In the context of email marketing, automation can be multifaceted, sometimes time-consuming (yes!), and considerably human-dependent. This makes marketing through email all the more beautiful, illuminating, and people-focused. 

Email automation is central to our workflows. While it certainly helps save time, its greatest achievement has been enhancing the quality of our marketing efforts. 

In this guide, we’ll explain email automation, explain how to set it up, provide the strategy for using it wisely, along with a few examples. Let’s go!

• What Is Email Automation?
  
• Why Should You Leverage Email Automation?
  
• Email Automation Setup: The Steps
  
• Email Marketing Automation Strategy
  
• What Is An Email Marketing Automation Flow?
  
• Email Automation Workflows And Examples

What is Email Automation?

Email automation is a process whereby relevant, personalized emails are “triggered” based on subscriber engagement. For instance, whenever a new signup occurs, a welcome email is sent to the newly subscribed contact(s). 

Triggers form the basis of automation. Any action a subscriber takes will trigger the relevant email workflow, which will send the right email to the subscriber. 

For most brands, email automation is a brew of drip and nurture campaigns. 

Triggers can be classified into time-based and event-based. 

In a time-based trigger:

• You set a trigger to send relevant emails to subscribers based not on their activities but on the data they provided at the point of signing up.
  
• For example, you can set a trigger to send birthday emails to your subscribers. You create just one such email and set a trigger for the days your subscribers have their respective birthdays.
  
• You can also set a trigger to send anniversary emails to your audience, offering them discounts for engaging with your newsletter for a year or more. It’s an example of a threshold trigger 

In an event-based trigger, it’s the subscriber who initiates the flow:

• Suppose a subscriber added products to their cart but did not complete the checkout process. In such a case, you can trigger a cart abandonment email to remind the subscriber to finish the transaction.
  
• A welcome email is also an instance of an event-based triggers. You set a trigger for all new subscribers so that a welcome email is sent automatically when there’s a new signup. You can also call these transactional triggers.

You can set many kinds of triggers, including re-engagement triggers, event follow-ups, reminders, purchase confirmations, and membership expiration emails. 

Why Should You Leverage Email Automation?

Saving time and effort are basic. You should use email automation because:

• It enables you to send the right message to the right audience at the right time. In short, it’s the key to relevant, personalized email marketing. This, in turn, leads to better subscriber lifetime value, which is where the bar should be set
  
• It improves customer retention rate. More than 10% of shoppers who receive a cart abandonment email will come back to finish the purchase
  
• Email automation increases open rates. Now, in event-based triggers, subscribers are expecting emails, albeit passively sometimes. Time-based triggers train subscribers to expect emails (think of birthday and anniversary emails)
  
• It enables marketers to engage in meaningful, results-driven conversations with their target audience

Marketing focuses on relationship-building, which is what automation, if rightly implemented, can make possible. This is what you save time for. 

Email Automation Setup: The Steps

How do you set up email automation? The process varies from ESP to ESP:

• Identify your campaign goals. What exactly do you seek to achieve with email automation? More sales? Better lead nurturing? 

• Select the right email automation software or ESP. Our best recommendations would be HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Marketo, Litmus, etc.
  
• Hire a dedicated ESP expert who can navigate the chosen platform with ease
  
• Determine which processes you want your ESP to automate. Do you want to bulk-send promotional emails or newsletter updates? Other examples include cart abandonment emails, birthday promotions, welcome emails, etc.
  
• Identify the segments for each automated process. Define the criteria for these segments, and your ESP will automatically create them
  
• Test your email automation setup before running it; check formatting, triggers, and personalization

That’s the general template for setting up email automation. Depending on your ESP, there can be additional steps and substeps.

Email Marketing Automation Strategy

An ideal email automation strategy starts from the bottom up:

1. Set Clear, Measurable Goals

The first step is to identify your goals for using automation. Determine the metrics you want to track. Research your target audience psychographically. 

2. Segment Your Audience

Most ESPs offer highly granular segmentation thanks to AI, enabling users to do advanced segmentation for more targeted reach. You can create segments based on:

• New signups
  
• New transactions
  
• Repeat transactions
  
• Website activity
  
• Location
  
•  Age, gender
  
• Loyalty
  
• Ebook downloads
  
• Event attendance, and so on 

You can also use web tracking (more in the next section) to create segments.

3. Use Web Tracking

Web tracking is the process of viewing how subscribers interact with your website. 

It is important to realize that many email-prompted actions are not easily trackable or measurable. Consumers are increasingly omnichannel, so email is not the only place where they interact with your brand. 

Now, this is where web tracking can be a great source of information. 

For instance, you can identify and distinguish visitors who regularly view your product pages from those still looking for the right hook in your knowledge center. You can auto-send the right emails to the right people based on these details.

4. Conduct Split-Testing

Split-testing or A/B testing is pivotal to your email automation strategy. 

You want to know which elements within your automation workflow resonate most with your audience. Typically, you should test the following:

• Preheader text
  
• Subject line

• Sender name
  
• Email copy
  
• Call-to-action buttons
  
• Personalization depth
  
• Send time

Read more: Steps to Effective A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing

5. Re-engage Inactive/passive Subscribers

Customer retention is cheaper than customer acquisition. Re-engagement campaigns are therefore crucial. 

You can send the following emails to re-engage inactive or passive subscribers:

• Cross-sell emails to showcase new products/services
  
• Winback emails with incentivized offers
  
• Customer/subscriber feedback campaigns
  
• Loyalty rewards for the next purchase or re-activating accounts

What Is An Email Marketing Automation Flow?

An email automation workflow is a sequence of emails sent based on triggers. The sequence is the flow. 

You can set up different kinds of automation Workflows, the most common being:

• Welcome
  
• Cart abandonment
  
• Confirmation
  
• Re-engagement
  

In our next section, we will take a look at each of these Workflows. 

Email Automation Workflows And Examples

1. Welcome flow

Here is a basic illustration of a typical welcome flow. The software triggers a welcome email when a new user signs up to receive email notifications. 

The above flow consists of two conditional steps. Including conditional logic improves subscriber experience. When the new user opens the welcome email i.e. fulfills the condition set in the workflow, they’ll receive a discount on their first purchase. Below is an example of a welcome email.

Image source: Really Good Emails

2. Cart Abandonment Flow

Here is a basic cart abandonment flow. 

The flow is initiated when the user adds items to their cart. The system then tracks how much time has elapsed since the abandonment. If the user aborts the checkout process within the timeframe set (one hour), the cart is registered as abandoned. 

Next, a delay period is set up to allow the user to finish the purchase independently. If they don’t, the first abandonment email is sent after 24 hours.

The automation flow will end depending on user behavior. Here’s a typical cart abandonment email. 

Image source: MailCharts

3. Confirmation Flow

Take a look at this simple purchase confirmation flow. 

Order placement triggers the order confirmation email. The conditional step is set up to track order status, involving fulfillment, shipping, and delivery stages. Based on the order status, the inventory levels, customer account, payment status etc. are updated.

Here’s an example of an order confirmation email. 

Image source: MailCharts

4. Re-engagement Flow

The following is a typical re-engagement flow.

The flow starts when a subscriber is identified as disengaged/passive for a set time. 

The condition checks if the subscriber meets the criteria for receiving re-engagement emails. Next, the first email is sent and the system checks if the subscriber engages with the email. If there’s no engagement, a delay period of seven days is set before the second follow-up email. If there’s no response, the second email with a stronger offer is sent, and so on. 

Here’s a brilliant re-engagement email from Ritual. 

Image source: MailCharts

Learn More About Email Automation

If you want to know more about email automation, feel free to download the following ebooks:

• The Role of Email Automation in Lead Nurturing
  
• All About Triggered Emails 

Alternatively, you can read our blog post on how to increase your ROI through email marketing automation. 

Or, check out this beginner’s guide to email automation.

The post Email Automation: Setup, Strategy, Workflows, Examples appeared first on Email Uplers.

Today, healthcare organizations have many opportunities to be the “holistic wellness and healthy living” partner that people now need. And email marketing creates many of these opportunities.

Through email, such organizations can engage with patients, ease their worries, and share important health information. Over time, they can build meaningful relationships and expand their revenue streams.

And email automation is the easiest and most scalable way to achieve these goals. In this guide, we’ll explore why your healthcare organization needs automated email marketing, and how you can leverage it to benefit patients – and yourself.

Why Email Marketing Automation Is Important for Health and Wellness Organizations

#1. Patients want information

Email marketing provides an easy, smart and scalable way to communicate useful information, start a dialogue with patients, win their trust, and stay top of mind. And the best thing about it is that it can be automated to meet these objectives in a streamlined, low-cost manner.

#2. Email marketing converts

In one study, 60% of consumers said they made a purchase after receiving a marketing email. Clearly, email is a powerful conversion tool. If used well, someone on the verge of buying a health supplement, signing up for a Yoga class, or booking a day at a spa using spa booking software is more likely to complete their purchase. And email is one of the easiest ways to do so.

#3. Increased website traffic

Automated email marketing can help you gain followers on your social media pages, regular visitors to your website, and readers for your blog. In the long term, these regulars are more likely to turn to you when they need a product, service, or support.

#4. Build a stronger brand

By engaging with the audience through warm, human email communications, you can meet their needs to improve their health outcomes. Happy patients are also more likely to recommend your brand and boost its value.

Sending emails manually takes a lot of time and effort. Here’s where email automation is very valuable. Once a campaign is set up, it will run by itself, and deliver results that benefit both patients and the organization.

5 Email Marketing Automation Strategies for Medical, Health, and Wellness Organizations

#1. Segment the Audience

Segmentation ensures that those who receive healthcare marketing emails want to receive them. It also ensures that you don’t waste your efforts contacting uninterested subscribers.

Some tips to improve segmentation:

• Find commonalities such as age, location, or gender in your target audience to group subscribers
• Create smaller segments so you can create more personalized automated emails that delight recipients
• Create a segment for existing customers or patients, and engage with them regularly through newsletters, special offers, referral emails, free trials, etc.

Noom’s re-engagement email encourages users to sign up for a health course with a free trial plus discount. It also focuses on how the company can help them practice daily self care.

To improve segmentation, you can get subscriber details at the first appointment. You can also add opt-in forms on your website or social media pages. Make sure you get their opt-in to receive your marketing emails.

#2. Create Email Templates

Reusable, on-brand templates make it easy to implement repeatable, scalable email automation. Choose your preferred templates and customize them with content blocks, custom fonts, and your brand’s colors, logo, etc.

A referral email such as the one above from Boka is easy to set up with a built-in template and a small amount of text.

Some tips to get the best results from email templates:

• Always select mobile-friendly, responsive templates
• Create different templates for each email type
• Test every template by first sending it to a small audience
• Preview every template on different email clients to ensure it renders properly everywhere

#3. Set Up Triggered Automated Emails

Once your email list starts growing, it will become harder to email each subscriber manually. To get around this challenge, email automation based on triggers is ideal. For example, when a subscriber or patient signs up on your website, you can automatically send them a welcome email that includes all relevant information. In addition, you can also set triggers to send emails like:

• Appointment reminders
• Annual check-up reminders
• Prescription reminders

This personalized email reminds the recipient to refill their prescription. It includes details of the product so the customer knows exactly what the email is about.

• Event invites
• Preoperative or postoperative information
• Free resources
• Special offers

#4. Optimize Timing and Volume

With automated emails from healthcare or wellness organizations, both timing and volume are critical. An email about post-operative care should be sent immediately after an operation so the patient can take fast action to prevent complications or side effects. Similarly, a reminder for an annual check-up must go out a few weeks before the year is up so the patient has enough time to prepare and schedule an appointment.

Most email tools make it easy to set up automated emails and optimize the send volumes, timing, and frequency. Some tools even provide a “throttle” feature so you can spread out email sends.

#5. Personalize Emails

Most people appreciate health information that’s personalized and aligned with their lifestyle, goals, or needs. It’s easy to automate and personalize such emails.

Use subscriber’s first name in the greeting or subject line. If a subscriber has purchased a product from you in the past or visited your clinic or practice, use this information to personalize each message. Based on what you know about them, you can send all kinds of personalized emails, including:

• Reminder emails
• Informative emails
• Promotional emails
• Newsletters with informative content
• Happy birthday or anniversary emails

Make sure each email includes useful content that’s relevant to that subscriber. Also pay attention to the email’s layout and structure with content blocks, a neat F-pattern layout, and clear headings and subheadings. Craft a compelling and short subject line and include clear Call to Action (CTA) buttons. Finally, use A/B testing to test each email, and determine the “best” version to send to the larger audience.

5 Types of Emails to Automate

#1. Welcome Emails

A welcome email should go out immediately after a patient signs up to receive email marketing from you. It should welcome them to your practice and include important introductory information, such as:

• Registration process
• What they can expect on their first and follow-up visits
• How they can stay in touch with your practice

You can also include a link to your website and social media channels.

#2. Information/Educational Emails

You can easily set up automation to share different kinds of informative emails:

• Pregnancy health emails for expectant mothers (and fathers!)
• Newborn health for new parents
• IVF information for would-be parents
• Geriatric care for caretakers/relatives of the elderly
• Chemotherapy information for cancer patients
• Information about activities, exercises, and healthy foods

#3. Special Promotions

Automated promotional emails can include details about limited-time sales or discounts. But be careful to always communicate the value the subscriber would receive through the promotion, instead of simply pushing your products or services. Also be careful about the words you use. Words like “free” in the subject line can land your emails in subscribers’ Spam folders.

#4. Reminders

Automated reminder emails are essential for healthcare organizations, whether for scheduling appointments or completing purchases from abandoned carts. You can also add a pixel to your website to track their movements and retarget them with ad campaigns on social media or search engines.

#5. Local Events

Is your clinic setting up a free COVID-19 vaccination camp? Inviting a heart surgeon to give a free talk on heart health? Planning a session on prenatal care for expectant mothers? You can create an automated campaign to invite the relevant audience to these events. Be sure to include a registration link or number and important information about how to sign up and the registration deadline.

Wrapping Up

Healthcare email marketing focuses on sharing relevant and accurate information, building trust, and putting patients at ease. With automation, you can achieve this at scale. Be consistent and timely, personalize emails, and always respect subscribers’ choice to unsubscribe. Additionally, ensure you comply with applicable email marketing and data privacy laws (e.g., CAN-SPAM) and industry regulations (e.g., HIPAA).

The post Guide to Email Marketing Automation for Healthcare and Wellness Organizations appeared first on Email Uplers.

But the landscape of marketing automation is constantly evolving, meaning you must always stay abreast of the latest trends to prevent your strategies from losing sheen. And so, as we prepare to set foot in 2024, are you wondering which marketing automation trends will have a strong bearing on email this coming year? This is precisely what we look to answer in this blog today. Dive in and find out!

1. Prioritizing Omnichannel Marketing

Gone are the days when businesses used to interact with their customers only via a single channel. Today, not only do multiple communication channels exist, but each of them also boasts a sizable user base. This has made it a must for businesses to set up shop across all of them or risk falling behind the eight ball. And while you’re doing so, it is just as vital that you look to dismantle the silos between these channels (the aim is to meet your customers wherever they are and attend promptly to their needs and grievances) and strive continuously toward delivering a personalized and unified experience to your customers. 

This is possible only if you practice omnichannel marketing. Juggling multiple interactions across multiple channels, however, can get incredibly overwhelming, especially if attended to manually (if your business has both physical and online stores, you can imagine how full your plate is going to be). Hence, to ensure the success of your omnichannel marketing efforts, you must leverage automation. 

2. Putting Social Media Marketing on Autopilot

At present, there exist more than 4.95 billion social media users across the globe. So, one can’t simply afford to look past social media marketing anymore. In fact, for quite some time now, businesses have looked to integrate social media and email marketing to benefit from the ocean of possibilities that would result from the same. Uploading contacts from your email list to your social networks, leveraging your social media accounts to grow your mailing list, repurposing your email content into social media posts (and vice versa), promoting your social media handles on your emails (yes, that’s why adding social media buttons to the email footer has pretty much become a standard practice now), facilitate the sharing of your emails on social media channels- these are some of the ways one can go about it.

Now, both email and social media entail a lot of operations. And while brands have now become adept at optimizing their email marketing efforts with the help of automation, it is time they do the same for their social marketing endeavors as well. From scheduling posts in advance to gathering data efficiently for performance measurement, social media automation, much like email marketing automation, will save you valuable time and resources, drastically reduce your error rates, and increase your ROI. 

Here are a few social media automation tools you can consider adding to your arsenal.

• HootSuite
• Buffer
• ContentStudio
• Scoop.it
• Buzzsumo
• CoSchedule

3. Introducing Generative AI to the Fold

If 2023 saw AI making inroads into the day-to-day operations of virtually every industry out there, 2024 will see AI casting an even wider net. Particularly generative AI- the likes of ChatGPT, Bard (by Google), and Copy.ai- is going to disrupt the field of email marketing increasingly. As we speak, email think tanks are continuously evaluating the prospects of AI-driven copywriting. 

Let us look at some of the ways in which generative AI tools can revolutionize the field of email copywriting. 

• AI tools help you produce large volumes of content in the blink of an eye. Whether you need a crisp ad copy or a detailed blog post, with the right brief, you can have generative AI fulfill your requirements in an instant. Especially in content creation endeavors that involve some sort of repetition, generative AI can prove to be an absolute lifesaver- rather than manually drafting each and every draft as you would have to do previously, now all you have to do is curate a master content template and subsequently generate multiple drafts from it with the help of AI as per your requirements; quite convenient, you’d agree? 
• With generative AI, you stand to improve your productivity by leaps and bounds. The greatest impediment to a writer’s productivity is, no doubt, the writer’s block. No matter how sorted you are in your ways, on some days, much to your chagrin, words will simply prove to be elusive to you. While infrequent in occurrence, there’s no downplaying the sheer anxiety and stress that writer’s block can cause. However, all of it stands to become a thing of the past thanks to AI. Now, even if you have an extremely vague idea or notion swirling around in your head, you can feed it to a generative AI tool and have it yield something around it for you. Then, you can use this rough draft to get your own creative juices flowing; isn’t that nifty! For this reason, these tools are being dubbed as the best assistants a writer could possibly ask for. Whether it is helping you get out of a creative rut or further amplifying your flow, generative AI promises to take your content creation efforts to the next level. 
• AI empowers small and medium businesses operating with a small content team and limited budget to go toe to toe with some of the most established players in their domain. By deploying generative AI tools in tandem with their existing content personnel, such businesses can scale up their content marketing efforts without stretching themselves thin or burning a hole in their wallets, thereby attracting more leads and creating greater brand awareness. 
• By taking care of the grunt work involved in the writing process, AI enables writers to hone their crafts further and evolve into master storytellers. This will eventually result in them crafting copy that is more impactful and mature than ever before. Moreover, AI-driven copy will inevitably lose its novelty once it becomes the norm, which it is all set to be. When that happens, it will only push brands to strive toward making their communication more personable and intuitive to stand out from the crowd. On the whole thus, AI tools promise to improve the overall quality of brand communication.  

4. Leveraging Chatbots

If chatbots aren’t a part of your email marketing automation strategy yet, you ought to rectify that as soon as possible. AI chatbots can give a leg up to your email marketing campaigns in the following ways:

• By engaging your site visitors in real-time conversation, chatbots gather a plethora of crucial customer data, such as the customer’s demographic information, their past purchases, their website interactions, and their interests and preferences. This information, in turn, will help you prepare a highly granular segmentation framework. Consequently, that will put you in a position to win over your customers by sending extremely personalized and relevant messages their way. 
• Compared to traditional methods of building an email list, like employing sign-up forms, chatbots can prove to be a much more effective alternative. By attending promptly to the queries of a new visitor, conversational chatbots can convince them to share their email address with relative ease.
• Collecting feedback is indispensable to improving your performance, and with chatbots you can do so rather effortlessly. Send an email to your subscribers with a survey link and have it redirect them to a chatbot; this chatbot will then conduct the survey in a conversational manner, making the process highly engaging for your customers. 

5. Implementing Hyper-personalization

Implementing mere personalization will no longer allow you to hold your customer’s attention in 2024; you must transition to hyper-personalization. Leverage AI to transform the vast historical and real-time customer data at your disposal into elaborate customer profiles. Doing so will allow you to have an in-depth understanding of their requirements and preferences, empowering you to devise highly targeted messaging. The customers of today long to be heard and understood by the brands they do business with; hyper-personalization is the only way through which you can stand up to this expectation.

Wrapping It Up

The more ingenious your email marketing automation strategy, the greater your chances of tasting email marketing success. We hope the insights shared above will help you shore up your existing blueprints and drive your email campaigns to dizzying heights of success. Are there any other marketing automation trends you see occupying the discourse in 2024? Do let us know in the comments.

The post Notch Up More Conversions by Leveraging These Email Marketing Automation Trends in 2024! appeared first on Email Uplers.

Now, what if we told you that there’s a way to amplify the efficiency of this already potent machinery? Yes, really. How? Two words- Artificial Intelligence. AI email automation, wherein one fuses AI tools with email automation, pretty much represents the next gen of email campaign development, execution, and management. The scope and merits of AI email automation are many; in this article, we will attempt to paint a comprehensive picture of the same. Excited to see what’s in store? Let’s go!

Why Opt for AI-powered Email Automation?

As the number of contacts in your email list grows, attending manually to every aspect of your email campaign can become quite overwhelming. This is where AI email automation comes to your rescue. In the course of streamlining these operations, AI-based email automation helps boost your productivity, ultimately opening the gates for improved results. 

Helps Boost Conversions

When you are dealing with large data sets, AI proves to be downright invaluable. By introducing AI to email automation, you can carry out a thorough analysis of your customers’ interactions and behavioral patterns. This, in turn, lets you gain a deeper understanding of the diverse buyer personas interacting with you, subsequently putting you in a definitive position to craft personalized communications for them. From sending custom product recommendations to enlightening how-to guides pertaining to their recent purchases, such gestures can go a long way towards winning the faith of your customers and skyrocketing your ROI.

Improves Decision Making

Globally, nearly 347.3 billion emails are sent per day. This insane volume, of course, translates to overcrowded inboxes and, by extension, widespread email fatigue. By now, we understand that personalization is the way to break through the clutter and establish a thriving dialogue with the customers. But on what basis should this framework of targeted messaging be formulated? Long years of familiarity with their buyers may tempt businesses to rely on guesswork, speculations, and assumptions to inform their strategies. However, you must learn to betray that impulse. 

Customer behavior is an ever-evolving entity, and no degree of affinity can help you hit the nail right on its head when it comes to anticipating future interactions and expectations of your buyers. Accurate forecasting can only be done with the help of data and data alone. With AI email automation, you unearth actionable insights that are supported by indisputable data; implementing them, thus, gives you surefire results.

Decreases Costs

Template creation, segmentation, and campaign scheduling- AI can lend a solid helping hand toward all these facets, sparing you from the need to hire additional resources. Money saved on this front can then be utilized to shore up your campaigns holistically; with AI email automation, you are guaranteed to get the most bang for your buck.

Lets You Scale Up Effortlessly

As much as businesses welcome an ever-expanding customer base, it gets them slightly nervy as well. Why? Because that calls for them to expand their existing infrastructure, “scale up”, as we refer to it more commonly, in order to accommodate the increased volume of requirements. With AI by your side, scaling up becomes absolutely hassle-free, allowing you to cater to larger audiences without furrowing your forehead. 

Use Cases of AI-fueled Email Automation

There are multiple applications of AI email automation. Below, we take a detailed look at them.

Email Copywriting

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copy.ai, Bard, and their ilk are all the rage these days. From whipping up lines of poetry to composing college application letters, these tools have managed to capture the imagination of the people, unlike any other disruptive technology in the recent past. That the tool has now come to be adopted by email marketers for email copywriting should, thus, come as a surprise to none. 

Subject lines, preheader texts, body copy, CTAs- generative AI tools are adept at yielding all these. Their ability to supply multiple options/drafts for a particular brief can serve to give you an excellent headstart with respect to your copywriting endeavors. What’s more, they can also help you churn personalized content at scale! However, given their nascentness, it is prudent to only treat them as an assistant at present. Though they are capable of producing impressive volumes of content in an instant, this content is not free from inaccuracies, redundancies, and bias. Therefore, these drafts must be subjected to rigorous editing and fact-checking to make them usable and compelling. Besides, the content generated by these tools lacks the spontaneity and originality that only a human mind is capable of. So, to make the most of them, human intervention is necessary. 

Inbox Management

All email marketers curate and deliver campaigns with the intention of eliciting a response from their subscribers. And to deliver a superlative customer experience, it is extremely vital to craft a satisfactory revert to every such response that comes your way. While this is, of course, not lost on the marketers, what most of them fail to consider is just how immensely time-consuming this exercise can be if attended to manually. 

AI-powered email automation lets you divide all your service requests into various categories. Subsequently, each query is then accurately directed to the relevant personnel/department responsible for addressing it. As a result, you are able to substantially reduce your revert time, earning precious brownie points from your subscribers. 

Send Time Optimization

Equally important as the curation of the copy, code, and design of your email templates is the time at which they are delivered to your subscribers. All the hard yards you put into designing a campaign risk sublimation into naught if you aren’t mindful of your email timing. And email timing, as any email veteran worth their salt will tell you, is an incredibly tough nut to crack, owing primarily to just how subjective it can be. Even if two businesses are in the same domain, peddling the same goods, one can’t assume that both of their customer bases check their inboxes at the same time.

With AI, though, cracking this code becomes extremely convenient. They meticulously observe your subscriber’s engagement patterns, helping you determine the most ideal time slot to deliver your campaigns. During high-traffic periods such as the holiday season, where competition among brands to mark their presence in their audience’s inboxes reaches an all-time high, AI email automation can help you secure pole position.

Reporting

After executing a campaign, it is vital to track its performance continuously so that you don’t miss out on any optimization opportunities. But, no business launches one campaign at a time; they run several. Surely, then, you can imagine how uphill of a task it can be to exercise a vigilant eye on them all? Thankfully, you have AI to help you out. AI tools will evaluate your campaign performance on critical metrics such as clickthrough rate (CTR), conversion rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and list growth rate, enabling you to draw up a robust campaign report from these findings (moreover, they also visualize the data in attractive formats to foster better comprehension). The best part is that their functionality isn’t simply confined to assessment; they are perfectly capable of suggesting effective remedial measures, too. Ticking all the right boxes has never been easier!

Testing

With subscribers accessing emails from diverse devices and environments, it is extremely crucial to test your campaigns before testing them out to make certain they render as desired. Then, there’s the necessity to curate your template as per the interests and preferences of your target audience? But how do you determine that? With the help of A/B/n testing, of course!

Through AI email automation, email marketers will be able to send multiple versions of their email templates to a sample audience. Subsequently, their response is analyzed to select the best-performing variant. For best results, it is advisable to test only one email element at a time. 

Wrapping It Up

Introducing AI to email automation is a complete game changer and, if leveraged smartly, can help your business climb several notches above your competitors. We hope the insights shared above have helped you gain an all-round understanding of AI email automation and allowed you to envision the myriad ways in which it can benefit your business. 

The post AI Email Automation- The Key to Optimizing Your Email Operations Like Never Before! appeared first on Email Uplers.

If you use Mailchimp to automate your marketing paths and plans, you probably might have chanced upon its customer journey feature and mulled over creating one for automating your marketing workflows. It’s a great thought, we say, and one you should consider implementing as soon as possible. 

In the blog that follows, we will walk you through the basics of customer journeys, building Mailchimp customer journey maps, setting rules and actions based on buyer personas to offer a personalized and guided journey down the sales funnel, and finally, some use cases. 

On that note, kick back on your favorite beanie, plug in your earbuds, open your Mailchimp account in another tab, and get ready to take some mindblowing marketing automation notes. But first, some coffee!

Understanding the basics of the Mailchimp customer journey, definitions associated with it, and the advantages of building customer journey maps

When you look at the words customer journey, one would probably conjure up an image of a person looking for a particular product or service either on the internet or through advocacy from friends and family, carrying out research, chancing upon your brand (if it offers relevant solutions), liking your content, engaging with it and try making a purchase, and if they like the whole customer experience, sticking around for longer. 

If that’s what you thought, too, congratulations, your basics are pretty sorted and solid!

If, in one line, I had to explain the essence of customer journeys, I’d say something to the following effect. The actions your customers take either before or after purchasing your product or service come under the purview of the customer’s unique journey with your brand

When you analyze your prospective customer’s interactions with your brand at different touchpoints, you gain a deeper understanding of what works with them and what ticks them off.  

As you delve into their patterns of interactions, you are better placed to map out customer journeys, touchpoints, rules, and actions in accordance with their unique needs and buyer personas. So to say, beginning with their initial discovery of your brand until the part where they become loyal customers and advocates of your merchandise. 

Mailchimp Customer Journey Builder allows you to create editable, automated marketing campaigns for all your contacts, personalized, if we may add, so that you don’t end up showing strawberry double sundaes to someone who loves chocolate ice cream! 

With an option to add tags, setup multiple starting points, send targetted emails, and create unique and relevant branches and actions so that you end up rendering a pleasant and personalized experience for all your contacts, Mailchimp’s Customer Journey Builder helps you realize 4X more orders and ultimately enhanced ROIs, customer retention. 

However, you might have limited access to Customer Journey Tools in Mailchimp, so it is recommended that you kindly check your current pricing plan. If you’d like to step up your plan, you can always do that on the plans page on your Mailchimp account. 

Please note that the starting points in your customer journey map only kick into action once you activate the particular journey map in your customer journey builder. Here are some simple explanations of the terminology you will encounter as we proceed toward the process of building customer journey maps in Mailchimp. 

• Customer journey: Though we have already clarified the concept in the preceding content, here’s a refresher. It refers to an automated route that is unique to each contact depending on what they do or don’t do as they interact with your brand at different touchpoints.
• Customer journey map: This refers to a visual representation of the entirety of probable paths a contact may embark upon in their journey.
• Starting point: As the name suggests, it refers to a pre-determined action or event that marks the beginning of a customer’s journey with the brand. 
• Journey point: This refers to the actions or rules that you will set up on your journey map following the starting point, depending on the guided interactions you’d like your customers to embark on as they engage with your brand. 
• Rule: A definition describing when and how a contact proceeds along a set path.
• Action: True to its name, an action refers to a specific point in the map that tells Mailchimp’s system to initiate a specific task, for instance, add a tag or shoot an email when the contact reaches that point in their journey. 

Phew! Too much to absorb? Well, not really; once we elucidate the process of creating customer journey maps in the following sections, it would probably make a lot more sense!

Before we embark on the same, let’s familiarize ourselves with the phases of a customer journey and the benefits of mapping the same. 

Phases of a customer journey

So, a customer’s journey generally passes through the following stages before they become regulars at your store,

• Awareness, wherein they discover your brand and its offerings
• Acquisition, when they liked your content and merch, signed up for a newsletter, and made their first purchase
• Onboarding, here you make them feel welcome with a nice and warm welcome and a general intimation regarding your emailer frequency, set content preferences, and showcase other products that might interest them
• Engagement: This refers to the art of creating awesome content in the form of emailers, social media posts, or newsletters that are informative, engaging, and adds value to your consumers’ lives
• Advocacy: If your customers reach this part of the marketing funnel, you should pat yourself on the back! They will now advocate your brand’s awesomeness to their nears and dears, and before you know it, you will not just have regulars coming back for more but also brand new joiners on the bandwagon!

Advantages of building a well-thought-out customer journey map

• You can delve deeper into the consumer psychology
• Identify and demarcate touchpoints
• Give your marketing efforts the boost they need and deserve
• Enhance customer experience
• Get a clear understanding of how a particular customer might interact with the brand
• Enhance customer engagement and loyalty

How to create a Customer Journey in Mailchimp

One can create and manage Customer Journey maps right from the Customer Journeys homepage. There is an option to choose from a variety of pre-built maps or create a new journey from the beginning. In this section, we will explore the latter pathway. 

Step 1: Click on the Automations icon and then select Overview

Step 2: Select the Create Journey option

Step 3: Enter your preferred Name for the journey and then proceed to choose an Audience by clicking on the drop-down menu

Step 4: Hit the Start Building Button

Now that you are all set with creating a new journey, you can now begin adding starting points, rules, and actions that will guide each contact’s path along the map. 

Step 5: Adding a Starting Point

• Click on Choose a Starting Point
• You can go with the one that appeals best to your brand
• To know more about all the different starting points in Mailchimp, click here
• You can also set up specific settings for your starting point type. For instance, if you choose to go with Sign Ups as a starting point, you might want to add imported contacts
• You can also increase the level of segmentation by clicking on “Get more specific about who can enter this map”
• Once you are done with setting up your starting point, click on Save Starting Point
• If you have a Standard MailChimp plan, you can add up to three starting points by clicking on the Add Starting Point button

Step 6: Add Journey Points

Once you are done with adding starting points, you can proceed with adding the specific rules and actions that make up a user’s journey, also referred to as journey points.

Some instances of journey points are:

• If/Else
• Wait for trigger
• Time Delay
• Percentage split
• Send email
• Send an email with a survey
• Group/Ungroup
• Webhook
• Tag/Untag
• Unsubscribe
• Archive Contact
• Update Contact

Where you spot the Plus Icon +, hover your cursor over it to add another branch to your journey, then click on Add a Journey Point.

Step 7: Activate your Customer Journey

When your customer journey map is ready, click on Continue. If you are adding a marketing objective instead, you need to click on Turn On to immediately activate your customer journey. 

Voila! You are done with building your first customer journey! 

Contacts will now begin moving along their unique journey as soon as the starting point condition is met.

You can also view stats and edit the journey points as and when the need arises. 

Use Cases of Automated Journey Maps

Depending on the type of business you own and run, your use cases of automated workflows will vary. Here are a few common scenarios wherein you can tap into the potential of creating automated workflows to realize better customer relationships, enhanced trust, and experiences.

• Welcome new customers and introduce them to your brand
• Bring back prospective shoppers to their abandoned carts
• Customer re-engagement
• Get reviews or feedback on your service/product
• Better segmentation by organizing contacts on the basis of their interests and levels of engagement

Summary

On a conclusive note, it is safe to say that building automated customer journey workflows not only ensures effective communication but also helps improve conversions. If you seek professional help in setting up customer journeys in Mailchimp for your business to realize better ROIs, then team awesome @Email Uplers is all game! Hit us up now! 

The post A Deep Dive Into Customer Journey Mapping In Mailchimp appeared first on Email Uplers.

Add to that the pressure of crafting that perfect email marketing strategy that converts as amazingly in reality as on the projection boards. Yeah, it can have the best of us in a tizzy, scrunching up our foreheads like the neighbor’s pug! Fret not, as we present an all-inclusive guide on email automation for eCommerce pundits. Stay tuned, folks! 

By the time we wrap up, you will be familiar with the basics of email automation, how to automate campaigns, the benefits of the whole exercise for your business, and an insight into some of the best e-commerce email marketing automation practices. Let’s hit the throttle now, shall we?!

Decoding the basics of email automation

When you automate your email flows, you ensure that the intended information, product catalogs, and steal deals reach the right audience at the right time. Therefore you set yourself up for greater conversions and, consequently, higher ROIs. 

This allows you to set flows for separate triggers, such as an abandoned cart, order confirmation, browsing abandonment, etc., without actually having someone hit the “Send” button on the requisite email every time someone leaves the cart without placing an order, etc. 

eCommerce email automation not only saves you a lot of time but also frees up resources to work on other pressing tasks. Let’s now move over to the difference between email campaigns and flows. 

The distinction lies in their purpose and execution. With campaigns, the idea is to strike up a conversation with your subscriber base. Campaigns can be of different kinds based on your objective, which can vary from nurturing leads, engendering brand and product awareness, improving traffic to your webshop, or increasing revenue. Once the objective is clear, you can choose your specific campaign ~ new product announcements, direct emails, content or informational emails, or seasonal sale announcements. 

On the other hand, flows are sequential emails that are automated to be sent out in response to certain conditions or triggers. For example, if someone signs up for a newsletter, a free e-book, or a white paper, a welcome email is automatically sent out to express the brand’s gratitude and a warm welcome on account of the new member in the house. Flows go by different names, such as automation and autoresponder, depending on the terminology of the ESP you subscribe to. 

The Undeniable Benefits of Email Automation

The time benefits are a no-brainer, but there is a whole well of other advantages that come with setting up email marketing automation for e-commerce. Let’s delve into those benefits. 

1. Enhanced marketing team efficiency: In today’s fast-paced era, time is money, and improved efficiency of your marketing team translates into more streamlined strategies that ultimately beget better results. 
Automation will not only make sending out personalized emails to subscribers easier but also make the data-crunching process a whole lot simpler. With the easy-to-peruse metrics at your fingertips, it can be easier and faster to select which campaigns are making the most impact and the ones that could do with some tweaking.

2. Translate leads into tangible sales: Every time a customer browses through the wares on display or signs up for a newsletter, you gain a lead. Even if they are probably just window shopping, adding items to their cart, and then leaving the website, you can still remind them of the awesomeness awaiting them in their cart with cart abandonment flows.

3. Keep existing/current customers engaged: Let’s face it, your existing customers are the ones responsible for the credit notification in your company’s account. In other words, you cannot simply assume that they will always hang around without consistently engaging with them and offering them value-added services, discounts, and products. With automated flows, you can schedule content emails containing links to blogs or collection pages so that they know what’s new with their favorite brand.

4. Infuse a touch of personalization: No one likes to hear from a bot. Your email list may be large or not-so-large, yet it’s important to address every subscriber by their own name and offer bespoke product suggestions. An automated email workflow can add that personal touch to every email that goes out to a particular subscriber, giving them the impression that they are cared for and that the brand values their association with them. 

5. Efficiently level up your marketing strategy: As you scale your business, the number of subscribers in your email list is also expected to increase. If you attempt to manually send out emails to each new subscriber, you’d probably have little time for anything else. With automation tools, every new subscriber can be integrated with the system and receives triggered emails right away from the moment they hit subscribe! How cool is that?

The Step-By-Step Guide To Automating Email Workflows

Step 1: Begin with finalizing the most suited Email Marketing Automation Tool

While there are numerous email automation tools such as Klaviyo,  Mailchimp, Drip, Campaign Monitor, etc. available for businesses to set up email workflows, it makes sense to invest in the one that is best suited for your unique e-commerce business objectivs. Presenting a screenshot of one such tool, for DTC brands with its complex sets of triggers that can be effectively deployed.

Step 2: Specify your email marketing automation strategy

Having your goals, all chalked out beforehand is quintessential to the success of your email marketing automation strategy. Whether the end goal is to get more click-throughs, higher traffic, increased signups, or ultimately more sales, you need to have a clear picture and ensure that everyone in the marketing team is on the same page as you. Here are some elements that you must think about;

• The kind of email workflows you would like to set up for your business
• The art and science of segmenting your audience perfectly
• Deciding the email cadence of each campaign
• And last but not least, email campaign design

 Step 3: Segment your subscriber lists

Segmenting your audience helps at various stages. Right from personalization to re-engaging those who might have lost interest, this step can help you win hearts and minds!

While there are many, you can consider taking the following metrics into account to form a basic segmentation framework.

• Audience preferences
• Demographics
• Shopping behavior ~ purchase and browsing history
• Position in the sales funnel

Step 4: Begin with the process of setting up workflows

There is a whole range of criteria you can set up workflows for based on the action that someone takes on your landing page, such as welcome emails, abandoned carts, etc. Each workflow consists of a fixed number of emails, usually not less than three, sent out at specific time intervals to the intended subscribers. 

Step 5: Specify automation triggers

Triggers that set a pre-programmed workflow into action are usually based on a preset event, user behavior, or action. So, for instance, if someone has not engaged with your brand for a specified time period, a re-engagement workflow can be triggered to ensure continued association with the brand.

Step 6: Analyze data for optimized future campaigns

Many email automation software allow for A/B testing, which allows marketers to test which version of the same email performs better for a specific target audience. One could also analyze metrics such as click-through rates, bounce rates, and email open rates to understand what works in your favor and identify factors that don’t.

An Insight Into Email Automation Best Practices

Here are some best practices that you can keep in mind while setting up your email workflows;

• Send emails only to those who have signed up to receive emails from you
• Know your audience, and be privy to their likes and dislikes, demographic information, and browsing history.
• Build a rapport with your subscribers
• Ensure that you send only relevant emails
• Regularly clean your subscriber lists to remove disengaged subscribers

Summary

Whatever your needs and goals may be, you can boost your return on investment with multiple automated emails for e-commerce such as welcome series, new customer acquisition, post-purchase, etc. If you would like professionals to set up the best e-commerce email automation, you can get in touch with the experts at Email Uplers. 

The post An ECommerce Marketer’s Comprehensive Guide To Setting Up Email Automation appeared first on Email Uplers.