5 Ways to Implement Email Automation in Your Business

If you’ve been an avid reader of our blogs, you’ll know that automation is the key to saving time in your business. Zapier serves its purpose for automating mundane tasks, but what about the emails you’re manually making each time? Surely, there has to be a more efficient way.

There is: Email Automation

Email automation is the method in which you can communicate with your audience at specified times. Having the power of selecting when your emails get sent out is powerful: as a business owner, you can send emails to the right people, at the right time. What does this mean to you? It means you’re able to deliver the message you want your customer’s to see at the time you want them to see it. Have a new product announcement coming up? Set up a 6 email, 90-day drip campaign to generate interest and customer hype! Let’s get into some other use cases.

Why Should I use Email Automation?

Like any other automation you implement into your business, the goal is to save you time performing repetitive tasks. Email automation is a feature that is built in to almost every single email marketing client, and there’s a good reason for that! Let’s take a look at some use cases of email automation:

1. Ecommerce Notifications

If you run an ecommerce store, you should already know the importance of email notifications. Providing your customer their Order confirmation within 1-3 minutes of their order being placed is critical. Moreso, capturing other stages of the customer journey (shipping confirmations, delivery notifications, etc.) is crucial to ensuring your customer feels comfortable during the entire process. Automating this process through email marketing is critical. We recommend setting up each stage of the customer journey and then associating an email to it where applicable. That can look like the following:

1. Order Confirmation

2. Order Fulfillment Status

3. Shipping Notifications

4. Delivery Notifications

2. Welcome Messages

Gaining a new customer is a great achievement, and the customer should be celebrated for their choice with a welcome message so they can know what to expect from your company’s products and/or services.

Writing a personal welcome message to each customer is great when you’re starting out; however, how manageable will that be when your database of customers is in the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands? You get the drift. Setting up an automation to welcome all new customers, email subscribers, etc. will save you from copy and pasting messages just to difference recipients.

3. Review Follow Up

Your customers have been using your products and/or services for an elongated time, why not capture a written or video testimonial from them? Email automations can be developed so that your customers receive notifications to submit a review after a specified period of time (example: 3 or 6 months post purchase).

By setting up the automation, you no longer have to manually track how long your customers have been with you before remembering to ask them for a review. Instead, every customer will undergo the same journey and receive their opportunity to submit their review on your product or service at the right time. Pro-tip: do you notice that you’re not receiving enough reviews at the specified time? Try an A/B test and further iterate on when the best time is based on user engagement and interaction.

4. Upsell Opportunities

The best market to sell to is your warm market a.k.a. your current customer database. Is there an opportunity to upsell your customers on a new add-on service or ancillary product? Take advantage of the opportunity with Email automation! Similar to the review follow up, scheduling specific times in the customer journey can incentivize engagement and potential conversion. The following example uses Apple products:

1. Customer purchases an iPhone

2. Two weeks into their purchase, Apple sends out an email detailing how they hope the customer is enjoying their product, and that they can attend a workshop in their store to further learn about all the features it has to offer.

3. One month into their purchase, Apple sends out an email with the subject “Increase Your Photography Skills With These Exclusive Accessories” and in the email, they have direct links to purchase accessories which will benefit the user.

5. Reminders

If you are a service-based industry, this is the most important form of email marketing: Email Reminders. If your customer booked an appointment for your service, sending a minimum of two emails is recommended. The more touch points you have with your customers, the better their journey will be. That workflow resembles the following:

1. Customer books service online

2. Customer receives an appointment confirmation within 1-3 minutes of booking

3. Customer receives a reminder of their appointment at least 24 hours prior to their appointment

The above workflow can be modified further to incorporate elements that will better the customer experience. For example, if your company requires a standard operating procedure prior to the appointment, you can inform your customer of it throughout your automation.

The above 5 use cases just scratch the surface of Email automation, and furthermore aren’t single use solutions. Instead, challenge yourself to incorporate multiple tactics within the same automation to better the customer journey, and overall save you and your company time from repetitive outreach.