Email automation streamlines communication by sending targeted messages based on user behavior and preferences. Building automation involves setting goals, segmenting your audience, creating personalized content, and choosing the right triggers and timing. Our guide simplifies these steps, helping you enhance engagement, boost conversions, and save time, making your email marketing efforts more efficient and impactful.
Understanding the importance of email automation
First of all, why put in all this work? Email automations are designed to save time and streamline communication during campaigns. 49% of marketers save time with automation and 45% see improved ROI and overall efficiency. However, while building automations demands consideration and planning before launch, once you have your automations built,t they do the work for you.
Email automations do the heavy lifting for email marketers by sending the right message at the right time based on user behavior and preferences. This reduces manual effort and increases efficiency. For instance, automated emails generate 320% more revenue than non-automated emails.
75% of email revenue comes from triggered campaigns such as welcome emails and cart recovery emails, highlighting the importance of timely and relevant messaging. By automating tasks like welcome sequences, cart abandonment reminders, and personalized offers, you can focus on strategy and creativity, knowing your campaigns are running smoothly and effectively in the background.
Email automations enhance customer engagement, drive conversions, and foster lasting relationships. Yet, to achieve these benefits, marketers must understand the complexities involved and avoid common pitfalls.
Start with a specific goal
Before diving into the technical aspects of building an automation, it’s crucial to define a clear goal. Ask yourself:
- What is the primary objective of this automation? Is it to drive purchases, encourage event sign-ups, or nurture relationships?
- Will this automation be a one-time campaign or an ongoing process?
By keeping an intentional goal in mind, you can ensure that every step in the automation leads toward achieving your specific objectives. The more specific the goal the better, if you build too many objectives into one automation, you risk distracting or overwhelming your subscribers. You can always split extra ideas into a new automation series.
Create an MVP automation
One of the most effective ways to avoid getting overwhelmed is to start with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version of your email automation. An MVP allows you to launch a basic version of your automation and gradually build complexity into it. This makes starting the whole process more approachable and streamlines your work. This iterative approach helps you:
- Test and validate your initial ideas.
- Fix bugs before they are tied into the whole design.
- Gather feedback and make data-driven improvements.
- Avoid the risks associated with overly complex setups from the outset.
By setting up a simple workflow of triggers, evaluations, and actions and then building it out over time, you can ensure emails go to the right segments and everything is working as it should.
Plan ahead to save time later
Building an automation is an upfront investment of your time—don’t worry, you’ll earn back that time, plus more once it’s up and running. But it’s still worth planning ahead to be as efficient as possible when you’re actually building the automation.
Look over your existing customer journey and pinpoint potential triggers, touchpoints, and opportunities to reach out to your subscribers. Then, decide what content would be relevant and helpful to your audience at those points—and what action you want them to take next. When you start plotting out your automation, visualization tools can be incredibly helpful. They allow you to map out your workflows, visualize different paths, and identify potential bottlenecks or crossovers.
The key is to have a clear visual representation of your automation’s structure. Delivra uses a visual workflow builder that allows you to easily map out and visualize complex email sequences. Even when your automations become sophisticated, this visual map of your workflow makes it simple to double-check that each step in the customer journey is optimized for engagement and conversion. Easily drag and drop actions into the builder to set up triggers based on subscriber behavior, such as email opens, clicks, or website visits, to send personalized messages at the perfect moment.
Key considerations for effective email automations
It’s easy to overlook several critical details when building automations, which is exactly why we created this guide! To help you avoid these common, but time-wasting mistakes, consider the following:
Keep tabs on frequency and timing
- Single-use vs ongoing: Determine whether your automation will be a one-time campaign or a long-term nurture cycle.
- Data updates are essential: Ensure data and analytics on the performance of your automations is readily available through your platform, this will help you adjust send times and triggers for optimal performance.
- Establish your optimal timing: Decide whether contacts should be added to the automation immediately when they match the criteria or at specific intervals.
Plan message coordination
- Contact management: Consider if you will send other messages to contacts while they are in this automation or if they should be excluded from other campaigns.
- Date considerations: Account for holidays, weekends, and other significant dates to avoid sending emails at inopportune times.
Optimize your content strategy
- Dynamic content: Identify opportunities to use conditional or dynamic content blocks in your emails, it’s an easy and effective way to personalize all your automated emails. Goal alignment: Ensure that each action within the automation leads toward your ultimate goal, whether it’s a purchase, event registration, or relationship building.
To get more tips and tricks to keep in mind, check out this edition our newsletter, The Inbox that explores the ABCs of building and optimizing these flows.
Quality assurance for email automations
Testing is a critical component of building effective email automations. A robust QA process can prevent issues and ensure a smooth user experience. Here are some tips for QA:
- Test your contacts: Create test contacts for every decision point in your automation.
- Evaluate your data: Start your automation with an event and continuously evaluate criteria as your subscriber progresses through the automation. Implement split paths based on this data to customize user journeys.
- Return to testing: Continuously test and refine your automation. Remember, the phrase “set it and forget it” does not apply here. Regular iterations with changes help fine-tune your strategy and address any unexpected issues.
Leverage pre-existing workflows and advanced features
When you have a few automations prepared, reuse pre-existing individual email templates or workflows to streamline the process. These templates can provide a solid foundation and help you get started quickly.
Once you’re feeling confident with single-channel automations, get SMS and email working together in the same campaign. Switch between SMS and email within an automation to increase touchpoints and vary your outreach.
If your marketing automation tool supports both communication channels, then adding SMS actions to your existing automations will be simple. For example, in Delivra, you just drag and drop to add SMS events to your automations.
Make sure your platform helps instead of hindering
Delivra streamlines building automations with features that minimize workload, including a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor and visual workflow builder, making campaign creation easy even if you don’t have technical expertise.
Delivra offers robust personalization options like dynamic content and conditional web forms so you can automate tailored messages without extensive manual input. Seamless integrations with CRM systems and e-commerce platforms facilitate smooth data flow, automated updates, and refined segmentation.
Building automations won’t be complicated if you have the right tools. Look for an email automation platform with a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop editors and visual workflow builders, robust personalization options, seamless CRM and e-commerce integrations, and comprehensive analytics to track key metrics and gain insights into subscriber behavior.
Follow your playbook for success
Clearly, building email automations is a nuanced process that demands careful planning and strategic execution. But, by starting with a clear goal, creating an MVP, and leveraging visualization tools, you can lay a solid foundation for your automations—and just keep building from there!
Pay close attention to timing, message coordination, and content strategy to ensure a seamless user experience. Finally, invest time in thorough QA and utilize all the features of your platform to maximize the effectiveness of your automation.
With these tips, you can navigate the complexities of email automation with ease and create impactful, efficient campaigns that drive results.
