Automation Techniques to Drive Traditional Email Marketing into an ROI Machine

Are you looking for marketing systems and strategies to convert traditional email campaigns into an ROI generating machine? Then, you are right! No other MarTech tool can benefit businesses more than marketing automation platforms in revenue generation. Automation tools enable users to manage, nurture, segment, and target leads accurately throughout the customer cycle. 

So, how to make the best use of these tools to automate email campaigns and start generating revenue? Let’s find out. 

1. Segmenting Your Subscribers

Have you already built a list of targeted subscribers? Now, focus on segmenting them into specific groups to understand and serve them better. Customers vary based on demographic data, behavioral data, needs, expectations, and other factors. That’s why they interact with your different campaigns differently. So, categorize leads into different groups to personalize and deliver email campaigns that are relevant to them. The customer insights to consider for segmentation include –

• Customer profile data, such as demographic data and customers’ interests.
• Campaign activity insights, including last email engagement, frequency of engagement, and responses. 
• Purchase history, including last purchase, frequency of purchase, purchase value, site abandonment, and cart abandonment.

Strengthen your email campaigns with relevant and personalized messages based on these insights.

2. Lead Nurturing Shortens the Sales Cycle

Studies have proven that nurtured leads can convert faster and shorten the sales cycle. Not all visitors consider buying from or developing long-term relationships with a brand. Many leads need in-depth product information or a demo before they make a purchase decision. These leads are not sales-ready. Email automation tools help create lead nurture tracks with resources, information, and messages to guide them through the customer journey to the sales funnel. 

Automation systems assist you in identifying each customer’s responses such as site browsing behavior, actions taken with email campaigns, interaction on social channels, and time they spend on different types of devices such as mobile, desktop, other handheld devices, and websites. 

You can then plan information and resources they need in the form of newsletters, webinars, free content downloads, and contests to nurture them using automation systems. When leads start expressing purchase intent, they can be pushed to the sales funnel for sales representatives to pursue them with a sales pitch.

3. Lead Scoring to Identify Quality Leads

There might be innumerable leads in your list, but not all of them need sales to follow up, only those leads that have shown positive response. That includes registration for a webinar, webinar participation, asking questions about solutions during a webinar, filling in a registration form to download content, viewing a product demo video, watching the entire video, and following social media pages. 

Automation processes can help you determine if leads need more emails before you mark them as qualified leads and send them to the sales team.

Lead scoring is another highly beneficial automation tool to identify which leads are sales-ready and which need more nurturing. Automation tools allow assigning values to all leads based on their actions. When the lead reaches a specific score, in a particular period, it will be considered sales-ready. Based on the lead scores, you can automate emails containing the relevant resources and information they need to nurture them until they qualify for sales.

4. Marketing and Sales Team Alignment

Your sales and marketing teams may not always work closely in demand generation and in managing leads. Automation helps to align sales and marketing teams through integrated CRM software to ensure a seamless transition of leads from marketing to sales teams. 

Marketing teams can identify when email campaigns can drive best leads, and likewise. Sales teams can verify which leads are sales-qualified and need immediate follow up.

Research has proven that marketing automation platforms can facilitate a more effective transition of leads from marketing to sales, which leads to a higher scope of revenue generation. 

5. Make the Most of the Customer Journey

You can create email automation workflows relevant to typical stages of the customers’ journey, similar to adding various marketing channels to marketing automation. While creating and automating emails in automation workflows, you can experiment with different types of emails such as:

• Welcome Email Series helps introduce your brand to your customers. You can also incorporate sign up incentives in a welcome email series and guide them on how to take the next action.
  
  
• Thank You Emails and onboarding emails are a great way to nurture subscribers with resources and information, where they have expressed interest in email preference centers or subscription management centers.
  
  
• Birthday Email Series is highly effective in developing long-term relations by offering personalized incentives and giving them something special on birthdays. Similarly, you can create anniversary series and special congratulatory emails to boost engagement with customers with unique and personalized messages.
  
  
• Abandoned Cart Email Series can help pull back customers who have left their shopping cart instead of completing the purchase, even after adding items. Create abandoned cart-centric emails with special offers and items related to their search to feature better alternatives to encourage them to make the purchase. Once created, schedule and automate these emails to particular segments. 
  
  
• Transactional Emails are emails you need to automate to update order confirmation, shipping confirmation, registration, and email address confirmation, password reset emails, digital asset launch such as a new website, app, and social channel. When automated, these emails can deliver the right information to your subscribers at the right time. Want some ideas on how to improve customer relations using transactional emails? Check out these 6 types of transactional emails you can leverage to boost customer engagement and revenue generation.
  
  
• Survey Emails are a great way to encourage customers to provide feedback on products, services, and solutions. Then you can use customer feedback to rearrange your program and email campaign to deliver a more optimized and personalized user experience. Use feedback emails to gather feedback on previous purchases and create a relevant list of items to complement later purchases and generate revenue from cross-selling products or services.
  
  
• Reactivation emails can help you bring back inactive subscribers who have shown little or no responses for more than six months. Automate emails with empathetic messages to rebuild connections with them and start nurturing with the right offers and resources needed to bring them back into the list.

Position these email automation workflows at different stages of the customer journey, depending on different lead segments, with personalized messages and relevant resources to tap the potential of customer engagement.

Conclusion

Conduct A/B tests with all the email automation workflows and assets related to these workflows. It includes landing pages, forms, images, links, content, and everything else incorporated into these automated emails, before and after the launch.

Revise and redesign your existing email marketing process into a more data-driven and optimized campaign by implementing the following –

• Collecting customer insights
• Optimizing campaign strategies
• Optimizing messages based on insights
• Running tests 
• Monitoring and analyzing data 
• Periodic data cleansing 
• Managing workflows
• And repeat! 

Following these steps rigorously will turn your traditional email marketing process into a ROI-generating email campaign machine. 

Would you need experts’ assistance to set up your automated email campaigns? While you are here, please take a quick look at our services or call us to discover how we can help you set up a winning email automaton process that will start producing ROI for you.