Automation in email marketing not only makes your life easier as a business owner, it can greatly improve customer experience and satisfaction. 73% of consumers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties, and a loyal customer is priceless to your business. The probability of selling to existing customers is between 60% and 70%, while for new customers it’s between 5% to 20%.
To maintain a positive brand impression, you need your emails to be relevant, engaging, and more importantly, useful. Instead of using email as purely a sales channel, develop an ongoing conversation with customers and deliver what they want at the right time. There are plenty of ways that you can do this, just take a look at our email marketing automation how-to guide for 5 great starting points.
1. Automate order emails
If a customer has purchased a product from you, the most important information they’re after is a confirmation that all is okay. Don’t leave them guessing on what stage their order is at, make sure you send out order confirmation emails, dispatch emails, and delivery emails, to keep them in the know. This not only reasssures your customers that you are organized but it avoids having to manually handle the influx of order inquiries.
You can set up these automations by integrating your email marketing tool with your eCommerce platform. For example, Shopify has a direct integration with Vision6, allowing you to automate all of your transactional emails and supercharge your campaigns.
2. Automate your onboarding process
Any kind of onboarding, whether it’s welcome emails to multi-step training packages, can easily be automated. It’s important to make the process as smooth as possible for newcomers. Schedule your first emails to be triggered as soon as someone signs up, then schedule further emails to be sent at convenient intervals to avoid bombarding their inbox. Making a good first impression will go a long way to ensuring positive opinions of your business.
Onboarding also presents a great opportunity to provide vlaue-add content such as information or insights to better inform customers. This could be about your company, the services or products they signed up for, or industry-relevant information. Going above and beyond from the very beginning is a great way to show your subscribers that they’re not just another number, they’re valued.
3. Automate your bookings
People lead busy lives with packed schedules. Sending automated booking emails is valuable for your customers, as well as your business. Having a centralized system will help to ensure schedules run smoothly and there are no annoying clashes. In Vision6 we have an ‘Add to Calendar’ link which automatically creates a save the date in your subscribers calendar so they won’t miss a thing!
4. Automate feedback and surveys
Emails are mistaken for a one-way communication tool, but it doesn’t have to be. Asking your subscribers for feedback is a great way to engage them in a non-transactional way. It also lets them know that their experience and satisfaction are important to your businesses.
Feed your customer surveys into your user-onboarding workflows, especially towards the end of a trial period. That way if you expeerience high rate of customer churn you can use your feedback surveys to pinpoint where customers may be experiencing certain road blocks in the onboarding journey.
5. Automate your customers’ communication preferences
It’s best practice (not to mention a legal requirement) to have clear unsubscribe options in all of your email communications. But there are ways to give your subscribers control over the messages they receive without them leaving entirely. Maybe they just want to receive fewer emails from you, instead of none at all. Give your subscribers the option to customise their communications from you with a preference centre.
For the best results:
- Provide the option for subscribers to set email frequency
- Let your subscribers select the kind of content they want to receive
- Give them the option to change or edit their email address
- Include a link to their preferences in every email and SMS communication
Want a more in-depth how-to for email marketing automation and how it can benefit your business? Set up a free demo with one of our team today!
