Email marketing automation provides many benefits and is an essential aspect of any successful digital marketing plan. From increasing click-through rates to generating more conversion, optimized email marketing automation strategies can significantly increase your marketing ROI.
But automated emails can backfire if not implemented correctly. To achieve the benefits of email marketing automation, it’s important to effectively plan your strategy to deliver relevant content to high-quality leads and nurture them accordingly.
Here are five ways you can improve your email marketing automation strategies to achieve more click-throughs and conversions.
Benefits of Email Marketing Automation
30% of marketers note email marketing automation as having the highest level of ROI compared to other digital marketing channels like social media, SEO, and paid search marketing.
On top of increased ROI, successful email marketing campaigns can offer several benefits, including:
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Improving Customer Experience: Optimizing email marketing efforts by segmenting your campaigns to deliver relevant content to those on your email list creates an improved, personalized experience for your customers.
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Customer Retention: When you are able to deliver emails that provide real value to your customers, you are able to build strong customer relationships that encourage long-term loyalty.
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Increased Sales Revenue: Simply put, more relevant emails lead to increased sales. You can leverage email automation to generate sales by sharing personalized promotions, notifying past customers of new products or services, etc.
Compared to Facebook and Twitter combined, email marketing is 40x more effective at acquiring customers — making it a priority for any business serious about its inbound marketing efforts.
5 Ways to Optimize Your Email Marketing Automation Strategies
Email marketing automation is effective only when optimized and implemented correctly. Through thorough research and testing, brands can achieve great results from their email marketing efforts.
If you’re not satisfied with the results produced by your existing email campaigns, here are five ways you can improve your email marketing automation strategies.
1. A/B Testing
Testing, testing, testing. As is the case with any marketing concept, testing is one of the best ways to optimize the impact of your marketing emails.
A/B testing is a great way to directly compare the performance and ROI of two separate emails. You can compare subject lines, CTAs, send times, and more to measure how customers on your email list respond. After sending two similar emails with different subject lines or CTAs, you can compare results to create an effective, data-driven email marketing plan.
2. Segment Your Email List
Not all of your customers have the same wants or needs. Segmenting your email list to create targeted email campaigns makes customers more likely to follow up on your CTA. Campaign Monitor notes that marketers who use segmented email campaigns experience as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
You can segment your audience based on various criteria, including demographics, browsing activity, purchasing behavior, and location. How you segment your audience may depend on what you are offering and what your goals are. For instance, if you manage email marketing for an SaaS B2B business that serves multiple industries, it would make sense to customize emails for clients in different industries.
3. Relevant Landing Pages
Customers aren’t always ready to make a purchase after clicking on an email’s CTA. Emails are often just the first step in nurturing leads and guiding them toward a purchase, so it’s important that your landing pages are relevant, informative, and appeal to the customer in the same way that the email did.
Emails and their matching landing pages should be similar in design, tone, language, and purpose. The landing page copy should be an extension of the email, continuing to lead them through the sales funnel. Multi-channel marketing is key to generating conversions — don’t rely entirely on your emails to do all of the work.
4. More Chances to Opt-In
Customers have to opt-in to your email list, and getting people to opt-in is harder than ever in a time when many are wary of handing over information to businesses. If you’re struggling to build customer engagement and get people to join your email list, many have found simply adding more opt-in opportunities to be an effective solution.
Beyond adding more opt-ins throughout the buyer’s journey, it’s important to create effective opt-in opportunities. There are several ways to do this:
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Visibility: Opt-ins should be highly visible without being annoying or intrusive.
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Privacy: Always keep in mind the importance of privacy to customers. Don’t ask for unnecessary personal information as it may seem overly-intrusive and turn away potential leads.
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Accessibility: Don’t make things more difficult than necessary. Customers don’t want to fill out forms or have to visit multiple pages to complete the opt-in. Keep opt-ins as simple and easy to complete as possible.
5. Effective CTAs
Whatever the goals of your email marketing automation are, from generating sales to informing customers, an effective CTA is the best way to get readers to take that next step.
So what makes an effective CTA?
Several factors impact how customers interact with your call to action, including:
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Location: CTAs should be displayed prominently above the fold. If you have multiple CTAs, make sure to arrange them so that one leads to the next in the order that you want the customer to follow them.
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Copywriting: Short, persuasive, actionable copy is vital to creating effective CTAs. Use words that encourage action e.g. “Read more,” “Download Now,” etc.
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Design: CTA buttons should stand out and be visually appealing. Use contrasting colors to make CTAs stand out against the background.
Effective CTAs encourage clicks, at which point your website can carry leads through the rest of the sales funnel, nurturing your customers each step of the way with relevant high quality content.
Enhance Your Email Marketing Automation
Automated marketing enables businesses to connect with their customers in a more meaningful way, leading to greater sales revenue, lead generation, and engagement. But to achieve these benefits, it’s important to implement research-backed email campaigns that appeal to your target audience.
