Email automation is defined as a set of processes and technologies used to send promotional/transactional emails automatically to customers. It uses preconfigured business rules to trigger communication, helping you dramatically cut downtime and effort spent reaching a large audience.

Email marketing is a popular tactic for brands around the world, given its low investment and high ROI. Automation can help you send marketing emails at a rapid pace, reacting to customer behavior and converting warm leads. Read this primer to know what email automation is, examples of brands with great email marketing automation strategies, and ideas to get started.

Table of Contents

• What Is Email Automation?
• Email Marketing Automation vs. Transactional Email Automation
• Email Automation Benchmarks You Should Remember
• 3 Email Automation Examples That Illustrate Key Best Practices
• The Way Forward: Ideas for Getting Started With Email Automation

What Is Email Automation?

Despite the rise of so many other digital channels, email continues to be one of the most popular means of communication among customers. There were over 3.8 billion registered email users in 2018, according to Lifewire – that means half of the global populace is accessible via email!

Marketers can use email automation to regularly connect with their consumer base and significantly reduce the time and effort needed to send emails. Once you have configured a business rule, the email automation software will keep following the workflow no matter how large the audience. Needless to say, this has incredible benefits for marketers.

Email automation is now a digital marketing staple, replacing the tedious task of manually sending emails to every customer with preconfigured workflows. You can specify what communication should be triggered in response to each customer’s behavior. This lets you map a variety of customer journeys and ensure optimum engagement with your brand.

Example: A frequent visitor to your website can be targeted with a “do you want to register for our newsletter?” email. Or, a customer who hasn’t purchased a product in over three months could receive a “we miss you!” email. These are only some of the examples of email automation – thanks to the advanced tools and technologies available, you can define a wide range of scenarios as per your customers’ persona and automate emails accordingly.

But why is email automation so important in today’s digital economy? Is it possible to get by without adopting it as part of your email marketing strategy? The answer is an emphatic NO.

In the early days of your business, it might be feasible to identify leads/customers using website analytics – and then manually sending out communications to each customer. However, as your business grows and your audience begins to expand, email marketing automation is an absolute must-have. It lets you spend more time on framing and designing the best possible communication, and not on iterative tasks such as hunting down email IDs, segmenting customers, sharing repeated follow-ups, and so on.

Key Benefits of Email Automation

1. Scale your marketing strategy with minimal effort

If you’re dependent on manual efforts, your customer reach will be directly linked to the size of your marketing team. For example, if everyone in your dedicated email marketing team can send 50 messages a day and you have a 10-person team, that means you cannot scale beyond 500 customers. Email marketing automation, on the other hand, predefines a business rule based on which every customer – new and old – will continue to receive messages from your brand.

2. Invest time in personalization

With your email marketing team now free from iterative activities, you can turn your attention toward strategic areas such as personalized emails. There are two types of personalization:

a. You can personalize the design and copy embedded in an email – each email can carry a different name, address, etc., or advertise products that are on the customer’s individual wishlist.

b. You can personalize the workflow so that a new customer, a returning customer, and a frequent buyer, receive unique, relevant messages every time.

Personalization can be extremely effective when converting leads in today’s crowded digital marketplace. This is one of the key ideas that’s led to the popularity of email automation.

3. Do more with less

This one is a no-brainer. Several case studies and examples of email automation prove that it takes far less effort to deploy an automated email campaign, compared to a manual pipeline. Even if you invest a significant amount of time on personalization, workflow configuration, platform setup, data analysis, etc., you’re still saving on non-value adding marketing efforts.

However, not all emails sent via automation are marketing messages. Let’s consider this in greater detail.

Email Marketing Automation vs. Transactional Email Automation

Before you consider ideas for adopting email automation, it is important to know about all the automation possibilities in your email strategy. Specifically, there are two ways you could automate your email pipeline – email marketing automation and transactional email automation.

Email marketing automation is partly the automation of promotional messages such as new product launch, customer greetings, offers and discounts, thought leadership content, and other ideas for engaging the customer. Messages sent via email marketing automation may or may not be relevant to the customer immediately – you can maximize relevance to an extent by segmenting your audience correctly and personalizing the content as per their interest areas and purchase patterns.

The other (and in many ways, more common) type of automation is applied to transactional emails. These refer to operational interactions such as resetting forgotten passwords, confirming an order, sharing shipment tracking details, asking for reviews, and so on. Interestingly, leading brands often leverage transactional conversations as a means of marketing a product or reinforcing their brand.

Example: An automated transactional email from Uber asks a customer to rate their trip, but also encourages social sharing and referrals with a monetary incentive.

As a marketer, you need to ensure that both types of email automation are part of your customer interaction blueprint. Without automating transactional emails, your response to critical issues would risk getting delayed.

Example: If you don’t send a “please review” email immediately after completing a purchase, the chances of your customer taking the time to respond will start to dip.

And, email marketing automation could significantly improve the impact of your marketing strategy. Using automated emails at critical junctures of the customer journey, you can establish a personal relationship with your brand right from the get-go. As a result, the customer will be less likely to drop-off mid-way on a purchase journey or switch to a competitor.

So, how do you measure whether your email automation strategy is working as expected? It will definitely bring measurable improvements over the manual method, but are the results up to industry benchmarks?

Learn More: Email Marketing Manager: Role, Skill Set and Job DescriptionOpens a new window

Email Automation Benchmarks to Remember

The purpose of email automation isn’t just to send messages in bulk – the content must reach customers at the right time, resonate with every reader, and inspire them to take action. This brings us to email automation benchmarks and why they are so critical.

Email automation benchmarks are metrics that help you measure the efficacy of an email marketing campaign. Are customers opening the email, or is it being sent straight to spam? Is the content engaging enough to make the customer click, register, or buy? These questions can be answered by keeping an eye on the following email automation benchmarks:

1. Average open rate

The latest reports from GetResponse, a leading email automation platform, suggests that the average email open rate across industries is 22.15%. However, this could vary significantly across industries, with non-profits coming in at the top (36.15%) and agencies at the bottom of this email automation benchmark (16.1%). Given that only one in five customers will open your email, it is advisable to create a smart subject line that catches customer attention.

2. Average unsubscribe rate

This is a risk for any email marketing automation strategy, especially is a customer is incorrectly targeted. Because you’re not dealing with transactional emails, a lead/customer could get disinterested and choose to opt-out of your email list. The average unsubscribed rate across industries is 0.2%. You can boost performance as per this email automation benchmark by carefully curating customer emails and avoiding buying email IDs from third-party providers.

3. Average spam complaints

Fortunately, cutting-edge email technology helps to filter out spam at the very roots so that it never reaches the customer’s inbox. However, your marketing emails could be erroneously categorized as spam if the content is too “salesy,” doesn’t inspire customer trust, or simply seems irrelevant to the reader. The average email automation benchmark here is 0.02%.

4. Average click-through rate

This is a vital email automation benchmark for any marketer – it indicates a genuine action taken by the reader, increasing the possibility of revenue generation. The global average for click-through rates is 3.43%, which is pretty high considering only 22.15% are actually reading the email.

Brands that formulate intelligent email marketing strategies and perform better than the email automation benchmarks discussed here, could significantly strengthen brand credibility and build lasting relationships with customers.

3 Email Automation Examples That Illustrate Key Best Practices

There’s plenty of email marketing examples and case studies out there that demonstrate how automation could be leveraged for exceptional results. Let’s look at three impressive instances and what you can learn from them.

1. Fully maximize customer data as illustrated by Nextdoor

Nextdoor is a US-based social media network that connects neighborhoods and local communities. The company was using a legacy, enterprise-grade email automation tool that wasn’t able to quickly adapt to emerging needs. Nextdoor switched to the SendGrid Marketing Campaigns automation platform, plugging in data such as open and click-through rates to detect customer interest. This reduced the effort needed to build a campaign by 56%.

2. Find and target key moments of truth like Ramsdens

A moment of truth is that juncture on the customer’s journey where they must finally make a decision – it could be, adding a product to the cart, wishlisting an item, choosing a payment method, etc. Jewelry company, Ramsdens, realized that it was facing large volumes of cart abandonment, without any response mechanism to tackle this challenge. The company adopted an email automation platform called Pure360, and was able to boost sales by 34% simply via cart recovery campaigns.

3. Build on top of customer sentiment, as demonstrated by Blue Water Mortgage

Blue Water Mortgage was losing out to competitors who leveraged readily available email lists to target its loyal customers. The company partnered with MailChimp to implement a detailed customer sentiment analysis project via email automation. Regular emails soliciting reviews, questions about a customer’s mortgage challenges and other data collection mechanisms helped to intelligently automate Blue Water’s marketing messages, and the company achieved a high open rate of 34.5%.

If these email marketing examples sound impressive, there are easy steps that you could take to automate email communications successfully at your business. Here’s how.

Learn More: Marketing Automation Manager – Role, Skill Set, and Job DescriptionOpens a new window

The Way Forward: Ideas for Getting Started With Email Automation

Once you know what email automation is, you’re ready to leverage the many tools and platforms available to build an automation workflow. But the first step is to have a clearly formulated automation game plan:

Step 1. The automation plan will comprise audience segmentation, moments of truth identification, and content-to-trigger alignment. For example, if a customer downloads a product brochure in the B2B space, you could auto-send an email with further details on the product. At this stage, you can incorporate all the available customer data to gain a holistic idea of your automation requirements.

Step 2. Choose an email automation platform that’s suited to your business needs. Apart from the ones already discussed in our email automation examples (SendGrid, Pure360, and MailChimp), there are a number of other tools you can use. A free platform (with paid scalability) will cover the most basic functionalities while an advanced one can offer detailed analytics and integrations with other marketing tools, like your CRM.

Step 3. Finally, you can define the workflow and measure results. Based on the triggers and responses identified in Step 1, you can outline as many customer journeys/workflows as you want. Data from your email automation campaign will be collected by the platform and displayed on an analytics dashboard for better results in the next cycle.

These are the three foundational ideas to help get started on your email marketing automation journey. Now that you’re equipped with a detailed understanding of what email automation is and the benchmarks indicating its impact, you can utilize the most popular digital channel in the world – email marketing – to build lasting relationships with the widest possible customer base.