Email marketing automation: benefits and best practices

Email automation is about more than simply letting an automated system do your work for you. A properly managed automated email marketing campaign can not only bring you more customers, but also cost your business less in the process. Automated email marketing is designed to help you increase ROI from both ends. Unfortunately, many businesses are failing to properly take advantage of this lucrative program.

The failure of many organizations to effectively implement automated email marketing software and techniques means a significant advantage for those businesses that do it right. That said, crafting a successful automated-email campaign takes more than just a downloaded app and a customer email list. It takes reliable automated email marketing services.

What you’ll learn:

• Automated Email Marketing Advantages
• Finding the Right Automated Email Marketing Software
• Salesforce Automated Email Marketing Solution

There are a number of overlaps between customer relationship management (CRM) systems and automated email marketing. CRM is designed to collect, store, and analyze customer data so that your sales teams and other authorized users can easily create a personalized customer experience. Automated email marketing likewise depends upon analysis of relevant customer data, so that the right kinds of emails can be sent to the right people, at the right time.

Automated email marketing systems provide users with powerful and accurate platforms from which to implement profitable email marketing strategies. While automated email isn’t appropriate for every customer interaction, there are many instances where automated emails can not only save time, but also give clients exactly what they’re looking for. Here are a few examples:

A well-crafted page embedded in an email can direct traffic to your website and give you many opportunities for sales with little effort. Once those customers visit your site, automated emailing can be used to send out friendly welcome emails, relevant special offers, and reminders about items that may have been placed in the shopping cart, but never actually purchased.

If your clients care enough about your brand to sign up for an ongoing newsletter, your marketers can take the opportunity to keep them interested. Updating your audience on developments in your business can keep your name at the forefront of their minds, which is why 83% of B2B marketers use email newsletters as part of their marketing strategy. Automated newsletter emails can also collectively engage your audience in your messaging and maintain your relevance, while providing easy links back to your product pages. Write it once and send it to everyone.

By maintaining detailed records of individual customer history, interests, and sales quotes, an automated system can send out reminders and special offers at the most appropriate times. This gives potential and former clients a more concrete reason to commit. 30% of consumers feel positively towards retargeted advertisements (vs. the 59% who feel neutral and the 11% who dislike retargeting).

It can be easy to see a completed transaction as being the end of the customer journey. With automated email marketing, it doesn’t have to be. Upon completion of a sale, an automated system can send out an email to the customer, thanking them for their patronage, and ensuring them that the order is being handled quickly and professionally. This helps to establish an actual relationship between customer and seller, and is useful in maintaining records as well.

To get the most out of your automated email marketing campaigns, it is critical for you to find the right email marketing software for your business. Here are certain features that the best automated systems share:

Automated email marketing software works for you, while you can concentrate on other tasks. To this end, automation should be simple to set up. Most marketers aren’t developers, so they shouldn’t need a computer science degree to operate their marketing tools.

In true CRM fashion, your automated email marketing solution will be most effective when it can function in tandem with your other systems and processes. This will allow you to build a more complete picture of your customers, and will cut down interdepartmental miscommunications. If you’re already using CRM software, be sure your automated email marketing solution will work alongside it.

You probably wouldn’t be comfortable having an automation tool in charge of composing your marketing strategy. This is why it’s important to find an email automation solution that is flexible enough to fit your needs — no matter what those needs may be. The system in question should allow for in-depth customization, and should be capable of scaling alongside your business.

Smart businesses collect and analyze all available data, and automated email marketing software can assist. This will allow you to create trackable campaigns, identifying strengths and weaknesses in real time, and adapting your efforts accordingly. The system should also be able to deliver clear, interactive, visual-based reports at a moment’s notice, so that decision makers always have reliable information on which to build company strategy.

Salesforce has become synonymous with the CRM industry, so no surprise that our automated email marketing service is the most reliable option available. Our Marketing Cloud integrates with sales and service, allowing you to build a complete picture of your customers and deliver automated emails that are relevant and effective. The tools are user-friendly, featuring templates for creating content. The system’s flexible design means a perfect fit, every time. Additionally, Marketing Cloud features a personalization builder that can help you create messaging that is directly relevant to your audience. Finally, you can track campaigns from conception, to realization, to reevaluation, and beyond with our built-in analytics.

Automated email marketing software can save you time and resources. If you don’t already have a system in place, consider investing in an automated email marketing service. If you have something in place that isn’t fully meeting your needs, then maybe it’s time to go shopping for something better. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud can turn the task of customer emailing into something easy, reliable, and effective, while saving you money in the process.