There are many tricks and tactics SMEs can use to make marketing more efficient and more effective. One of the best approaches is to use email marketing automation. Email marketing automation is designed to ensure your email marketing messages are as relevant and impactful as possible, without requiring much effort from your side. Businesses can use email automation in many different ways to achieve different things.
This quick guide explores everything you need to know about email marketing automation for SMEs.
What is Email Marketing Automation?
Email marketing automation is when you send automated emails to the right people at the right time. These emails are pre-prepared and then triggered based on certain actions. For example, a person might sign up to your mailing list and then get automatically sent a welcome email, or a series of welcome emails (known as a drip). You could also use email automation whenever a prospect or customer performs an action like viewing a certain product, making a purchase, or engaging with your marketing content in certain ways.
Why is Email Automation Valuable for SMEs?
Email automation is one of the best ways to enhance any email marketing strategy. First, it saves time and effort, as you don’t have to manually send out each email to each person. Most importantly, email automation helps you send relevant, personalised, emails to the right people at the best possible moment. This helps to make your email marketing more engaging, which results in a better outcome.
How to Apply Email Automation to Your SME
To apply email automation, you’ll need to use email marketing software that has automation abilities. This means the software will let you set up automated workflows that run in the background, while you can focus on other work.
A key part of this is having a database where you store and manage all of your email contacts. This lets you create different email lists, which you can use to send relevant content to each list. The lists are also automated, so people are automatically added to different lists based on their actions.
For example, you could have an email list and automation in place for people who purchased menswear products from your online store. As soon as they make the purchase, they are added to a menswear list and are sent a series of emails promoting related menswear products. While automation is focused on email, it’s also possible to apply the same tactics to bulk SMS sending. This can be highly effective, as SMS has much higher open rates than email.
Email marketing automation is one of the best ways to improve marketing efficiency and generate better results from your email strategy. You just need to set up your emails and triggers, segment your lists, and then you can let your automated emails work in the background while you run your small business. It’s easy to apply and can be used to achieve many different things.
