Why Email Automation is Critical to Business Growth

Have you ever noticed how big brands always seem to drop extremely relevant emails into your inbox at the right time?

The email with a discount on your birthday? A neatly curated list of recommended products after browsing a website? The invitation to write a review a few days after wearing your new shoes (and living to tell the tale)?

You might be thinking, "These companies probably have a huge marketing team that curates lists, remembers birthdays, and sends out those emails." Or "They have such a small clientele that they can take the time to care and get to know ME!"

Or even "Magic sprites take care of it, silly!"

Well, I'm sorry to tell you, but there are no elves. The real answer? Email automation.

What is Email Automation?

Email automation is sending emails triggered by customer behavior or predefined actions, rather than being manually scheduled to send at a certain date and time. Due to the timely nature of these emails, their content is tailored to each recipient.

Whether email automation is totally foreign to you or you're looking for ideas on how to leverage your new email marketing tool, keep reading as we run through the the ins and outs of email automation, its importance, examples, and some tips from my experience creating automated email journeys and campaigns.

Why is email automation important?

As marketers, we want to provide our customers with the most relevant, informative and personalized content. Each person who interacts with your brand should have an individual dynamic experience based on their own needs, preferences and buying habits.

Email automation allows us to do this efficiently and at scale.

You set up email automation to trigger emails by creating rules based on a customer's behavior, such as signing up for a newsletter or adding an item to their cart. Messages are then delivered in a timely manner with content tailored to that particular user's behavior. This enhances your brand message by becoming super relevant and consistent across all email communications.

Not only that, but it also saves your team time because no one has to send out these campaigns manually. There is also less room for human error. And the whole process is totally scalable; once the rules that trigger your campaigns are in place, they apply to all users who follow them, no matter how many.

Simply put, email automation is essential if you want to do more with less, deliver personalized content, and keep your email relevant.

Identifying personalized events and triggering emails from them is key to sending relevant and valuable information to your audience

How to Set Up Automated Email Campaigns

Now that you know what email automation is and why it's important, learn how to set it up!

1. Choose an email automation tool

It's important to choose the right email automation software for your needs. So let's go over a few things to look for when selecting your tool.

Trigger emails based on personalized behavior. It may seem obvious, but some tools don't allow you to do this. The more precision you can get when creating the rules that trigger your automated email campaigns, the more relevant they will be to the recipient. Dynamic and customizable emails. Personalized content goes hand in hand with automated emails; it is essential to the success of the campaign and the growth of the business as a whole. To really make your automated emails relevant, you need to display content that is dynamically tailored to each recipient. Integration with your software stack. This plays into the point above about personalization. Email automation software that allows dynamic content isn't useful if you can't get the necessary data about each recipient in the email. It is common for customer data to be stored in customer relationship management (CRM) software or some database. Being able to plug this data directly into your email automation software using native integration means you have access to all the information you need to populate your email. Analytical and reporting capabilities. You must be able to view campaign analytics...