Personalized email automation is one of the most crucial aspects of email marketing. It is an important tool to nurture prospects and convince them to make a purchase. Many of your leads lie dormant in the awareness or consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. This implies that they are not yet ready to buy from you and need some time to research and think.
So, how can you get them to the decision stage and convert? The answer is: Create relevant, personalized email automation.
Benefits of Personalized Email Automation
Lead nurturing through personalized email automation helps you to build a rapport with your prospects. This way, you can win their trust by empathizing with their pain areas. Through email automation targeted to a specific subscriber activity, you can instantly connect with the prospect. The faster you respond, the better the likelihood of conversion.
You can convey your proficiency through regular emails that enhance the brand visibility and make the subscriber more aware of your services. Lead nurturing enables better segmentation as it allows you to know the behavior of a particular prospect and send them relevant emails accordingly.
The additional advantage of email automation is that it saves you considerable time and money while facilitating the ‘marketing triad’ of conveying a personalized message.
You can focus on improving your business as email automation takes care of the existing leads, enticing them to convert.
Types of Email Automation Workflows
- Welcome email.
- Product recommendation email.
- Transactional email.
- Cart abandonment email.
- Re-engagement email.
- Customer loyalty email.
- Seasonal promotion email.
Let’s understand the fundamental personalized email automation workflows and how each can help you use it to the maximum potential.
1. Welcome Email
The very first email that your subscriber receives after signing up is the welcome email. It helps you in creating the first impression of your brand and makes way for a lasting relationship with the subscriber. Showcase your business through the welcome email and let your subscribers get familiarized with it.
Welcome incentives also appeal a lot to the new subscribers. Your email can either include free shipping, free access to a service for a specific period, guides on getting started and an insightful resource from your company.
It is recommended that you send a series of welcome emails rather than a single one. If you have a short sign-up form, you can grab this opportunity to collect the right information from the subscriber or ask them to set preferences. Then, you can use this information to send out tailor-made emails according to the subscriber’s preferences.
A good personalized email automation campaign that starts with an effective welcome email really sets the scaffold for all future communication with your business and aids in faster conversion. See how Office sends out a brilliant welcome email informing the new subscriber about their products.
They also request the subscriber’s birthday to leverage occasion-based email marketing and increase the likelihood of conversions.
2. Product Recommendation Email
Another type of automated email is a product recommendation email. Taking into consideration the past purchases of the subscriber, the frequency of buying, and the average money spent, you can send out personalized product recommendation emails that are relevant to the subscriber.
You can segment these subscribers according to this information and build a personalized email automation workflow, thereby facilitating an effective lead nurturing campaign.
For example: If a person has purchased a mobile phone from your eCommerce store, you can send out an email promoting the accessories that go great with it. This not only helps you in cross-selling or upselling but also helps you in creating a better brand reputation.
Let me share a personal experience with you. I had ordered a GEL KAYANO 24 running shoes a few months back from ASICS and ended up buying their GEL KAYANO 25 product too after receiving this recommendation email.
Integrate dynamic content with your email automation tool to send better product recommendations. You can implement the principles of artificial intelligence and machine learning to create relevant emails that resonate the most with your subscribers.
3. Transactional Email
Once a subscriber places an order or purchases from you, make sure you have set automation workflows that send out a planned transactional email informing the subscriber about the order invoice, shipping details, and order delivery.
Your customers appreciate live order updates so that they can know when the order would be delivered. It appeals to the subscriber by tapping into their curious and emotional personality.
Based on the product purchased, you can display related products in the section “People who bought this also bought:” Such emails work wonders to showcase your products and maintain a relationship with the subscriber.
Some marketers even have a reminder for an upcoming purchase.
As an example, consider an eCommerce store that deals with pet food. You can send out reminder mails to the buyer to restock the items and encourage new purchases.
Huckberry includes the trending products with attractive images in their order confirmation email, thereby luring the customers to make another purchase.
4. Cart Abandonment Email
Cart abandonment is the most unfortunate event for any business owner. It leads to losing out on your customer as well as a huge amount of revenue. Often, carts are abandoned because of the reasons listed below:
- High pricing
- Unexpected shipping costs
- Lack of payment options
- Difficult checkout process
- Technical glitches
- Security concerns
- No return or refund policy
You can overcome this situation by executing a cart recovery program. Having a cart abandonment email automation strategy goes a long way in convincing the lost customer to make the purchase. Cart abandonment emails sent within 24 hours encourage the prospective customers to rethink and complete the purchase.
It is advisable that you create a series of cart abandonment emails that are sent immediately, after 24 hours, and after 48 hours respectively.
Offer the subscriber incentives and discounts in the email. Make sure you write an interesting subject line, email copy, and CTA that catches the subscribers’ attention and prompts them to complete the purchase.
Saatchi Art sends out a discount offer in their cart abandonment email and also promotes other relevant products that match the customer’s choices.
5. Re-engagement Email
According to Neil Patel, approximately 60% of subscribers in an email list are inactive at a particular time. Re-engagement email automation grants you the opportunity to pull them out of dormancy and place them back in the sales funnel. Also, it is an easier way to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one.
Consider the last interaction you had with a prospect who has not engaged with the previous 5-10 emails. Choose a customer-centric approach to build a strong personalized email automation campaign that will generate a higher transaction rate. Write a humble and sweet copy that would inspire them to make the decision of choosing you or separation.
Your re-engagement email should remind the subscribers why they are on your list. Next, you can send out the recent updates that you have made in your products or services. Also, discounts and exclusive offers on products of their interest can lure them back to the active subscriber list. Humor and emotions work best when it comes to re-engagement email.
Re-engagement emails are a great way to ask for more information such as an updated email ID and get to know about their preferences better. This ultimately helps you further in creating good personalized email automation workflows.
To activate an existing customer, American Airlines has set up an automation program that creates a sense of urgency and encourages the customer to fly with them yet again.
6. Customer Loyalty Email
Keep a track of the frequent buyers and incentivize them with special VIP discounts or coupon codes on the products they love the most.
The leading coffeehouse chain Starbucks rewards its loyal customers and sends out a tempting email designed to fetch them more sales.
Another great idea is to run a referral marketing campaign to leverage word-of-mouth from your existing customers.
The referral marketing email by HotelTonight is great to grab the subscriber’s attention and get referral sales from their existing customers.
7. Seasonal Promotion Email
Almost every business has some sort of seasonal promotion or event that they offer throughout the year.
Offering a creative seasonal promotion is a great way to increase sales and revenue during typically slower times of the year. If you don’t have an email automation workflow in place to promote your seasonal specials, you could be missing out on a big opportunity.
A seasonal promotion email automation workflow is a great way to make sure your customers are always aware of your latest offers. Also, this way you can strategically plan your ads for when your prospects are likely to look for certain products.
Key Takeaways for Personalized Email Automation
- First-name personalization is the building block of effective email marketing. It is the easiest way to instill trust with your subscribers and garner the subscriber’s attention.
- If you want to enhance your open rates, try subject line personalization.
- Identify the personas whenever you set the automation.
- Do not send too many emails in the quest to engage your subscribers.
- Define the lifecycle stage of the prospect, and then plan the type and timing of your emails.
- Monitor the performance of your automated email campaigns and make the necessary changes, if required.
- Make sure your emails do not get too creepy with over-personalization – the kind that gives the customer a feeling of being stalked.
- Create smaller segments at the outset and see how they respond to your emails. Go for the larger leap only if it is working.
Final Thoughts
Personalized email automation enables the marketers to render a flawless subscriber experience and helps to generate new sales. Just follow the buyer’s journey and create meaningful emails. Following this strategy will surely help create a powerful email campaign for your brand.
Author Bio: Karen, a passionate email marketer for 5 years in Inbox Group; specializes in email marketing automation programs to bring out the best from them. She has helped numerous clients to improve their email marketing strategy. You would find her in nature’s lap, penning down profound quotes in her personal diary when she is away from the world of email marketing.
Guest Author
Writing for DevriX Blog Our blog has over 800 posts now and its audience is growing. Here are our blog post submission guidelines[link] Contact us to propose your posts, we’ll be glad to publish your content if it is compliant with these guidelines.
