Email marketing continues to be an effective way of selling and capturing the customer’s attention in the busy technological era of the current society. At the same time, as cited in Statista’s report, the number of global email users is set to increase to 4.6 billion people by 2025. This is a clear indication that through email marketing, there is market potential for reaching a humongous number of people. In addition, a study found that, on average, the ROI for each dollar invested in email marketing was $42. These figures indicate the need to enlist email marketing automation at the core of any digital initiative.
This article will, therefore, expand on the topic of email marketing automation, explain the value proposition of this technique, and give real tips to SaaS businesses that wish to leverage this tactic to increase their sales.
What is Email Marketing Automation?
Email marketing automation is defined as the process of disseminating emails to specific markets after preset conditions have been altered and at defined time intervals. The following technology allows the delivery of messages that are pertinent to the company as well as timely without putting much effort on the part of the company. This could be subscribing to a newsletter, a purchase, or even carting an item. Some of the uses include getting a new subscriber, ordering an item that is new, and clicking on a link, among others.
When a message is sent to a predetermined receiver within a certain period, the intended audience is most likely to respond positively and continue patronizing the business. Automation will help companies eliminate the need for repetitive tasks in the email marketing process, helping them spend more time strategizing and creating better content for the result. The features that these tools offer allow email campaign metrics to be fine-tuned on an ongoing basis, and mobile responsiveness makes email marketing automation an essential partner in digital advertising strategies.
The Benefits of Automated Emails
Automated emails offer numerous advantages, including:
- Efficiency: It reduces the amount of time spent on tasks as this system will perform several tasks for the marketers, and it will save them time that they can use to develop strategies and come up with ideas.
- Personalization: The correspondence is filtered, timely, and predicated on the users’ actions and likes of the users thus making emails exciting.
- Consistency: Electronic communications ensure that the customers’ attention is constantly drawn to the brand and that the leads are handled.
- Scalability: As the business grows, the effectiveness of email automation increases, which means there will be a marked improvement in the type of communication volume that the business can handle without additional resource requirements.
- Data-Driven Insights: Software tools provide tracking results of the campaigns, carried out in an attempt to enhance the campaigns.
How to Automate Email for a SaaS Company
Email automation can significantly enhance the marketing efforts of a SaaS company. Here’s how to get started:
Segmenting Your Target Audience
Email marketing, therefore, commences when you have categorized your audience according to their demographic data, behavior, and, in particular, their interactions with your enterprise.
This enables you to be more specific in sending messages so that they are effective, practical, and meaningful.
Send Introductory Emails and Onboarding
Send welcome emails to new subscribers that contain basic information about the services being offered and expectations. Onboarding sequences can assist users with their initial learning of your application and its features to improve usage.
Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns
Personalization is more than just using the recipient’s name in the message. To target users, you can share articles, notifications, and offers depending on the activity within the application to deliver personalized content.
Create Behavior and Response-based Triggers
Provide several automatic activities that may depend on users’ operations, including registering as a trial user, engaging functions, or even none. For example, if a particular user has not utilized our service for a long period, then he or she might be sent an email with useful information or even various offers that might lure him or her back to utilizing the service.
Increase Customer Retention
Employ the use of email automation applications to enhance interactions with customers and reduce customer cancellation/subscription rates. It is recommended that you always send your clients rich and relevant content about your products and the attractive promotional offers that are available.
Improve Email Automation Through Continuous Testing and Optimization
Engage in A/B testing for your email campaigns to help find improvements in the metrics. Optimizing subject lines, email bodies, and call-to-action are some of the approaches that can be used to try out different best practices with the audience.
Security Compliance and Privacy
Be sure that you stick to specific rules and regulations when it comes to the use of email autoresponders which include GDPR and CAN-SPAM. Keep your customers’ data and their trust secure and safe through implementing security and privacy standards.
Email Automation Tools
Several tools can help you automate your email marketing efforts. Here are three top options, along with their detailed features:
Snov.io
Snov.io is an email automation system containing a selected email verifier tool to guarantee that the emails are delivered to the proper addresses. It offers a range of features that make it a powerful choice for SaaS companies:
- Email Verifier Tool: Helps to make sure that emails are delivered to real and active email addresses, decreasing bounce rates.
- Drip Campaigns: It can create fully automated email campaigns that take the leads through the sales process funnel.
- Lead Generation: Facilitates gathering the email IDs of the potential customer using methods like domain search, company profile search, and social URL search.
- Detailed Analytics: Gives you information on the email open rates, click-through rates, and many other factors that will assist in improving the campaigns.
- Integration with CRM: Works well with other common customer relationship management tools where you keep your contacts and the emails that you send in one package.
Salesmate
Salesmate is an application that deals with Customer relationship marketing and email automation of sales processes. From email sequences to intelligent automation, follow-ups, and connections with other top applications, everything assists in lead nurturing and closing more sales. Here are some key features:
- Personalized Email Sequences: Deploy specific email campaigns regarding the user actions and their properties, increasing the effectiveness of emailing.
- Integration with Popular Apps: Integrates seamlessly with products such as Google G Suite, MS Office, and multiple CRM solutions to harmonize a working environment.
- Sales Pipeline Management: This helps you to know at each stage of the cycle how many deals there are and gives you a visualization of your sales process. You can then see areas that need to be worked on.
- Analytics and Reporting: Provides a comprehensive analysis of emails’ performance, sales undertakings, and overall efficiency of the campaigns to allow for evidence-based choices.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is amongst the most well-known options for creators and small businesses due to its simplicity and extensive automation. Together with automation, it provides the ability to create complex email follow-ups, tagging of audiences by the actions performed, and audience segmentation for specific campaigns. Key features include:
- Visual Automation Builder: Enjoy flexible and easy-to-use email sequence builders to help build your complex automation systems.
- Subscriber Tagging: Subscribers can be tagged according to their actions and preferences, meaning email campaigns can be pretty specific.
- Segmented Campaigns: Segment your audience based on various parameters like age, gender, previous purchase, and level of interaction to make your emails personalized.
- Landing Pages and Forms: Design visually appealing and engaging landing pages and forms to capture leads and expand the email list.
- Integrations: Integrates with a wide variety of third-party applications and services ranging from e-commerce and membership sites to webinar tools, among others, that you can use to amplify your marketing activities.
Email Automation Examples
- Welcome Series: Assuming when a user first decides to take a free trial, barriers are low, he or she gets a sequence of welcome emails that informs him or her about the product, guides through significant functionalities, and offers initial tips on how to use the product.
- Abandoned Cart: E-commerce businesses can leverage automation, especially by using the abandoned cart notification to clients who had items in their cart but didn’t check out. They can also use a discount on the items to push the purchase.
- Re-engagement Campaigns: By tele-mailing, you could send inactive users messages on exciting content that could entice them to use your product/service.
- Product Updates: Be sure to inform the customers with product update emails whenever new unique features, updates, or improvements exist.
Conclusion
Email automation plays a significant role in promoting your marketing strategies, encouraging the sale of customers, and sustaining the relationship. Thus, segmenting the audience, tailoring the emails, and using proper tools help create efficient automated email marketing campaigns that generate responses. It is important to continue optimizing the campaigns for better results and bear in mind the country’s data privacy laws. Email automation can do wonders for your marketing approach and allow your company to be successful.