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EMAIL AUTOMATION
It’s Time to Up Your Game — with Email Automation
According to a recent study covered by BtoB Magazine1, the average email marketer’s open rate — defined as “one open per recipient” — is roughly 19.7%. Marketers in the highest quartile enjoy rates nearly twice as high, at 35.7%. But the news here for email marketers is still troubling: Among those subscribers and prospects on your own lists, only about 2 in 10 are opening your email messages (and not quite 6 in 10 even if you’re among the highest-performing marketers). What’s going on?
Don’t Fumble with an Interested Prospect — Use Email Automation to
Cross the Goal Line
We can’t simply chalk up these discouraging rates to email recipients not recognizing the senders. The study further reveals2 that average spam complaints are a mere .07% and unsubscribe rates are just .25% on average — and these numbers are even better for higher-performing marketers. Recipients of marketing emails opt in to these lists presumably to hear from marketers. So why do so few recipients open the messages?
One reason is that most marketing emails are blasted to lists with little if any thought given to when they’re sent, to whom, and if the particular message will resonate with a particular recipient. Email marketers can significantly improve the effectiveness of their campaigns by implementing Email Automation, which lets marketers:
Send customized messages to prospects when they react to specific triggers.
Create workflows that set in motion a series of automated actions for prospects who demonstrate specific interest at a specific moment.
Learn more about each prospect over time, to continually create more relevant, anticipated — and lucrative — email campaigns.
Improve the email experience for prospects by providing timely and relevant information when they want it — building loyalty and improving email ROI.
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EMAIL INTO REVENUE
Many email-marketing campaigns are implemented in much the same way. Let’s call them “Email Mary’s.” With an Email Mary, a marketer drafts a sales message as quickly as possible, blasts it to every email address on the list, and hopes a small percentage click through and buy.
What marketers forget when they take this approach, though, is the value they’ve built in earning the trust and permission from each email address on their list — trust and permission that will dwindle with each message that prospects finds irrelevant, badly timed or otherwise “mistakenly” sent to them.
With Campaigner, you can quickly and cost-effectively put Email Automation tools and practices into place that make each message more relevant and customized for each prospect — by allowing prospects to demonstrate their interest in specific areas of your business, and then generating automated responses and actions to satisfy their specific needs.
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EMAIL INTO REVENUE
Stop Blasting “Hail Mary” Emails!
You know the Hail Mary pass in football — the quarterback’s desperate throw across the field, usually toward the end of a game, hoping a teammate will catch it and score. No target. No strategy. Just throw it into the end zone and hope for the best.
EMAIL INTO REVENUE
Email Triggers
Yes, you could spend yourself into bankruptcy on a Super Bowl ad that will reach tens of millions — and be ignored by almost all of them. Or you could send your message to Jim in Cincinnati and Jordan in Denver (and a few hundred just like them around the country) — because they’re very interested in your offering and asked for more details.
Why Email Triggers are the Simple and Smart Play to Start with:
Triggers let you easily send a customized email when a prospect performs a specific action — clicking a link, completing a form, or checking a box requesting more information.
Implementing trigger-based email campaigns lets you give a prospect exactly the right information to make a purchase decision or otherwise further engage with your business — when they ask for it.
A trigger lets your prospect feel as though they’re receiving “attention” from your business when they want it — great for building loyalty — even if your responses are automated and don’t require any work from you or your team.
Your triggers can also be time-based — so if a prospect “goes quiet” for a period after showing initial interest, you can initiate a trigger after a week, a month or any time you wish to send a relevant follow-up message.
Campaigner Helps You Send the Right Message to
the Right Recipient at the Right Time.
Campaigner gives email marketers an easy-to-use Email Automation toolkit that can help you dramatically improve the quality of your campaigns — with email triggers, email autoresponders, email workflows and email reporting.
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“Perfection is not attainable. but if we chase
Perfection, we can catch excellence.”
EMAIL INTO REVENUE
Email Autoresponders
Key to any business is the ability to be responsive — to give customers the human touch we all crave when doing business with any firm. But what if your list contains 50,000 names — or 5,000,000? You can’t give each one attention or information whenever they ask. That’s where autoresponders can be invaluable.
“in life, as in football, you won’t go far unless
you know where the goalPosts are.”
—arnolD h. glasow
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How Email Autoresponders Help You Put Points on the Board:
Autoresponders are essentially pre-packaged workflows that help you send the right messages to the right subscribers at the right time — and scale easily as your list grows, requiring no additional work from you.
You can create an autoresponder sequence that makes sense for you and your prospects — time-based (a recurring weekly email, for example) or trigger-based (a thank-you, for example, or a promotion after a related purchase.)
Autoresponders created for specific types of subscribers will help you deepen your relationship with those subscribers — by sending more targeted, relevant messages that they have shown an interest in receiving.
EMAIL INTO REVENUE
How to Use Email Workflows to Win Big:
A workflow lets you think proactively, building a sequence of emails and if/then rules based on your prospects’ specific actions — rather than simply reacting to each email reply, form submission or request for information with a manual response. You can also learn from your prospects’ behavior, to continually refine and improve your workflows.
You can use workflows to build ongoing value for your prospects — and earn their trust and loyalty — by creating content at the outset and sending it to them at regular intervals or when they ask for it. Either way, a workflow lets you stay in contact with prospects — and always be responsive — no matter how big your list becomes, or how busy you get. Your workflow can be as detailed and customized as you need it to be — tracking every movement of a prospect as they interact with your email or websites — and using that information to enhance the relationship for both your prospect and you. You can, for example, automatically send a discount offer to a prospect who has abandoned their shopping cart on your site.
Email Workflows
Now you’re ready to pull together all of the tools in your Email Automation toolkit — to build a fully automated “workflow” that includes a sequence of emails, perhaps other content (like downloadable white papers or even video messages), and rules to set it all in place. Campaigner’s email workflows let you build a highly customized email relationship with each prospect — from introduction to purchase, and well beyond.
“you can learn a line froM a win —
anD a book froM a Defeat.”
—Paul brown
EMAIL INTO REVENUE
New Customer “Welcome” Workflow — triggered by first purchase
You can create a series of welcome emails for a lead or subscriber who has just made their first purchase. This is a great way to build on your relationship by giving your new customer useful information at just the right time — and a reason to continue engaging with your business. This “Welcome” email series can also include “training” on your product or service, if relevant — which your new customer will see as extremely valuable and timely. What better message to send than that your business is there to help your new customer get the most of your offerings right away!
Event Workflow — triggered by registration or
attendance at your event
Whether you host seminars, exhibit at trade shows or run live webinars (another great marketing tool!), you can create an email workflow to automate communication with prospects and leads who attend (or even just sign up to attend) these events.
You can create a series of content-rich messages, for example, for prospects who have attended one of your webinars — with content specific to the webinar’s topic. This is a great way to deepen engagement with the information-hungry segment of your market — which webinar attendees are by definition — with just the type of information they’ve already shown an interest in receiving.
Re-engagement Workflow — triggered by a period of
inactivity from a lead
Reopen the lines of communication with leads or prospects you haven’t heard from in, say, three months, or a year — whatever timeframe you specify.
You can use this series of emails, for example, to send time-sensitive discount offers, or new content, or something else of value to your inactive leads. People get busy, distracted. Why not set an automated series of emails to remind those on your list who’ve “gone quiet” why they engaged with your business in the first place?
Just a Few Great Workflows
You Can Use to Score
More Business:
EMAIL INTO REVENUE
Go ahead — be a Monday-Morning Quarterback. With Campaigner, your Email Automation toolkit includes the ability to track, monitor and analyze the results of your emails in real-time, so you can immediately learn what’s working in a campaign — and what needs work for next time.
Email Reporting
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How Campaigner’s Reporting Tools Use Big Data —to Help You
Hit Big Numbers:
Campaigner’s email reporting lets you tap into the “Big Data” behind your email campaigns — how many times a given recipient opens your message, what time of day they’re most likely to read it, etc. — to give you a much richer picture of how your campaigns are working and how you can improve them.Implementing trigger-based email campaigns lets you give a prospect exactly the right information to make a purchase decision or otherwise further engage with your business — when they ask for it.
Review and compare your campaigns over time — to see which campaigns perform the best, and why.
Your email reports give you an extraordinary window into exactly what your subscribers are doing with your messages — second by second, for every prospect. You’ll learn who’s opening your messages, how many times, what time of day, on which device, which links they’re clicking (and not clicking) — so you can continually refine and improve your campaigns.
1BtoB: “Email opEn ratEs avEragE 19.7% last yEar” —
www.BtoBonlinE.com/apps/pBcs.dll/articlE?aid=/20130508/ Email13/305089998/Email-opEn-ratEs-avEragE-19-7-last-yEar
2silvErpop: “2013 Email markEting BEnchmark study” —
http://www.silvErpop.com/documEnts/whitEpapErs/2013/wp_EmailmarkEt-ingmEtricsBEnchmarkstudy2013.pdf
