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5 Steps For Building An Effective Email Automation Sequence

December 10, 2019|Digital Marketing, Email Marketing

Surprisingly, even with the massive amount of new communication platforms and marketing tactics, email continues to be one of the most powerful digital marketing tools. This is especially true when you master email automation. With automation, email can work for you and your business without you ever lifting a finger. That is, of course, once you have set up and refined your email automation sequence. You can get your sequence up and running in just five steps.

What is Email Automation?

Email newsletters and campaigns are great, but the real power of email comes with a little more precision. Instead of sending out the same email to everyone on your list at once, an automated sequence sends specific email messages to individual people when they meet certain criteria. Whether that is when they sign up for a newsletter, make their first purchase, or leave something in their shopping cart without checking out.

Step One: Create a Plan

Planning is essential to most marketing functions, but it is especially critical here. Email automation is driven by criteria or triggers. Before you get started, you need to plan out what you are trying to accomplish so that you can be sure you are collecting the right data to feed those triggers. For instance, automatically sending a welcome email to someone who signed up for an email newsletter will be pretty simple since they need to use their email to sign up. However, if you want to automatically send an email when someone leaves something in their cart, you will need to be sure you have collected their address early in the sales process. That is unless you already have it on file as they are a returning customer. So, before doing anything else, sketch out what you want to do, and figure out how to capture the right data.

Step Two: Choose the Right Tool

If you are already using email for newsletters and campaigns, you already have an email tool of some sort. Now, you will need to see if what you already have has the power to help you automate or whether you will need to find another solution. Look for features that will help you create trigger criteria and build automation sequences. Also, look for robust analytic reporting tools. Later in the process, those will be essential for evaluating your strategy.

As you are looking at options, look at the features and the pricing structure. Email automation tools vary in price from free to several thousand dollars a month. Some offer free or inexpensive plans that scale into more expensive plans as your email list grows. Just be clear about current and future pricing since it can be difficult to switch services midstream. Some of the providers include Constant Contact, ConvertKit, MailChimp, SendinBlue, InfusionSoft, and HubSpot.

Step Three: Design and Launch Your Workflow

This is where your plan and your software tool come together. Most email automation software makes the process of setting up a workflow rather easy. As long as you are collecting the right data and are clear about your objectives, this may be the most straightforward part of getting started.

Step Four: Measure and Adjust

The great thing about automated email is that you don't need to pay attention to it daily. However, that doesn't mean you should just ignore it. Hopefully, the software you have selected has precise analytics so that you can see email statistics like open rate, click rate, bounce rate, unsubscribes, conversions and other key metrics. You may find that you need to make some adjustments along the way to get the most out of your workflows. This may mean adjusting the copy in the messages, changing the timing or frequency, or even completely redesigning the workflow.

Step Five: Get Started

Getting started with an effective email automation sequence can be pretty easy and relatively painless. Just be sure to plan ahead, find the right tool, and keep measuring and adjusting. Before long, you will be on your way to more sales, higher conversion rates, and more profits for your business.

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