Email marketing campaigns have been the backbone of companies large and small for years, and the process remained mostly unchanged.
With the creation and accessibility of marketing automation, large and small businesses are choosing to create email campaigns in a whole new way.
The power to create finely-targeted and tailored email campaigns now rests in a skilful marketer’s grasp.
Not sure you want to switch to marketing automation? Here are the five major perks you’ll be missing out on.
1. Cuts down on time
One of the biggest complaints about email marketing is that someone needs to take the time out to do it. Most small businesses have a limited staff, and their time is often stretched between plenty of equally important tasks.
Marketing automation can be done and scheduled at the beginning of the week and not touched again until the following week. You can plan out your campaigns in advance and spend the rest of the week focusing on other marketing efforts, such as social media outreach, blogging and webinars.
2. Reach any person anywhere at any time
Many businesses have clients all over the world, and it is difficult to reach out to an audience that is active when you are not at work or awake when you are asleep.
During the day, most working professionals, teenagers and children have few opportunities to check their personal email accounts and be able to click through to your website. Now you can schedule your email blasts to hit their accounts when they are most active in the evening. You do not have to remember to send them email out yourself after work.
This is also beneficial for businesses with global clients. If you are in Melbourne and want to reach out to your audience in New York City, you will not have to set an alarm and wake up at 3 a.m.
3. Customise your messages for your audience
Your customer contact list is probably pretty diverse, and each group might use your product or service for different needs. With email service providers, it is often difficult to meet all the needs of your audience. There is no one email design that will appeal to every sector of your audience.
Marketing automation makes customising much easier. Once you upload your contact list, you can further divide your contacts into certain groups like parents, business owners or students. Rather than sending out generic content with a broad meaning, you can create a timely message and call-to-action (CTA) for each sector of your audience.
4. Carry out efficient A/B testing
Once you have a set CTA, you can probably think of several different ways to go about communicating that message. How can you tell which one is best?
The best way is to conduct A/B testing, and with marketing automation, this is much easier to do. After you send out both emails, your marketing automation software will give you a rundown of each one’s analytics, meaning how many people opened the email and how many people clicked through. You will which messages your audience responded best to.
5. Track and assess your progress
As stated, marketing automation provides you with almost instant feedback, which is perfect for determining the success of your campaigns. Depending on the analytics data given, you should have an idea about how to create better campaigns.
For example, if very few people opened the email, maybe the subject line was not enticing enough. If most of your contacts opened the email within an hour after receiving it, then you can safely assume you chose a good time to send out the email and can repeat that in the future.
Marketing automation breathes new life into tired email campaigns and lets you tailor them to fit your buying cycle. You know your company best, so it makes sense that you should be in control of its message.
