Email Marketing Automation Best Practices

What’s your definition of email automation?

Automated emails are groups of campaigns that are sent based on data that’s collected about recipients. There are multiple triggers you could have with them. An email is sent as soon as the data for the recipient meets the criteria for the message. Let’s say you want to trigger an email campaign specifically for recipients in the Southwest United States, if you have a recipient input that they’re in Arizona, the Southwest campaign will automatically be sent to them either instantly, or at a specified time.

What are some of the benefits of email automation?

Setting up an automated email program frees up a lot of time for you and your team. Once created, you can easily test a portion of your cohort by sending just a small portion of your recipients a version of your email that you can tweak and change based on resulting engagement before sending out to our entire list.

What are some of the pitfalls of email automation?

If you’re not careful when setting up your automated emails, you can negatively impact user experience. I’ve seen people set up an email automation incorrectly, and then they sit back, expecting it to work as planned, but the recipients are getting two or three duplicate emails. So, make sure you’re setting everything up correctly.

Do you have any really great email automation examples/use cases?

I’ve built a few automated email campaigns that were really successful. The first was for a travel website. Let’s say a customer books a trip to Flagstaff, Arizona. Based on the location of their booking, they’d then get three follow up emails about the location and some things to do their, or places to stay there.

The second automated email campaign that I’ve created would automate hotel room upgrades. You book a hotel room somewhere, and then as you approach your sign-in date, you would get an email asking if you’d like to upgrade the type of room you’ve booked a week or so before you check-in.

What advice would you give to senders who want to implement email automation?

At a certain point, you’re going to have a ton of data flowing in, and you’ll need to be able to segment recipients based on that data. But it doesn’t have to complicated to be valuable. You can always start small and work with the data you already have. Once your program becomes more sophisticated I think that having someone who can properly structure a database is essential for any company that wants to implement an advanced email automation correctly.

What advice would you give to senders who already send automated email?

Don’t set it and forget it. I’ve seen customers set up really long, complex automations that involve 25 different emails over the course of 8 months, and then the campaign isn’t monitored. Then, when people have stopped engaging, and the messages continue to get sent, ISPs might start sending those messages to spam, and preventing other emails from getting delivered.

What do you think are some of the benefits of email automation?

A well-executed, automated email campaign strategy can make a ton of money for a company, but there are a few other benefits. Email automation lets marketers get creative in building engaging experiences for recipients thinking through flows like “if a customer does this, then this happens.” That can be very empowering for marketers as they advance in their careers.

What are some of the pitfalls?

One pitfall would be getting too complicated. Oftentimes, if a marketer has a tool with endless possibilities, they risk trapping themselves overthinking things needlessly. They’ll spend way too much time, which is money, trying to think of every possible scenario.

Another pitfall, from an execution and deliverability side, is they can end up unintentionally flooding inboxes. That’s a really important thing to think of regarding email automation. If you’re coming up with an email automation workflow, you need to cap your email frequency. Recipients could fall into several different triggers or conditions, and you don’t want them to hit a perfect storm and get eight emails in a day from you–which is totally possible.

Do you have any really great email automation examples/use cases?

One of the automated emails I actually like to receive is product updates or new product release emails. I think this is pretty easy to do for a lot of companies because they can track who has bought which product, then if there’s a new version being released, all those customers can get an update. I also receive emails for concerts in my area, which is triggered on a weekly or monthly basis, based on my location. Lastly, well written, educational nurture, or welcome, campaigns are probably the best for adopting a new product well.

What are some major misconceptions about email automation?

I think the misconception, from the marketer’s standpoint, is that everybody has email automation set up and they’re triggering and firing messages based off of tons of different criteria. The reality is there are relatively few companies out there doing it correctly and doing it well. It’s not something that everybody’s doing and that people are missing the boat on.

What marketers don’t always anticipate is how little data they will have for the majority of the people who will receive their automated email flows. Senders dream up all this automation, but they don’t realize that they don’t have data for the majority of recipients, so what then? What do you do for the people whom you have no data? The people who get one email or two emails, and maybe didn’t click on anything? There’s a spectrum of automation that needs to go into that.

What advice would you give to senders who want to implement email automation?

For somebody who’s just thinking about dipping their toe into automation, just start somewhere. I think that it’s kind of like paralysis by analysis sometimes when people are starting an email automation program.

Instead of coming up with an elaborate map of workflows and campaigns that might result from it, just take a few steps, launch one or two automations, and see how it performs. Think about how the data and how the revenue recognized from those processes roll up into higher business strategies. From there, see what happens. See what data comes out of it, and then you can get more elaborate based on your business needs.