This is an article “Why You Need to Automate Your Email Marketing Campaigns” by Marc Primo Warren.
Setting up the myriad rules on Mailchimp or any other email marketing tool makes it easier for you to manage, analyze, and execute more effective mailers that your customers might be interested in. Email marketing gets a lot of work done for you while you comfortably sip your coffee and study your marketing figures.
Consider this: Once a user shows interest in your website by signing up for a subscription, an instant welcome message is sent out to him. If the user shows disinterest, you can follow up with an encouraging mailer or offer a promotion. If the user decides to buy, you can automatically recommend more products that he might be interested in from your website. That’s email marketing magic at work for you! All stages of your marketing funnel are covered if you do the right things in automating your email marketing tactics. The usual one-word question for many though is, ‘how’?
Hot surface– be careful
Now that you’ve finished your cup of coffee, better check if your email marketing efforts are still working. Things in the world of business do change, after all, just as how the global pandemic resurrected the demand for email marketing across digital channels while people have the time to review them while stuck at home.
Last year, interest in email newsletters increased again but that didn’t mean that marketers could take their sweet time letting automated email marketing work for them. As the competition grew in the email realm of the digital space, new trends have also emerged as game changers you have to set your eyes on.
For one, more artificial intelligence (AI) technology is widely available now in email marketing software, with some of it still puzzling a good number of marketers. Since more data is widely accessible now, these AI features are intended to make algorithms more efficient when analyzing voluminous information online. Call them cutting-edge tools but a few list segmentation, content analysis, and specific audience outreach features can be rocket science for many email marketers out there.
Now, if you know the basics and objectives of email marketing, you’ll soon see how these AI features can help you with a little trial and error.
Start with the easy ones, like how to optimize your subject lines, improving personalizations, automating time for sending emails, and how they can help with your retargeting efforts.
Optimizing your subject lines
Every email marketer knows that subject lines are important to capture the attention of your target market. It’s that part of your strategy wherein the first significant click happens and a user buys a ticket to the marketing funnel journey you have in store for him.
These days, AI is making things simpler by using system algorithms to come up with subject lines that can work for higher click-through rates. The process involves an analysis of your current marketing campaign where AI then generates better subject lines that constantly improve over time.
Improving personalizations
Personalizing your subject lines for your specific audiences increases your click-through rate efficiency by 26%, according to Campaign Monitor. Most of your users would want to receive emails that are highly interesting to them and tend to ignore those intended for a more general audience.
With AI, you can automate categorized mailers to your grouped audiences through algorithms that track their marketing funnel journey. You can also gather insights from customer data so you can predict how they would want to be followed up on with your emails, or suggest which products you can offer that will catch their interest based on their past purchases.
Timing automation
One AI function that may require your best judgment is how often you’re supposed to send out mailers to your customers. While customer data helps a lot in determining future behavior, how you know your customers and how close they are in real life to your buyer personas will allow you to determine your timing automation when sending out categorized emails.
Leaving everything to AI may mess up your timing and flood your customers’ inbox with too much spam, so it’s always best to regularly review customer data points. What you can take away from using AI for your timing automation is the best times of the day to send your emails for higher chances of them being opened and read. Opting how often you send categorized emails to individual customers for better engagement should be all up to you.
Better retargeting
When retargeting customers who have abandoned their shopping carts on your website, AI can help you fine-tune your tactics by reviewing individual customer data based on the time they had spent on your website, which pages they clicked, and which products they checked out previously.
Has your customer added items to their shopping cart but not completed the checkout process? Email retargeting is a highly effective way to boost your sales and reduce your shopping cart abandonment rate. With this information, you can make an intelligent decision on whether your customers are on the fence about making a purchase or are simply waiting for the right time to do so. Sending them retargeting emails can influence them to take their customer journey with your brand a step further and tell them that you are with them all the way, all with the power of AI.
Combining AI with traditional email marketing
Utilizing what AI can do for your email marketing efforts can make a huge difference in your engagement, conversion, sales, and revenue figures. As AI in email marketing continues to develop over the years, cutting a slice of your budget to invest in these useful tools will give you higher ROI now and into the future.
Email marketing automation has been often called ‘drip campaigns’ owing to how certain triggers are set off based on algorithms. However, having control over your strategy is something that AI cannot perform as it is in your best interest to know how many emails you send out to your customers individually. Customers like to have free rein when managing their inbox and usually frown upon spam overload, so use what you can with AI and improve the content you send out to your customer groups.
By combining your AI tools with traditional email marketing, your customers will feel that you are taking more personal steps to get to know them better and address their pain points genuinely, which can help them decide whether to give you their time or move your messages to the spam folder.
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