The New Email: Automations and Email Marketing

Remember that thing called email?

Yes, it still exists. And to everyone’s surprise, it's doing better than it ever has been, thanks to the digital marketing world!

Though we have come a long way from being glued to our computers waiting for that precious “You’ve Got Mail” alert (Meg Ryan will forever by my favorite email heroine), we are still in many ways “glued” to our email. It is something that we have officially taken for granted, which is why we tend to forget it even exists. But in this day and technological age--could we live without it?

My answer is no, and here’s why:

WHY EMAIL IS STILL VERY MUCH RELEVANT TO OUR EVERY DAY LIVES

Though many people have created separate junk emails, fill their spam folders to the brim, and often just leave promotional emails in their inbox, untouched, there are still a lot of other positive actions taking place over email.

For one, email keeps customers updated. While we don’t always look at every email we get from our most used websites or applications, we do know to go straight to our email if ever there is a sudden change with our account or we have somehow completed a conversion that we expect to be alerted about via email. Even activities like bank statements has become such a commonplace thing to find in our emails, making it that much more important.

The number of coupons a user receives in their email inbox on a daily basis is incredible, really. And while we think we ignore the lot of them, the amount of people who do use emailed coupons for things like online shopping and food ordering is quite unbelievable. 57.4% of consumer claim they are more likely to buy a product from a retailer's site when the retailer emails them a discount code (Cue Connect, 2017).

With all of the premium and up-gradable accounts available to us nowadays, its hard to remember a time where there was ever just a platform that didn’t cost us a single cent to be able to use the platform in it’s entirety. But with email, you can absolutely do this.

Another thing to keep in mind with email is that is it 100 time less crowded than any social media site because it is your own personal space that you are free to organize how you please. Overall, less news feed posts and hashtags means more room for focusing on each individual email you receive!

So what does all of this mean? Basically, digital marketers have an amazing tool to be able to reach you—their potential and returning customers—that sits right in the palm of your hand at all times, and it’s essentially free. Relationships can be maintained by sending automated emails to customers for specific reasons, and sending out coupons for certain products to a customer that they were recently looking at will help to drive more sales. By email not being a live feed of constant posts and updates, there is less competition for email marketers to fight against when it comes to grabbing your attention.

So if there are so many benefits to digital marketers using email to connect better with their current and potential customers, how do they do it?

EMAIL MARKETING vs EMAIL AUTOMATION

There are two main tools than digital marketers can use to better reach their audiences via emails.

The first is called “Email Marketing”. This is really just an overall idea of the basic techniques you use to design, target and tailor your email campaigns to better reach the potential leads that are more likely to get on board. Designing the right campaign for the right customer is an essential part of email marketing, and one can easily do this by using analytics platforms like Google Analytics to get a better understanding of where their leads are coming from, what their actions were on your site, etc. With this information, a digital marketer can build a “buyer persona” of each certain group and generate email campaigns that will better meet each of those groups’ needs and interests.

The second tool, “Email Automation” is a tool that most users think of when they hear the phrase “email marketing”. However, these two are not at all the same thing. Marketing automation is a way that digital marketers can target and communicate with customers based on specific actions they’ve taken, but in more of a bulk and auto-generated way. These automation emails are general sayings, such as a “Happy Birthday” or “Welcome” message, triggered by certain actions on the site, such as entering your birthday into your account settings (and then it being your birthday of course) or creating an account.

By using these tools, digital marketers can reach specific segmented and targeted audiences that they otherwise might have reached before in a bulk email sent out to one big customer list.

BEST PRACTICES FOR EMAIL MARKETING AND AUTOMATION

One major thing to remember is that while sending an email or setting up email automation seems easy to do, there are certain do’s and don’ts that every email marketer should abide by. Here are some best practices a few major online marketing companies have said actually work when reeling in those new leads via email:

• Use emails with social media, rather than against them
• Pay attention to sign-up sources (where the customer came from before signing up for your service)
• Segment your audiences
• Show some personality
• Determine the frequency and goals of your emails
• Include clear, visible CTAs
• Make sure the design of your email is more attractive than the next

Here’s a couple examples of some companies that I’ve found have done a great job incorporating these best practices into their email marketing habits:

LINKEDIN:

While the folks over at LinkedIn are all about making online connections, they have also done a great job of making their email campaigns much more personable. In this email campaign, you can see that the person supposedly sending the message has a photo next to their name. Not only does this make the email more realistic—it makes the person reading it feel like they actually know who sent it! Their “double-yet-different” CTA buttons were also a great touch because it offers receivers of the email a couple chances to get involved with LinkedIn.

GRAMMARLY:

This campaign also includes a couple different techniques that are sure to help their campaigns take off. The first is the cartoon drawing and the phrase “Like a Boss”. This really draws in potential customers of a certain audience, specifically those who know and use these kinds of phrases and like these kinds of cartoon drawings, giving Grammarly that much more personality. The other technique used is the snapshot of the tweet stuck below the ad. By including this tweet, they are not only sharing great and interesting customer feedback, but also telling the readers of this email that they use twitter too. Connecting social media with email marketing is never a bad thing because it will help potential leads get a better idea of who and what your company is, from all different aspects, and social media presences is arguably one of the more important ones!

EMAIL AUTOMATION IN ACTION

A great example of an email automation company is MailChimp. This company is essentially a platform that businesses can use to create and maintain email automation for their own business. The business launched an Email Marketing Field Guide awhile back, and I highly recommend checking it out!

At first, MailChimp was simply an email service that helped smaller businesses connect better with their clients through strategic email writing. But as soon as co-founders Ben Chestnut and Dan Karzius discovered that incorporating social media into email marketing was a niche that had not yet been tapped, they decided to take it over.

Looking at the change in software over time, its probably safe to assume that MailChimp decided to make the leap from general email marketing to email automation in order to better incorporate more trackable metrics on the recipients of their clients' email lists. By giving businesses the ability to track where and how their customers were coming to their website and what they did while visiting, it allowed these businesses to retrieve more valuable information on their customers' habits that they could then optimize through automation emailing. Not a bad start for what was originally a side project for a web design consultation business!

So friends, tell me what you think about this whole idea of email making a comeback! Er—perhaps not a comeback, but rather making an impact in a whole new way, yet again.

For more best practices within email marketing, check out this 2018 A-Z Email Marketing Guide from SendGrid, another email service platform.

Thanks for reading!

Cheers,

Aubrey McNeil