You Know About Email, But What About Email Automation?

There are approximately 3.7 billion email users in the world today. That's A LOT! Though many people may seem like email isn't important, it actually is quite vital to businesses. Emails provide a way to reach out to potential customers that could be at different stages of their decision journey. How businesses decide to take control of that situation, sets the tone for the relationship they will have with their customers.

Email Best Practices

Most of us having been writing emails for a majority of our life, and even I like to think that I have it down. But there's actually a lot more to be done when businesses reach out to their customers. MailChimp gives some great steps to engage potential customers the best.

Know Your Audience: If a business isn't sure about what their target market is looking for, their emails are likely to end up in the trash or worse...SPAM!

Signup Sources: Find out where customers were signing up to better attract them and optimize strategies.

Segments and Groups: The cool thing about email is that contacts can be put into groups, and this is super helpful for businesses when they want to reach out to specific segments in their target market.

Decide what you will write: There can be many things that go into the content of an email, but looking at the business goals, what is the most effective for you?

• Upcoming Events
• Recaps and Photos from Events
• Popular posts from Social Media
• News Coverage
• Details about new or featured products
• Holiday Shopping Guides

A company that I particularly enjoy seeing emails from is Nordstrom. Their emails are seamless and get straight to the point. In addition, they attach their promos at the top of the email so that customers know exactly what they're trying to get you to do.

Email Automation in Action

Email Automation works more towards larger audiences and then focuses on specializing in particular relationships with groups of customers. Automation helps with increasing ROI by not having to spend so much time crafting an email for a certain amount of people. Instead, these are emails that businesses can create whatever kind of relevant content and send to their customers. With email automation platforms like MailChimp, Marketo, Sharpspring, or Pardot, businesses only need to figure out what they want in their emails and everything else is taken care of.

Some of the cool features of email automation include being able to track all the opens and clicks. This is like any platform that offers marketing services, except you can see which emails are doing the best with your customers. The already designed templates make it easier for businesses to create unique layouts that catch the reader's eye. If businesses have a specific goal in mind, its best to make sure those are clear in their email automation.

As I've said in my past posts, I work in the Ethnic Student Center (ESC) at Western Washington University. Part of my job as the assistant marketing coordinator includes sending out a monthly email to club leaders, members, and community. Using MailChimp has been very advantageous to me because I've been able to make groups in which I only reach out to club leaders or all ESC club members. I can also track how many people are opening or interacting with the site and this is very beneficial to know what I should and shouldn't include in the next email. Something else that I really enjoy from MailChimp is the ability to be mobile friendly with newsletters. The designed templates help make the mobile version look a lot more seamless.