Are you staying in touch with your customers? Or are they dormant in your database?
While email marketing remains the most effective digital marketing tactic, it continues to evolve in order to meet your customers’ expectations.
Traditional email will always be an important piece in the puzzle; however, the smartest brands are now taking advantage of personalized automated email campaigns.
Not only are automated email campaigns personalized, but they’re also timely and more relevant to the customer. Automation delivers email to the right person, at the right time, and with the right message. As a result, more emails are opened and clicked, ultimately generating a higher ROI for your company. Companies that adopt automated email campaigns usually increase sales by 14.5%.
If you’re also looking to increase your customer lifetime value, then keep reading! We’re going to look at how automated email campaigns can help you achieve this.
What is an automated email campaign?
Email marketing automation is based on workflows that are set up to automatically send an email based on the action of a customer. Like subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing a product, or clicking a CTA.
Where traditional emails are sent manually and in mass quantity without personalization, automated email campaigns are triggered by the individual and include content based solely on their interactions with you online.
Why are automatic email campaigns important?
Automated emails are useful for marketers because it eliminates the time-consuming task of developing, sending, and managing email workflows. For example, let’s say you want to send an email to someone who recently subscribed to your newsletter.
The ideal next course of action will be to initiate a relationship with them. Your first email to them may include loads of information about your company, products, resources, and maybe even a discount code.
Imagine how extremely time-consuming it’d be to manually develop and send an email to every person that continued to subscribe to your newsletter. Eventually, you might get tired and stop altogether.
This is where automated email campaigns come into play. Once you set up the workflow, and customers take action on your triggers, the email automatically sends without any additional effort on your part.
Still on the fence? These automated email statistics don’t lie:
How to create an automated email campaign in Campaign Monitor
With Campaign Monitor’s journey designer, you’re able to deliver relevant emails at key moments to keep your brand top of mind with customers.
We lay everything out for you so you can skillfully design campaigns with a “set it and forget it” strategy in place, allowing you to focus on other important things, like growing your brand.
First, navigate to the Automation section in your account and select Create a new journey. Then, name your journey, select a list to be sent to, and choose a trigger. Triggers include:
- Subscriber joins a list
- Subscriber enters a segment
- Subscriber exits a segment
- A date or anniversary
Source: Campaign Monitor
Journey steps
Once these fields are established, you can begin personalizing the journey by clicking the + button and adding journey steps. There are three steps to choose from: Delay, Email, and Condition.
- Delay: put a delay between emails in minutes, hours, days, weeks, and monthly increments. This helps to space out the sequence to avoid customers becoming too overwhelmed. It’s also important for condition-based journeys.
- Email: email steps define the actual content of each message within the journey. You have the option to send the email to everyone on your list or specific segments for a more hyper-personalized approach.
- Condition: based on defined rules, you have the option to split a journey into two paths. The subscribers who follow the rule will go one on path and the others on a separate journey. Rules can be created based on subscriber detail, custom fields, membership, campaign activity, or journey activity.
You have the option to add as many steps as you like—giving you the flexibility to create a personalized and relevant automated email campaign for every subscriber.
Source: Campaign Monitor
After all steps in the journey are complete, you can click Turn on journey to begin subscriber movement and reporting. If you want to edit or develop additional steps in the journey, you’ll need to turn it off.
Now that you understand how to build an email journey in Campaign Monitor, let’s take a look at the different campaign options you can develop.
4 automated email campaigns you need to create
Email automation is based on triggers and activity, so you have countless options, depending on your own creativity and brand needs. To kick things off for you, we’ve compiled four popular automated campaigns that’ll increase your customer’s lifetime value.
Welcome emails
A great way to introduce your brand value and product benefits to your new subscribers is a welcome email series. In fact, these emails have a 91.43% open rate and can boost revenue by 30%.
These new contacts have already shown interest in your brand and, therefore, are in a perfect position to build a relationship with.
You can welcome them to your email list, include a fun video or image to show personality, and even offer a promotion that piques their interests.
Source: Really Good Emails
Product-feedback emails
How do you really know what your customers want? Are you meeting their needs? Customer feedback is a valuable method for not only understanding your customers, but also opening your business to new industries and revenue. You can send an automated feedback email to capture these insights and better cater to your customers’ needs.
We recommend keeping this process simple. Develop a modest design, tell your customers why you need their input, and include a strong CTA.
Once you begin collecting responses, analyze the findings and implement the feedback to provide a better customer experience. Your customers will love your brand even more if they know you care about the information they provided.
Sources: Really Good Emails
Birthday emails
We all love it when someone remembers a special event like a birthday or anniversary. In fact, birthday emails generate 342% higher revenue and a 179% higher unique click rate than traditional messaging.
Send these emails on the customer’s birthday and include fun features like mystery savings, free gifts, coupons, or even a festive gif.
Remember, these emails are all about celebrating your customers and making them feel special, not promoting your newest product.
Source: Really Good Emails
Lead nurturing emails
Fifty percent of qualified leads aren’t ready to purchase. How can you efficiently move them along the buyer’s journey without spending too many resources on them?
If your contacts are organized within a CRM system, you have the ability to tag leads that need additional nurturing and integrate the contacts with Campaign Monitor.
From there, you can develop an automated campaign that educates these subscribers about the benefits your brand provides.
We recommend sending an email workflow that illustrates the following messaging:
- Educate readers on a current problem they’re facing
- Showcase how your product helps achieve your customer’s goals and lives
- Outline the process for transitioning from the customer’s current product to yours
- Provide an overview of the tools needed to achieve your customer’s goals—introduce your product here and explain why it’s better than the competition
- Demonstrate how other customers have used your product with a case study
- Suggest additional resources, like an eBook or blog, for the customer to learn more about your product
While you can use a variety of different emails, the goal is to provide value and a solution instead of a sales pitch. With this automated email campaign, you’re able to educate the lead into making a decision.
Source: Really Good Emails
Wrap up
Developing an automated email campaign not only helps increase the customer lifetime value, but it also takes time-consuming tasks off your plate.
With automation, you’re able to create campaigns that are highly relevant and personalized without having to manually send email after email to every new subscriber.
Depending on your brand’s offering, you’ll want to consider sending the following workflows:
- Welcome emails
- Product feedback emails
- Birthday emails
- Lead nurturing emails
However, you could also send appointment reminders, upcoming expirations, blog post promotions, event invitations, and more.
With automation, the sky is truly the limit in terms of the emails you can deliver to your subscribers.
The key is keeping their needs in mind to deliver a powerful customer experience that’ll boost your ROI.
Are you ready to start building your own automated email campaigns? Campaign Monitor has you covered. We provide what you need to develop, send, and analyze your email marketing strategy. Get started today.