Here at our office hours in Durham, NC a question we are commonly asked is “How can I automate my email marketing?” Email marketing is one of the most important things a company can do but it can seem like a daunting task for a startup or small law firms or even local restaurants. Keeping your name in front of your customers and clients is an invaluable tool that email marketing excels at. Where email marketing can really take the next step for a small business is automating the process, giving you the best of both worlds! Let dive in and learn more about automation for email marketing.

What Exactly Is  Automation For Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a pretty broad term, but for the purposes of this article we are going to define it as:

Under this definition anything a company would do for promotion, client lead generation or even a monthly newsletter would qualify. One of the most common ways to utilize email marketing is thanking someone for joining your mailing list or creating an account on your website. You would not want to send an individual email to everyone who creates an account on your website, that would be an inefficient use of your time! The best thing for this would be to create an automated email that triggers every time an email is added to your “new account” list thanking them for joining.

This is where automation really shines, all you have to do is write the “thank you” email once then set the logic or trigger you want it to follow and done! You now have your first automated email marketing campaign running 24/7 without ever missing out on an important opportunity to connect with an interested client or consumer. This is a great way to grow your business without spending extra time trying to contact everyone who creates an account or reaches out to you for a quote. While this is a very basic form of email automation, the mechanisms that are built into many of the common email marketing services can be quite complex. However, they all run on basically the same type of basic logic:

 
or as we like to call it “If This, Than That.” Almost every business, organization or entity has these processes already in place without realizing it. For example you may have a policy in your company that when a user submits a quote request through your website a customer representative from your company would reply asking follow up questions. These emails tend to be very similar and are an example of something that could be automated to speed up your business processes! Don’t be afraid to get creative with them, the more genuine and unique an email seems the more likely a user is to respond.

What Services Can I Use  For Automation?

There are an abundance of email marketing services that are currently in the marketplace which allow for automation. As of late, the MailChimp Automation has become free to use and thus we recommend starting out with Mailchimp if you are a newcomer to email marketing. The service also comes with a ton of helpful guides to get you through the nitty gritty aspects of creating and monitoring your automated email marketing campaigns. Learn more about MailChimp’s automated email marketing service here.

There are however plenty of alternatives out there as well to MailChimp. Other leaders in the space include:

• Constant Contact
• AWeber
• Campaign Monitor
• Get Response

All of these have various pros and cons associated with them but we would recommend trying them out before you decide on an email marketing platform to invest in. Almost all of these have costs associated with them but can be used to fit any size marketing budget.

What Kind Of Campaigns Should I Run?

This is where the magic happens. Setting up unique campaigns to stay in front of your customers or prospective clients is the goal here. While many services listed above have basic or “stock” campaigns to choose from, creating one that’s tailored to your business is always the best choice. Only you know the best way to market your business and drawing on past experiences that have garnered successes is what you should focus on. Here are 3 ideas to help get you started!

People want content. Our online society has an unquenchable thirst for good, informative content that both educates users and promotes your products or services. A great way to automate this is to have a trigger that will send out any blog posted into a specific category like “Featured” to a specific list! This will ensure that your most valuable content that you spent hours creating makes it in front of the users who you stand the most to gain by seeing it. Other examples for this include: sending blogs tagged with “real estate” to a list made up of only real estate professionals or blogs tagged with “technology” to people who work in the tech fields!

Does Email Marketing Automation  Work For E-Commerce Sites Too?

Yes! Email marketing automation is arguably strongest for e-commerce platforms for one reason alone, cart abandonment reminders. There is nothing more frustrating to an online e-commerce platform that sells products online than seeing forgotten carts full of items. This used to be a tool only available to the top players in the online sales relm like Amazon and Ebay but today, anyone can take advantage of these tools. By setting an automated reminder email to customers who have left their cart full for more than 24 hours, you stand a much better chance of attracting that consumer back to your website than that user coming back on their own. This can also be a complex automated “recipe” that can show in the email what items are in the cart or even entice them with a price drop of an item!

Why Choose Oak City Technology

At Oak City Technology we specialize in building these lead generating websites, that draw in the users who are looking for you and convert them to leads, through a simple user experience and answering the users’ basic questions. We pride ourselves in generating business for our clients and making sure you stand out against your local competition. Contact us today to get started generating leads and clients for your firm’s website!