From the perfectly timed follow-up email to the maddeningly unnecessary daily reminder, sending automated emails can be paradise or purgatory. Think about it. For every wonderfully executed welcome series you receive, you get twice as many cringe-worthy marketing emails.
These four tips will help you create automated email campaigns that produce results.
1. Monitor campaign performance and adjust accordingly
Some of the biggest email blunders happen when a marketer takes the time to create an automation campaign series, sets the parameters and turns on the workflow just to walk away and forget about it. When this happens, there are no evaluations of effectiveness, no repositioning, and no opportunities for adjustments. Checking (and rechecking) the health of your automated campaign is one of the biggest favors you can do for yourself and your subscribers. It’s necessary to maximize the value of your email marketing tool.
2. Maintain front and back end quality assurance
Many of the same reasons you don’t want to walk away and forget about campaigns hold true for quality assurance. Reviewing your campaign periodically can help you avoid mishaps caused by out-of-date messaging, broken links, and faulty triggers. You don’t want to send automated emails that hurt your content marketing.
Any one of these problems within your emails can be frustrating to your readers and could even lead to unsubscribes. It’s also important to make sure that if you’ve got multiple drip campaigns running, they’re not overlapping each other. Otherwise, your subscribers could be buried in an inbox avalanche.
3. Forbid the no-reply address
Sending an email campaign from a “no-reply” email address does more harm than conveying that you do not care about your recipients’ responses to your content. It can hurt your delivery rates and push readers to mark your emails as spam. The no-reply simultaneously increases the difficulty of getting in contact with your business and decreases the personalization value of your email. Always use a real email address when setting up an automated (or any email) campaign so your customers can connect with you and see that you value what they have to say.
4. Empathize with your subscribers
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What offers would you like to receive in a follow-up email? How long after purchase or download would a survey be impactful for you as a consumer? Would a daily, weekly, or monthly event reminder be most effective in your opinion? These are all important questions to ask yourself prior to deciding for your consumer. Think about what you like to see in your own inbox and use customer data to make content and parameters relative to your subscribers.
Email marketing automation in campaigns can be valuable for both the sender and recipient when executed correctly. Use these four tips and prepare yourself for an optimized email automation program!
