How to Use Email Automation to Transform Leads to Sales
Accumulating leads mean gathering potential customers. But how do you even begin transforming them? Cold calling? SMS marketing? Email marketing? In this quick guide, we’ll show you how email automation can elevate your business goals while reducing unnecessary workload.
What are Email Automations?
Email Automations are pre-written emails that are modified to have personalised content and scheduled deliveries for easier email marketing.
This strategy has multiple advantages for both customer acquisition goals and business workflow. Oftentimes, these emails are geared towards specific campaigns, whether it’s reaching out to cold audiences, enticing existing customers to purchase again, pulling prospects who abandoned their cart to purchase, or expanding your brand’s community.
In the modern world, people have become jaded to generic marketing promotions and have opted to purchase from those who act more human. Email automations do this by calling their name up front in the subject line for example. This small addition to an email makes it even more powerful in turning a seemingly uninterested consumer into a lifelong customer.
Why Should I use Email Automations?
There are dozens of benefits that root from email automation. Some may be connected to your business goals, some for the brand’s credibility and some for your team. Overall, automating your emails will not only make conversions much easier to acquire, but also providing an avenue to leverage the ever-growing email marketing strategy to its full potential.
1. It works for itself
Just by the name, Email “Automation”, you can already tell that by fully setting up the workflow, the only thing you need to work on is content and schedule management. This strategy works through trigger events, when something happens, like a customer abandoned their cart, you can automatically send them a message after a set amount of hours or days. This is extremely convenient when compared to manually emailing your audience.
2. It Warms up your leads
While it may not be a sure-fire way to convert leads into purchasing customers. Email automation is still great for letting them know about your brand. A prospect may not purchase after 3 automated emails, but by reading your content, they get to know the brand’s story, values, position in the industry and much more.
3. It personalises your messages
As I mentioned a while ago. Email automation is king when it comes to personalising a prospect or customer’s experience. By being super targeted with your words and codes, you can attract customers in a way that feels like a referral or recommendation.
4. It saves time
The power of email automation lies in its ability to salvage your and your team’s time. Efforts drawn to manually writing personalised emails could have been used for other important business matters. Although setting every trigger, workflow and content do initially waste a few hours a day, this can easily be remedied by hiring a marketing automation agency. They often provide quality automations, quick deliveries and cheap pricing.
5. It’s cost-effective
Despite having to pay a relatively small monthly fee for email automation software, you are still getting a bang for your buck. The cost of automating your emails is wildly more affordable than hiring 1-2 in-house email marketers to do the same amount of work. And even though you decided not to hire more employees, your current team’s hours are better suited for other relevant tasks rather than wasting time on every email promotion.
What To Watch Out For When Automating Emails?
Although email automation is great for generating sales, it can still go wrong if done without proper marketing strategies.
Here is a neat list of everything you should consider before completing your automation:
1. Don’t sell too hard
Talk like their friend, who’s also professional and authentic. Don’t become a 1980s marketer who shoves deals into people’s faces. Speaking like a human is the best way to turn a stranger into a lifetime customer.
2. Don’t forget about mobile
It’s much easier to write emails on a desktop or laptop. That’s why sometimes we forget that most consumers actually use their mobile phones to read them. Adestra says if an email is not displayed correctly on mobile, 75% of them will ignore your message entirely.
3. Not including a CTA
There can be times wherein we would write emails to increase our brand’s credibility. We show them our values and achievement but, more often than not, forget about the call to action. Every email should include this to entice the audience to either browse your selection or purchase a product/service.
4. Writing a weak subject line
Even in the marketing world, a lot of new (and even experienced) advertisers belittle the power of a subject line. Not knowing that, it’s actually the most important piece of text in your whole email. Remember, a well-crafted email designed to convert 80% of prospects to customers will not even be read when paired with a bad subject line.
5. Wrongly Scheduling emails
Automatic email delivery is great, but only if you time it right. Hubspot’s analytics shows us that sending emails at 11am yields the highest open rates. While this may be true, some might prefer sending them at 7-9am when people are still teary-eyed from their night’s sleep.
Email Automation Statistics for Nerds
For those who enjoy a good list of statistics, here is a list of email automation data gathered from reputable sources:
- Automated emails generate 70.5% better open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than generic newsletters
- 82% of B2B and B2C companies in total use email automation tools
- Business owners receive 250% more replies by using automated follow-ups and retargeting
- 80% of digital marketers would rather forego social media marketing than email marketing with automation
- Warming up leads with automated emails generate at least 10% more revenue for the business
- Automatic-responding emails have a 73% higher open rate compared to generic emails
Final Thoughts
Email automation is the bread and butter of an effective business that plans on converting leads into sales at a much faster pace. By using personalised messages, proven statistics and a well-timed schedule execution, you can capitalise on the human connection your relevant leads need and turn them into paying customers.
Aside from transitioning leads to sales, email automation can also be used for brand awareness, brand credibility building, retargeting, building a community, enticing first-time buyers to become recurring customers and much more. All within the scope of the ever-familiar promotional strategy, email marketing… but smarter!
Email automation is both time-saving and cost-effective. But if in the event that your team is not well-versed in the technological field, a professional email marketing agency such as Contevo would be a perfect alternative. As a digital marketing agency for 15 years, the brand has been catering to small and large businesses all over Australia.
