Introduction

You have likely put quite a bit of time and effort into generating new leads. Made use of landing page campaigns and social media lead generation strategies – do you know what’s next?

You have to figure out how to nurture all of these leads in an effort to build your actual sales conversions. The bad news is, this isn’t always a simple task.

One option that you may have never thought to use is email marketing automation. This may not be a brand-new concept when it comes to nurturing your leads, but only about 35 percent of all companies currently have this type of system in place.  

While there are more than a few ways to begin nurturing your leads, email automation is one that should definitely be considered. Keep reading to learn what you should do to find success with these efforts.

1) Understanding Email Marketing Automation – What You Need to Know

Before diving into how to make the most of email automation to nurture your leads, you need to better understand what this is. Believe it or not, email marketing automation isn’t quite as impersonal as it may sound.

This is really an incredible way to build relationships – if you get it right. If you are able to deliver amazing content that is contingent on your lead’s behavior can help to drive even more traffic to your website, will help to increase overall social engagement, and eventually result in higher sales conversions.

While you can’t overlook the importance of email parsing, you can implement email automation to help enhance your efforts and make it more tempting for leads to convert.

Let's understand what the term 'automated email campaigns' means: Automated email campaigns are pre-set sequences of emails triggered by specific user actions or predetermined schedules. They streamline communication by delivering personalized messages based on subscriber behavior, such as welcome series, abandoned cart reminders, or post-purchase follow-ups. Automation enhances engagement, nurtures leads, and boosts conversions efficiently.

Are you curious to know exactly what email automation has to offer? It can help you remain in touch with your leads, help you develop a much deeper relationship thanks to more engaging content, streamline your entire marketing funnel, and ensure your business remains top of mind for customers.

While it takes skill to create a lead nurturing campaign via email that is optimized and automated, once you fully understand the basics, it won’t be very hard at all. Additionally, if you do everything right, you may be able to achieve (and perhaps even exceed) your expectations.

Some steps for you to take to use email automation to optimize your entire marketing funnel can be found here.

2) Plan Out Your Email Automation Campaign

If you want to create a successful email marketing automation campaign, you have to understand what outcome you are trying to achieve. Figure out your specific goals. Do you have any measurable outcomes? Who exactly are you trying to target?

Some of the goals you may have are to nurture the trust that your new leads have when progressing through your business’s marketing funnel. Some of the other goals include creating ongoing engagement with your customers to help develop a stream of repeat buyers; increase the levels of engagement through your social sites; drive more traffic to your actual site; to build more brand awareness through content and education; and to convert your free trial customers into real, paying customers.

Some steps that you can use to plan out this campaign include:

a) Make a List of Your Objectives

This will help you prove how effective your automation campaigns really are. Be sure to be as specific as possible. When setting your OKRs (objectives and key results), ask yourself: Are they realistic? What are our timeframes? Are they aligned with my business goals?

b) Determine Who Your Prospects Are

It’s important to create a list of demographics, criteria, and online behavior for the past interactions with your business. Figure out if your target is a latent lead or a new lead and if they are actively engaging with you on your social media sites.

When you take the time to get to know your customers, then you will be set to create an effective and targeted campaign. When you are able to get to know your clients, then you can also get more conversions.

Email marketing automation strategy

3) Segment Your Email Marketing Funnels

Once you get to know your prospects, you need to keep in mind that not all of them are going to care about the same things. This means that you can’t send them all the exact same messages.

With segmentation this is a great solution. This process allows you to make groups of your larger email list into various categories depending on the information that you have taken the time to verify about the contacts you have. Keep in mind, a great way to make sure you have legitimate contacts is by using email verification tools.

The fact is, segmentation is the main reason that email marketing can be so powerful.

When you use email, you have a ton of information that you can utilize to get a better understanding for your audience. With this you can easily track who is opening your messages what links they actually click on and where they are located in the world. Other information you can gather includes demographics, overall purchase history, the number of visits to your website and the list continues.

You can use all of these factors to help create a segment. By speaking to a smaller group of people you will be able to specifically address their problems.

4) Create a Valuable Message Full of Personality

Why would anyone want to read an email from you? While you may have some amazing things to offer or be able to solve a problem your audience has, they are never going to know this if they don’t take the time to look at the email.

There are people who are interested in what you have to say. After all, they want to know more about the brands that they follow. When they opt-in for emails, most new contacts are very likely to read the first email that you send.

But you have to keep them reading and engaged.

When you begin creating your email marketing funnel, it isn’t just enough for those you are targeting to actually need what it is you have to offer. It also won’t be enough to go through all the features and the benefits you provide at the same time.

After all, that’s completely boring. You have to do much more than just show off your product. You have to take steps to make it sell. If you want to do that, then you have to infuse all of your emails with personality and value.

5) Create a Persuasive CTA

After you have created your message that is full of value and personality, you have to focus on the call to action (CTA). This is your moment to really make a statement and this is the moment that your marketing funnel is always working toward.

When you get close to the end of your email marketing funnel, then you need to create some type of persuasive CTA. To do this, determine what the main offer of your funnel actually is. What’s the goal that you are looking to achieve.

Remember, this is the very last part of your email that your prospects are going to see; however, it could be the first thing that you create. When you reach the conclusion of your funnel, then there are two things that you need. One is a CTA that asks your prospects to help achieve the goal you have and two is persuasive design and copy that can sell the CTA you have created.

6) Landing Page Development

It’s important that the landing pages you ultimately create are consistent with the email messages you are sending out. Having cohesive images and messaging is going to help to increase your overall conversion rates.

If you plan to use a specific visual in the CTA of your email, then you need to make sure that people visiting your website see that same image above the fold on the landing page. Also, figure out the number of landing pages that are needed and then start to develop them.

There’s the option to use a landing page template, which makes everything easier, but this is something that is up to you. The key is to create landing pages that have the conversion principles and fundamentals in mind.

When you start to create your landing pages, you need to figure out how many you make, make sure they are consistent with the email messages you are sending, and use templates to make it easier.

For eCommerce stores, tools like Tagalys can be used to create instant Landing Pages and they can be optimized to improve conversion. These Landing pages can be custom sequenced as well to match your business requirements. Or if you would like custom designed landing pages, using a flat rate design subscription service like Delesign can help you with web mockups and much more.

Email strategy execution

7) Use A/B Testing, Tracking, and Be Sure to Measure Your Results

It’s important that you take the time to test your emails so that you create a completely optimized and automated email marketing campaign. Make sure that you are testing your emails at each stage of the campaign that you are creating.

You need to provide A/B testing for all parts of your emails including the subject lines, the content in your email, the CTA, the email trigger, the day and time you send, and your frequency.

You need to make sure that you measure your results using a tracking system so you can analyze the conversion rates over a set period of time.

You can create UTM campaign codes, or you can measure with a specific analytics system – including Google analytics. If you're looking for more options, Finteza is a great alternative of Google analytics that allows to build and measure Sales Funnels.

Be sure to always track the results for KPIs – Key Performance Indicators – including the delivery rate, open rate, sales conversion, unsubscribe rate, view rate, and the click-through rate. When you measure the metrics and you analyze the results, it will help to optimize the conversion rates moving forward. You can use the research to continue improving the profits you earn.

There are several steps that you can take to test and to measure the results you achieve. This includes A/B testing several variables in all of your automated email marketing campaigns, and be sure to measure and analyze the results so that you can optimize the conversion rates to help you continue to improve.

8) Optimize and Repeat

One of the biggest benefits offered by an email campaign is that they are easy to adjust. They aren’t too expensive to continue to repeat. In fact, you can test the campaigns you have created on an ongoing basis.

Some of the ways that you can optimize your email is by looking at the frequency, the day and time, the CTA, the “from line,” the body copy and subject line, and much more.

Another bonus is that you will be able to change each of the elements, even if your campaign has gone live. When the emails have been optimized, then you will be able to let them continue running, all on their own. This will help you save you, as well as your sales team quite a bit of time regarding nurturing effort. When it comes to automation, that’s the whole point.

You should make sure that you monitor the results that you are getting on either a weekly or even a monthly basis. When you do this, you can watch as your sales conversions get bigger and bigger.

9) Don’t Give Up

Remember, when it comes to your email automation efforts, there are more than a few emails that you can send. Just because the prospect did not take action based on the first email that you sent, doesn’t mean they are a complete lost cause.

The key is to ensure that you continue nurturing the lead. This is what automation is all about. You can set up to send emails based on when someone doesn’t convert, or if they leave something in the cart, or for a myriad of other reasons.

The Takeaway

You have to work to continue nurturing your leads by using extremely optimized email automation campaigns. Be sure that you keep monitoring the results that you achieve, that you adjust or tweak your messages as needed, and to convert the leads into more website traffic, more sales, and higher levels of social engagement.

By using the tips and methods here, you can achieve the goals you have for your marketing funnel and meet the goals you have for your email marketing automation campaign. Using a personal contact method like a person’s email can help you increase the success of this marketing campaign.

FAQs


1). What is email marketing automation?
Email marketing automation is a strategy in which email marketers send triggered or timed emails to subscriber lists. Marketers can send personalized messages to both prospects and customers based on a schedule, or when a specific condition is met.

2). What are the benefits of email marketing automation?
The main benefits of email marketing automation are as follows:

  • Automated personalization which helps increase transactions.
  • Send more relevant emails through segmentation.
  • Save time and reduce cost by sending automated transactional emails.
  • Send scheduled emails which sync with the customers’ purchase cycle, like 7 days after a purchase action/event.
  • Nurture leads with an automated drip campaign.

3). What is an email marketing automation strategy?
An email marketing automation strategy can be defined as a set of procedures that an email marketer follows through automated tasks to achieve the intended marketing goals through email marketing.