A Guide to Email Automation for Beginners !!!

If you’re a marketer, you’ve probably heard of email marketing automation. Email marketing automation is an essential part of building a profitable email list for any online business. However, creating, planning, and sending out emails takes up a lot of time, especially as your campaigns grow more sophisticated. The solution is to automate at least one aspect of that process.

In this article, we’ll try to cover what email automation is and when it makes sense to use it. Then we’ll go over three simple steps to get you started. Let’s get to work!

What is email automation?

Automated email, also referred to as triggered email or behavior-driven email, is any message automatically sent from your email service provider (ESP) in direct response to an individual user’s specific actions made (or not made) on your website or web app.

Automated email allows you to send real-time, one-to-one messages that strengthen customer engagement, retention, and loyalty.

Email automation provides benefits from both transactional and marketing email because it allows you to follow up with individual customers automatically, like transactional email, but also allows for more robust messaging opportunities like you get from the marketing email.

Automated email achieves the best of both worlds between timing and content to provide marketers with messages that have:

Relevance

Engaging content

Loyalty

Brand building

Revenue

Retention

Action

Why use email automation?

Despite the value of automated email, many companies haven’t started implementing it. The good news is that it’s easy to get a smart, focused automated email campaign started and begin driving meaningful results.

Here are some examples of automated email messages you could be sending:

– Welcome series emails to help new customers begin using your product/ A customer makes a purchase.

– Nurture series emails that help guide customers to the next step in the sales funnel.

– Happy birthday or anniversary emails to help increase customer loyalty.

– User verification emails to make sure new users are legitimate.

– Someone hasn’t opened your emails for a while.

– A subscription is due to be renewed soon.

How to Get Started With Email Automation

Before you can automate your emails, you’ll need to sign up for an EMP(Email Marketing Program). Let’s take a look at how that process works.

Step 1: Sign Up for an Email Marketing Tool

Most of the EMPs don’t offer automation functionality with their free plans. This means that many users who are just starting to build their email lists miss out on a powerful feature.

Let’s consider MailChimp, which does offer automation functionality for its free users:

The sign-up process will vary a bit depending on which EMP you use, but it should be straightforward. If you want to follow along, go ahead and sign up for an account now, and then move to the next step.

Step 2: Create a New Campaign and Select a Trigger

Once you have a MailChimp account, you can access your dashboard. It includes an option to create a new email campaign right at the top

• next screen, you can choose what type of campaign to set up. Let’s go with Email:

You’ll choose what kind of email campaign you want to design. The options include regular and plain-text emails, as well as automated messages. We’ll go with the latter option.

Next, MailChimp enables you to configure what you want your campaign’s trigger to be. We’ll select the Welcome email option, in order to demonstrate how automation works. Finally, select an internal name for the campaign, and choose which list of subscribers you want to target

Step 3: Put Your First Automated Message

Now, you’re ready to start working on your welcome email. You can configure from which account the email will be sent, and give it a subject.

There’s also an option that enables you to further customize your email’s trigger. To access it, select Edit Delay And Recipients.

Some websites use a one-day delay, so as not to overwhelm new users too quickly. Feel free to tinker with your email’s delay. When you’re ready, save your changes and click on the Edit Design button

The MailChimp editor is very user-friendly. You can drag around elements, click on them to add customizations, and include new elements from the menu to the right.

When you’re ready, hit the Save and Continue button at the bottom of the screen. Then, return to your email campaign’s overview page. From there, you can ‘turn on the campaign by selecting the Start Sending option.

Now every time someone joins your email list, they’ll receive the message you just designed. It’s a small touch, but considering that this is your first step in the world of email automation, it’s not a bad start.

Conclusion

The sooner you get started with email marketing, the easier it will be to build a sizable list of subscribers. Then, you can use that list to send out all kinds of automated messages, keeping your audience up to date and informed.

Do you have any questions about email automation? Please use them in the comments section below!!!

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