Did you know that email marketing automation strategies are 40% more effective than those made on social networks, such as Twitter or Facebook? Email is a very powerful marketing tool, and with the right planning and strategy, you can help convert many users into customers.
In this article, then, I intend to analyze what are the benefits of email marketing automation and what things should be avoided in order to achieve a successful campaign. Let us begin!
In this article, we have explained What is Marketing Automation? and explained the Real Tools and Examples for Marketing Automation. Also, you can read the 10 Tips and Good Practices of Email Marketing for Companies.
Email marketing automation: what is it?
Email marketing automation refers to the use of specialized software to send emails automatically.
Some companies leave email marketing campaigns away from the main strategy thinking that other methods, such as investment in social networks, may be more effective. Nothing is further from reality: thinking of an email marketing strategy is more than positive, if not essential.
When we talk about these types of campaigns and, especially, about automated ones, we move on to a field where not only the conversion matters but also the saving of resources involved in having certain tasks scheduled automatically.
In this way, marketing teams can devote their efforts to more creative tasks that revert to greater benefits instead of investing time in repetitive tasks. It makes sense, don’t you think?
Benefits of email marketing automation
As we say, email marketing automation campaigns achieve greater profitability by saving on operational time. But this is not the only benefit of this marketing action. There is more, and I’ll tell you next!
- It is 100% effective and is an action that clearly reduces costs.
- It allows you to have greater control over all the marketing actions you are going to carry out.
- It allows the detection of the users most interested in your product or service and, therefore, firm candidates to receive a more direct commercial offer.
- It is a fully configurable option.
- It allows you to have a conversation with your subscribers so that the contact is maintained from the beginning until you finally buy it.
Lead scoring and lead nurturing: an effective strategy
There are several email marketing automation strategies, but in this article, I will focus on analyzing lead scoring and lead nurturing. Take note!
Lead scoring
Lead scoring is a technique to give a rating to your leads database. This classification, score or “scoring” will depend on how close your buyer person is to your company, taking into account their interactions with it, as well as the point of the purchase process in which it is located.
Qualifying leads you to achieve:
- Create personalized and more effective messages.
- Facilitate marketing and sales strategies to create more concrete actions.
- Know the degree of interest of your audience in your service or product.
- Fit which leads are closest or far to the purchase and create strategies based on it.
- Create better loyalty strategies.
Lead nurturing
Once we have classified all leads (with lead scoring), we can implement a lead nurturing strategy. The objective of this strategy is to educate, capture and retain customers to achieve a previously defined objective (which is usually the sale or consumption of a service).
With lead nurturing, we can choose certain interactions that the company will make with the user in a fully automated way. Thanks to practices such as retargeting, chatbots or smart CTAs, we can carry out a lead nurturing strategy after scoring.
We believe that the key strategy is to perform lead scoring first and then lead nurturing. In this way, the most direct actions, such as sending an email offering a certain product, are carried out based on the knowledge of what type of customer or potential customer that email is addressed to.
5 mistakes you should avoid in email marketing automation
Once the concepts of email marketing automation, lead scoring and lead nurturing have been introduced, I would like to talk about the mistakes you should avoid when automating this type of action.
1# Skip the analysis and scoring phase
An error that yes or yes you should avoid is that of not analyzing and segmenting your database well. If you send all the same email chains to all users (without scoring) you will lose many opportunities.
For example: suppose you are addressing a user who is already very advanced in the sales process (he has already read many articles and pages from your website, he has downloaded many of your downloadables, he has opened many of your emails, he knows you … ).
If we have not segmented our database well based on this, we may begin to impact you with overly educational emails about content that you may have already read. That would be bad nutrition and you could lose it.
In this case, the right thing would be to have these users well-identified and send them appropriate email series for the phase they are in. In the example, you would send, more specifically, content with a more commercial tone.
2# Do not customize the content
Another of the most common mistakes is not to personalize the content of the emails. If the database is well segmented (with a good lead scoring) and we know user data, we can customize the content to be as close as possible to your needs, since each user is different.
And we are not only referring to him by name, but also to contacts in which we follow the steps he has taken on the web to offer help, for example, or an email.
3# Email series linked to nurturing
Another of the typical mistakes of email marketing automation and scoring and nurturing strategies is that in email series there is no means to advance the user through nutrition.
For example, suppose we already have scoring and we have already segmented users according to their level of qualification. On the other hand, we have nurturing with three different nutrition chains depending on the phase in which the user is: emails, education, brandings, and others with a more commercial tone.
The criteria for a user to move from the nutrition chain 1 to 2 is that they have read a minimum of 3 blog articles, that they have opened at least 2 emails and that they have downloaded 2 ebooks. If in the emails of nutrition 1 we do not invite users to read articles or download ebooks, it will hardly happen one day to the next nutrition.
4# Not creating enough impacts for a sale to take place
The amount of impacts necessary to close a sale is different for each business. Not adjusting your email chain (that is, making it too short) can make you lose business opportunities. You stop impacting records that, perhaps, if you had impacted them once more, would have requested information.
To succeed, the key is to understand that each lead has a different maturation phase and we must adapt to it to send the appropriate content, sometimes just and necessary.
5# Do not analyze or adjust your campaigns
Lead nurturing must be something dynamic, which adapts to the context and the database. It is very important to periodically analyze the results to think about improvements that increase the results. Remember it!
Analyze aspects such as the number of emails sent, opened, clicked … is vital to adjust the following campaigns and get better results in the next shipments.
After this brief introduction about email marketing automation, you will also have concluded that it is a vital part of the marketing strategy to be able to advance your database through the funnel and, little by little, make it reach the purchase.
But for your strategy to succeed, it is very important to have a good tactic of defined and well-segmented scoring, some email chains adapted and customized to each type of user and constantly analyze the strategy to make improvements.
I would love to know what your scoring and nurturing strategy is, and what are your results, can you tell me your experience in the comments?
