SaaS product marketers must regularly engage with their users to streamline their journeys. Hence, emails play a vital role in communicating with users. But not all users engage the same way with the emails you send. They may be at different stages of their journey and need more time to get comfortable with your product before fully committing to it.
Also, some customers might be well advanced in using your product but need further guidance on how to use its advanced features. Thus, gauging customer behavior and crafting compelling emails is the cornerstone of email automation.
Email automation has been taking over the email marketing industry and is making the lives of marketers easy. Now, you can avoid manually sending emails to users keeping in mind their user journey. Instead, you can create email workflows that send the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
In this blog, you will learn how to use email automation effectively and how it can increase conversions and make your brand a hit with its users.
Email automation is a process where you send targeted emails through a self-operating system to your users based on their engagement with your product.
Marketing automation is a revolutionary concept that allows marketers to focus on delivering just what the user requires. The combination of analytics and automated emails helps increase conversions and also helps deliver quality content to the user.
Apart from automating email marketing, email automation has other benefits as well. Here are five benefits of email automation:
You have all heard the phrase “time is money.” That is, in the context of email automation, is true. 76% of marketers see a positive ROI within a year after implementing email automation, and 44% see a positive ROI within six months.
Thus, the time you save can be used to pursue other important tasks instead of writing and sending emails.
Email marketing automation truly comes in handy during lead nurturing. It is suggested that it requires 4 or more follow-up emails just to turn a prospect into a customer.
Hence, automated emails can ensure the smooth running of your email campaigns.
Personalization is all the rage these days. With careful analysis of the incoming user data, you can craft conversion-worthy emails. With email automation in place, you can send the right message at just the right moment to drive the conversion rate.
To put things into perspective, automated emails enjoy a higher open rate of 70.5% and a click-through rate of 152% as compared to generic emails. Hence, don’t shy away from using users’ data to provide them with a personalized user experience.
Email automation also improves the marketing productivity of a company by eliminating tasks that are repetitively performed. 36% of marketers use marketing automation to lessen repetitive tasks.
With increased marketing productivity, you can focus on getting more done in less time and ensure your brand grows steadily. According to a survey of information workers, 59% said that the time saved by automating the repetitive tasks of their job could help them save 6 hours per week.
Retaining existing users is considerably cheaper than onboarding new users. And email automation can be used to improve retention rates. By making email automation a part of your email marketing campaigns, you can reach out to soon-to-be churned users in time and lure them back with personalized offers.
Sending out emails manually to your users can be limited by your staff. Hence, it can limit your potential to reach out when your email list doubles or even triples.
Automated email marketing allows you to scale your marketing strategy. You don’t need to have a staff member when a user signs up for your product. The automation system automatically integrates the new subscriber into your system and sends them messages based on their behavior and engagement with your product. In short, it will not put additional pressure on your limited resources.
Now that you know what benefits email automation has, it's time for you to know how email automation works.
First, you must find the right email marketing tool that features email automation. Some platforms offer email automation as a separate package. Therefore, you need to make sure what your requirements are and whether or not the email automation tool you consider fulfills them.
Secondly, connect your website to the email marketing automation tool that you have chosen. If the tool you have chosen is a low-code tool, then you might need to integrate the tool with your app.
You can easily find detailed documentation on how to integrate apps with the email automation tools on their websites.
Once you have selected your email automation tool, start creating your email automation flows. Some platforms provide pre-built recipes for creating workflows alongside custom workflow creation features.
Lastly, connect the Google analytics with your email automation tool to monitor subscribers' actions and overall engagement with your app. In the case of some tools, this might be a necessary step. But most of the tools offer advanced reporting by default.
As there are many benefits of email automation, there are three mistakes to avoid that can stop you from reaping the benefits.
The basic function of email automation is still to send emails. Hence, if the users don’t find your emails interesting enough, you won’t see any significant conversions.
So, to make sure that your emails have the maximum impact on your users, test two or more variations of an email. A/B split test your emails and analyze which emails have high engagement rates and which don’t.
Sending too many emails can result in the user suffering from email fatigue. Email fatigue is a state that users experience when they receive too many emails. This state can culminate in the user unsubscribing from your email list, thus, increasing the churn rate.
Ensure that your users don’t suffer from email fatigue and that your automation workflow is set to send emails at a set frequency. By sending your emails at a set frequency, your users will not only remember you but will expect to see your emails and not get overwhelmed.
You are kicking away huge gains in open rates and revenue by ignoring personalize your emails. Using data and incorporating segmentation to create tailored emails for your users helps them make feel unique and more connected with your product.
Moreover, personalized subject lines that include the recipient's name are 26% more likely to be opened. Also, you can use your user’s data to personalize the images. Along with that, you can personalize the offers by using the recent engagement history of your users, and you can create different offers for different users.
Here are six tips that can help you create highly effective email automation.
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Analyzing your email marketing metrics can help direct your next move. By keeping an eye on your metrics, you can gather information about how your recipients interact with your emails and then use that information to craft automated workflows that help increase conversion rates.
The metrics you should track are:
Keeping track of these metrics you can offer discounts tailored to specific users.
New users take their time before making a purchase. Therefore, nurturing them to make a purchase is critical. You can use automated drip campaigns that drip relevant content about the product to the users.
With drip emails, the content will be sent only to prospects who show interest. Thus, you don’t have to send a broadcast email to your entire email list.
Email automation allows marketers to segment and sends relevant content to users at each step of their journey. To a new user who has just signed up, the first email you can set for them to receive should be the welcome email.
For those who have used your product for a certain period of time and are now looking for guidance on using the advanced features, you can send them an eBook.
Automation and personalization, when used together, can work wonders. According to Experian, brands that personalize email communications have seen 11% higher open rates and 27% higher click rates.
The days when using only the user's first name in the email was considered personalization are long gone. Email automation has become the gold standard for using user engagement data in creating personalized emails. Here are three steps that you can take to make the most out of personalized automated emails.
So, the first step in personalizing the emails is collecting user data by asking user preference choice questions. This will help you segment the user based on the data they provide. You can use a survey email to ask them what they like about your brand, their preferences, and what can be improved.
Take a look at the email from LinkedIn. The email copy informs the reader that they have been selected to take part in a survey that helps LinkedIn improve its offerings. There are two CTAs in the email, one at the top and other at the bottom of the copy. Both the CTAs say "Begin survey."
The next step is to create user personas based on your collected data. This will help you in creating better-personalized experiences for your users after you understand them better.
Your users might be scattered throughout the world in different time zones. Therefore, you must consider their locations and time while sending your emails. A/B test other times and see at what times you get a better response from your users.
Another way you can benefit from email automation is by strategically offering your users discounts. Create automated workflows for users who have used your product for a long time, and offer them discounts and other rewards for their loyalty.
But ensure that you plan whom to offer these rewards and when to offer these discounts, as frequent discount offerings can create unrealistic expectations among users.
For example, Google One offers a user who has been a user of YouTube premium for a long time three months of free usage of Google One.
Gaining and losing users is a part of email marketing. But it doesn’t mean that lost users can’t be won back! Whatever the reason for your user to churn from your email list, your automation should send them a re-engagement email as soon as the event of unsubscribing is triggered.
Entice the churned user with an offer of a discount. Use the user data to create emails that remind them why they signed up for your product in the first place. Ask them about the pain points that caused them to churn. You can also provide solutions to the issues faced by your users.
Look how Spotify wins back its churning customers. They offer users playlists to users who haven't used the app for a while. They offer these playlists for free and guide the user with the CTA "Listen Free" so that they take the desired action.
These are the five best email automation tools that can help you create highly effective automation workflows.
Price: $149/month
Free trial: Yes
AppFlows is a low-code tool that is designed to create behavior-driven and smarter automations in quick time. With powerful journey mapping, you can intercept and engage users at just the right time.
Pricing:
Free trial: Yes
Userpilot is a leader in SaaS marketing, offering product owners and managers powerful email automation features. Without having to code, create unlimited workflows. Learn about user sentiments and create compelling user personas. Learn more about your users with growth insights.
Price:
Starter: $49/mo
Pro:$199/mo
Growth: $499/mo
Enterprise: $1,299/mo
Free trial: Yes
Vero is among the top email automation tools for SaaS marketers. Create seamless automation and broadcast newsletter emails. Use free and responsive HTML and MJML email templates and create beautifully branded campaigns.
Pricing: $49-599
Free trial: Yes
With 3,600+ companies using Encharge, it is startups' go-to SaaS marketing tool. You can nurture, convert, and onboard users with 100s of email templates. You also don’t have to write prodigious lines of code because Encharge integrates seamlessly with the apps you already use.
Pricing: $74/mo
Add-ons:
Product Tours: $199/mo
WhatsApp Support: $9/mo
Surveys: $49/mo
Free Trial: Yes
Trusted by tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, Intercom stands among the top SaaS marketing companies in the world. You can create top-notch email workflows in just a snap. Moreover, you can integrate Intercom with more than 300 apps.
Email automation makes nurturing, converting, onboarding, and engaging users easy. Also, it increases marketing productivity and helps scale SaaS marketing strategies. With the help of unique user personas, marketers can fine-tune their emails for each user’s journey.
Following the best practices mentioned above, you can drive engagement, increase revenue, and grow your business.
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Content writer by day and a book nerd by night, Ammar Mazhar has been writing for 3 years for B2B and B2C businesses. As a wordsmith, Ammar knows how to write SEO-optimized content that your users will find insightful, igniting results for your business.
Ammar Mazhar
August 1, 2022
Ammar Mazhar
August 1, 2022
Ammar Mazhar
August 1, 2022
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