How to Build Customer Relationships with Automated Email Marketing

Email marketing automation not only responds to specific dates, but also uses customer data to automatically send personalized emails triggered by specific actions or behaviors—for example, clicking on a product or abandoning a purchase. In this way, recipients receive only content that is really relevant to them.

Email marketing can be used at different stages of the customer journey and to achieve a variety of goals. Whether you are contacting your customers for the first time, inviting them to an event, or trying to win them back after a long period of radio silence, we have compiled the most important use cases.

The Welcome Journey

In this phase, you get to know your new customers, their needs and interests—and vice versa. And as with any encounter, the first impression is crucial. Your emails should show the recipients that you are really interested in them and offer the right solutions to their problems and wishes.

Consider the following points for a successful Welcome Journey:

1. Collect data that helps you understand the needs and preferences of your customers—for example, through newsletter sign-up forms or membership forms.
2. Share information with your customers that is truly relevant to them and has added value.
3. Involve your customers and create engagement by starting a conversation with them—for example, follow-up emails after a purchase asking them to rate the product and motivating them to share it on social media (get that user generated content!).

Event Promotion

Users who register for an event consciously grant you a place in their calendar. But the competition for time and attention is fierce. That’s why it’s important to make the registration process and communication around the event simple and motivating to generate as many registrations as possible and prevent guests who have already registered from dropping out again.

Most importantly, stay in touch: confirm registration, remind attendees when and where the event will take place, explain why attendance is important, and provide another reminder in a timely manner.

It’s a challenging task that would be impossible without automation: attendees sign up at different times, use different calendars, and forget appointments. Automated email campaigns save you time and ensure that all necessary information is delivered in a timely and appropriate manner.

Abandoned Shopping Cart

The internet is a great place to shop. But the choices are endless, with many websites and communication channels competing for customers’ attention. This means that the risk of being distracted while shopping is very high.

There are many reasons why customers do not complete their purchase after adding a product to the shopping cart, such as push notifications, private messages, shipping costs that are too high, credit card information that is not easily accessible, and so on.

Automated reminder emails give your customers the opportunity to complete their purchase at a later—more appropriate—time. With one or more emails, you can remind them what they were looking for and show them how they can easily complete the purchase.

Re-Activation

The success of email campaigns should not be defined by the number of recipients, but by the KPIs engagement and conversions. Emails that fail to make an impact are a waste of time and resources: you pay higher fees to your email tool provider and the result doesn’t support your brand or conversions. Furthermore, if your emails repeatedly fail to deliver (hard bounce) or engagement KPIs are low, it has a negative impact on your email status. This can lead to you being classified as a spammer and excluded from certain mailbox providers.

An automated process can help directly target inactive recipients and encourage them to interact again.

Successful reactivation automatically prompts recipients who have been inactive for a while to confirm that they want to receive emails. If they don’t take action, you can offer them incentives. The American company Invesp found in a study that it is five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain one.

Although both are parts of email marketing, you should not confuse marketing automation with a newsletter. While a newsletter is a one-off send out with educational or informational content, automated emails are triggered based on an action by the customer—such as visiting a webpage—with the purpose of assisting the customer to progress on their journey. This is advantageous because the email only contains information that is relevant to the recipient(s). What’s more, the timing couldn’t be better, because automated emails are sent exactly when the customer needs them. They are also much easier to optimize than newsletters. While newsletter performance is affected by many variables, marketing automation provides a direct comparison of your measures.

• According to a study by Epsilon, automated emails have a 119% higher click-through rate than manually sent emails.
• A study by DMA found that automatically triggered emails generate 21% of email marketing revenue.
• A study by Campaign Monitor found that automated email campaigns have a 70.5% higher open rate and a 152% higher click-through rate than traditional email campaigns.

Curious? Learn how you can get even more value from your email marketing with our handy step-by-step guide.