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When planning the optimal email marketing strategy for your business, automation is often unavoidable. Without it, creating high-quality emails and sending them manually takes hours or even days. You need to account for subsequent tasks, such as analyzing email open rates, new subscribers, and other relevant metrics. Keeping track of everything on your own while trying to boost your sales outcomes can be pretty challenging. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be if you have the appropriate email marketing automation tools.
Common Email Marketing Approaches
Before diving into our overview of tools, let’s go over some of the most common types of email marketing:
Welcome emails.
This email is the initial contact you make with a client. Welcome emails containing an introduction of your company and without a heavy sales push have high open and click-through rates. These types of emails focus on making a positive first impression that demonstrates your knowledge of your sector and opens doors for further communication. Nearly all email marketing automation tools offer a selection of welcome email templates.
Lead nurturing
Understanding the subtleties of your leads’ timing and wants is the foundation of lead nurturing. This approach entails a closely linked sequence of emails packed with helpful information and a clear goal. For this reason, developing buyer personas beforehand is crucial to reach your target demographic efficiently. Afterwards, all it takes is a good automation platform to handle the distribution of emails for you.
– Jacek Zmudzinski, Team Lead at MakoLab.com
Drip campaigns
Drip campaigns are used to advance your leads through the sales process effectively. They entail the gradual distribution of a sequence of emails, each of which builds upon the one before it. For example, implement a drip campaign to inform leads of the features and advantages of any new and upcoming service.
Re-engagement emails
It is important to send the occasional re-engagement email if metrics reveal that some of your subscribers have been inactive. A re-engagement email can be as simple as reminding customers of your service offer or asking for feedback. This interaction could be a win-win situation because they are once again actively thinking about your company while you have fresh inputs to use for process improvements.
Activity-based emails
These emails are triggered by a particular activity performed by the customer, such as making a purchase or leaving their shopping cart without buying (cart abandonment). Businesses can segment their client base by utilizing email list hygiene best practices and using activity data to provide more personalized emails. This is essential for targeted communications and increasing revenue.
Email Marketing Automation Tools
Automation tools are perhaps the most significant component of email marketing. Their biggest advantage is that you can set up a whole email funnel that runs almost entirely on its own with minimal intervention needed on your end.
Email marketing automation allows you to streamline the above approaches via the use of triggers, pre-scheduled drip campaigns, automatic welcome emails, and AI-powered email content creation. Some may even offer delivery testing services through email API to test out your email marketing campaigns without spamming your subscribers.
Moosend
Moosend is one of the top email marketing solutions for small and medium-sized companies. Its major features include an excellent drag-and-drop email builder, professionally designed newsletter templates, registration forms, and landing pages.
Additionally, Moosend’s strong automation capabilities allow you to segment your email list, automate the delivery of tailored content to subscribers, and essentially put your marketing campaigns on autopilot.
Moosend is a particularly great and beginner-friendly option for cross-border eCommerce companies looking for a simple way to expand their customer base and boost revenue.
MailChimp
Mailchimp is one of the most widely used email automation platforms. It comes with plenty of functionalities that serve to address nearly every email marketing task for the purpose of increasing sales.
Mailchimp offers hundreds of email templates and an incredibly configurable email editor. It also provides various segmentation and testing options for your emails, such as A/B testing and customer journeys that trigger the distribution of emails in response to particular outcomes.
Mailchimp also provides numerous insightful statistics, including Facebook and social media engagement, click-through and email open rates, and Google Ad click outcomes.
Omnisend
Omnisend is an all-in-one marketing platform for automated SMS and email marketing. You can use it to collect your visitors’ emails using different types of forms, landing pages, and other methods.
Once you have your clients’ email addresses, you can use Omnisend to distribute customized email campaigns efficiently. You can also integrate the tool with other marketing channels, such as text messaging or push notifications.
Omnisend provides great customer segmentation features, enabling you to send tailored emails based on your own criteria to various client types. A personalized approach like this can significantly boost your email open rates, which will lead to an increase in sales down the line.
HubSpot
HubSpot consistently ranks high on lists of the finest automation solutions. In fact, this company generally specializes in creating a wide variety of marketing software.
One of HubSpot’s most popular functionalities includes generating emails automatically depending on specific events. These include sending a live chat message, completing a form, and joining your email list.
HubSpot features an easy drag-and-drop UI for creating emails. You can also take your pick of more than 20 pre-made templates they have on offer.
HubSpot helps you easily nurture leads through your marketing funnel by building connected processes for your email drip campaigns. It provides plenty of triggers and actions that can all be linked to a specific objective so you can send emails to the appropriate recipients at the right times.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is another comprehensive marketing tool that caters to companies of all sizes. It includes drag-and-drop email tools, live chat, SMS marketing, a built-in customer management system (CRM), as well as automation tools for audience segmentation.
You can also use this tool to create landing pages for your emails effectively, email list registration forms, retargeting advertisements, and different kinds of email testing.
Sendinblue started out as an email outreach platform but has successfully grown to provide more extensive marketing functions, making it a great all-in-one automation solution.
Final Thoughts
A crucial component of every successful company’s sales plan is email. Indeed, email remains an essential component of digital marketing, even if your company uses other kinds of promotional channels (such as social media). Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what automation tools you opt for; what matters is that you utilize something that you can adapt to your particular customer base, service offer, and skillset.
Guest Author Bio: Nina Petrov
is a content marketing specialist, passionate about graphic design, content marketing, and the new generation of green and social businesses. She starts the day scrolling her digest on recent digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. Her little white bunny tends to reply to your emails when she is on vacation.