Five Benefits of Email Automation that Help Save Time and Grow Your Business

With over 3.9 billion daily email users worldwide, having an email marketing strategy is a must for businesses both big and small. That starts with understanding the benefits of email automation so you can determine what the best options are for your organization.

When executed with a clear strategy in place, email automation can be used to solve business problems or create new opportunities for businesses. Let’s look at how.

Overcoming Common Roadblocks to Automation

Before we look at the benefits of email automation, it’s important to acknowledge some of the things businesses often feel are a roadblock to being able to implement and effectively use it.

Like anything else you invest in for your business, price is always a concern. Clients often express concern about investing in something new as they’re not entirely sure what results to expect.

The good news is that email automation doesn’t have to be expensive. There are several no or low cost platforms that are perfect for a beginner, and using one of these options means you can figure out what exactly you need from your systems before you go any further.

In many cases, those higher cost options just aren’t necessary for what a smaller business needs from their email automation.

Plus, if you’re looking to reap the benefits of email automation, you really should have a strategy driving what you do. While you could easily write up the occasional email and send it out to your audience, email marketing is always the most effective when it’s done with purpose.

If creating an email strategy is not something you’re comfortable with, this is something you can easily outsource. By working with an expert, you can insure your email marketing strategy will get results.

Discuss with your team what you’re doing and why BEFORE you implement new tools. Sharing the benefits of email automation and how it can help your team improve marketing programs and customer experience is a key step to getting your team on board.

To help you be prepared to discuss the benefits of email automation here are five ways it can help save time and grow your business.

How Email Automation Can Help

Before you decide to start looking at an email automation strategy, it’s important to remember that automation is only one part of the puzzle.

The fact is, people buy from people. The goal of automation is to enhance existing processes or give you the ability to create new ones along with saving time and money in the long run. .

#1. Extending Lead Followup Time

Many businesses are short staffed due to Covid-19 and sometimes leads are dying on the vine and/or clients are going unserved.

Letting leads go cold can have a BIG impact on your business — both financially and reputationally.

Losing a lead means losing an opportunity to gain a new customer. It also means that the person will likely remember they reached out to you and never heard back.

Given how uncertain the economy presently is, ensuring leads don’t slip through your fingers should be high priority, and email automation can help you achieve that.

Creating a series of emails that run over the course of a few days means you have time to build the relationship while keeping the lead alive.

With 31% of B2B marketers saying email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads, there’s no question that it’s in your best interest to consider automating the communication that happens during that initial time frame.

#2. Re-engaging Your Existing Audience

Your existing audience is made up of people who have either bought or had potential interest in buying at one point or another, so why not tap into people who are already familiar with your brand?

While many businesses focus much of their marketing efforts on new customer acquisition, the fact is, your existing customer base represents a great deal of potentially untapped revenue.

By increasing customer retention by as little as 5%, you can increase your profits anywhere from 25 to 95%. Additionally, the probability of selling to an existing customer is about 60 to 70%, versus about 5% with a potential acquisition.

It’s clear that your existing customer base warrants some serious attention. When looking at the benefits of email automation and how it gives you a channel to re-engage existing customers, it should be a no-brainer as it can result in additional revenue.

When thinking about re-engagement, it’s important to understand it’s not just about selling. Your goal is to nurture the relationship by sharing content that may be of interest, information about the company, industry news and other personalized content based on their history.

Yes, you can lead them to sales, but the best way to persuade people to buy is to work on building the trust factor through communication at regular intervals.

#3. Onboarding New Clients

If you want your customers to feel confident in their purchase, consistent communications from day one is key. Building trust is critical to any long-term relationship and showing new customers you’re being proactive with their onboarding sets the right tone.

As part of the onboarding process, clients can be educated on the valuable content and resources you have to offer. This is a win-win, because they get the tools they need to maximize their success and in turn, the amount of support calls they need to make to you will be minimized.

From an internal standpoint, the benefits of email automation can’t be overstated. Email automation platforms offer hundreds of templates, and these can be used to create a consistent look and feel for all your communications. Additionally, these templates can serve as a guide to craft an email sequence that ensures emails go out at each step of the onboarding process, ensuring nothing ever gets missed.

Finally, you have one place to send and track emails and you’ll gain insight that will help you enhance the customer experience in the future.

#4. Upselling/Crossselling Products and Services

Email marketing automation can provide you with important data about your clients. Your subscribers can be segmented based on various criteria — clicks, past purchases, views of content and more.

Consider this: According to one survey, 72% of consumers indicated they will only engage with personalized messaging. That means your customers are expecting you to know who they are and what they like — and for the offers you make to them to reflect that.

Through automation, your email platform can collect this necessary data, which can then be used to target customers and trigger email offers based on their buying habits and areas of interest.

#5. Creating Brand Awareness

It’s estimated that presenting your brand consistently across multiple platforms — including email marketing — can increase revenue by 23%.

The reality is, not everyone will buy from you the minute they come across your products and services. They want to get to know you, and building a relationship of trust takes time. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to help that process along.

Email automation gives you a regular channel to communicate with potential customers who’ve shown interest by signing up for your emails, but aren’t quite ready to commit to purchasing anything yet.

Your emails can reflect your brand personality and values through more than just the words you use or the content you share. The design can convey experience, trust and reinforce it in a visual way.

Plus, having a welcome sequence for people who’ve signed up for your email communication is an opportunity to educate them about your brand — what you offer, what you’re all about and what they can expect if they choose to do business with you.

Capitalizing on the Benefits of Email Automation

While this post outlines five of the key benefits, it’s important to note that there are many, many others.

When crafting a strategy for your email automation, it’s important to remember — quality over quantity. It doesn’t matter if you have 5,000 people getting your emails if none of them are buying.

By focusing on critical stages of the customer experience, like onboarding, and slowly working on building trust and awareness, you can create a loyal customer base for your business.

Need help creating or implementing an email automation strategy for your company?

OnMerit Marketing understands all the nuances of effective email marketing and can partner with you to create and deliver your email marketing program.