Do you receive promotional emails from your favorite store? Or maybe a newsletter from a trusted publication? It’s all in the name of email marketing!
The first email was sent in the 1970s, and the channel has come a long way since, especially in the marketing realm. Email marketing is a way to connect with and nurture all types of prospects and customers in a personalized way with the click of a button. It’s such an integral part of reaching an audience, so it’s no surprise that most companies, regardless of size, make use of email marketing in some capacity.
The problem? The manual effort that goes into sending emails is extremely time-consuming. Segmenting audiences and sending emails manually can be a full-time effort. That’s where marketing automation enters the picture. By incorporating email marketing into your marketing automation strategy, you can drive engagement with the right people at the right time and move leads seamlessly through the funnel, all without having to lift a finger (almost).
What is Email Marketing’s Role in Your Marketing Automation Strategy?
There are several benefits to interweaving your marketing automation strategy with your email marketing:
Reach the Right People
One of the great ways to make the most of email marketing automation is by using an audience segmentation feature in your automation tech stack.
You can segment by location, company, job title, industry, engagement, etc. -- the possibilities are endless. You can also use this for account-based marketing so you can target certain accounts and not others. With a clean and strategically segmented audience, you can implement campaigns with messaging tailored to each person’s stage of the buyer’s journey. This personalization helps ensure that warm leads move through the funnel and the sales team gets the leads that are most engaged and ready to talk.
When you create an email marketing strategy that utilizes automation, you’re making things personal for your audience and establishing strong connections, all without having to manually parse through all your contacts.
Automate Right, Communicate Right
Marketing automation can do even more to keep leads warm over email through automated workflows and triggers. With these, certain actions that a prospect takes can trigger certain emails to be sent. For example, if a new prospect signs up for a webinar your automation software can automatically send an email a few weeks later with a piece of downloadable content relevant to the webinar they attended and their pain points.
A drip campaign is another way to use automation to enhance communication. These campaigns allow you to send messages to prospects over time automatically, so they’re constantly being nurtured and given attention. Drip campaigns are best used when you segment your audience – all the features of your marketing automation strategy can work in harmony to make your email marketing do the work for you.
Increase Efficiency
Gone are the days of having to manually mail merge, segment audiences, and click the send button. When you incorporate email marketing into your marketing automation strategy, you can set emails and forget them. Create a drip campaign, develop a workflow, and then let it do all the work for you. You get to nurture the right leads, easily and automatically! That means your team gets back the time to focus on higher-reward opportunities and revenue marketing gets a productivity boost.
The right automation software will also offer tracking, analytics, and reporting so you can see what's working and what isn't. Who’s opening your emails? What’s the click-through-rate (CTR)? Which subject lines and CTAs get the most traction? Automation can answer all these questions and more, empowering you to optimize campaigns in real-time.
Conclusion
Incorporating an email marketing strategy in your marketing automation strategy can be highly beneficial if done right. A marketing automation agency can help you pick and implement the best software for your business – the one that will help you reach your company’s goals and develop an airtight automation strategy. If you opt instead to use an email marketing agency, one of the first things you should ask is whether or not they use automation. The right answer is yes!
Want to Know More?
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