5 Smart Tips to Strengthen Your Automated Emails and Increase Conversions
Communications Strategy // Make the most of your email marketing strategy by using marketing automation to increase conversions. Read on for 5 tips to help you strengthen your automated emails.
Sara MaloneyEveryone uses email. Not everyone loves email, but everyone uses it today nonetheless. Why? Because it’s the main way we receive valuable communications.
But, how many times a week do you scroll through your inbox and think, “Why am I receiving emails about something completely irrelevant to me?” or “Why am I being sent this email asking me to register for an event that I already registered for?”
With the technology available at our fingertips today, we expect more from the organizations we affiliate ourselves with. We expect to be heard, and we expect to receive a personalized experience on par with what customer-centric companies like Amazon are giving us today.
Without that personalization, we often lose interest and unsubscribe from email lists long before completing the call-to-action that the marketer sending the email was hoping for.
Perplexed by personalization? Putting automation to work is easier than you think.
Everyone understands the value of personalization, but what’s more difficult to understand if you’ve never used automated emails, is how easy it is to create this personalization and increase conversions through automation. Think of it as a big green button that says “GO.” Once you’ve set up the automation rules and hit that green button, the campaign takes over for you.
Source: Future Health
How often you should monitor your campaign from there depends on the actions within it and how often they’re supposed to happen. At any rate, these services make life easier for both you and your customers. Setting up an automated campaign once and revisiting it based on your goals, rather than manually completing mundane segmenting tasks, is a simple way to make massive improvements to your strategy in terms of productivity and efficiency.
Include these 5 tactics in your strategy before hitting send.
More technically speaking, here are a few helpful tactics to increase conversions, or have completed calls-to-action, with automated emails.
1. Segment your email list.
Not all emails are created equal—no one wants every email you send to the entire membership. Segment email lists so that each member receives email that is relevant to them. This is easy to do using marketing automation’s web tracking feature.
2. Send at the time they’re most likely to open
Marketing automation has this great feature that lets you send emails to everyone based on the time they’re most likely to open that email and fulfill the call-to-action. Industry standards for open rates are great, but knowing each individual’s personal open time is beyond powerful.
For example, the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA) used a send optimization feature and surprisingly, found they have better open rates on Saturdays. They got rid of their Friday newsletters, instead sending emails at a time that better served their members. This information wouldn’t have been possible to know without automation.
3. Make sure your emails are mobile-optimized.
This is key to avoid the trash bin! If a member opens an email on their phone and can barely read it, they won’t try very hard to see what your call-to-action is, let alone fulfill it.
For example, when the Association for Addiction Professionals (NAADAC) started using marketing automation tools, they saw that 40-50% of their audience checked their emails on mobile devices. They currently weren’t optimizing for mobile, meaning, their large mobile audience currently had to pinch and zoom to read their emails. NAADAC switched over to using responsive email designs, so they could reach those mobile users.
4. Identify a clear call-to-action.
Make it clear what you want your email recipients to do, whether that be register for an event, fill out a survey, or any other concrete action. Make sure that your recipients know what to do and don’t ignore your email.
5. Set up an abandonment automation rule.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to automatically send a follow-up email to every member who opens the landing page to register for an event, but then doesn’t complete their registration? Well luckily, there is! And you don’t have to be Amazon to afford it. Marketing automation can literally pay for itself by recovering this type of lost revenue.
There are many more tips out there, but these are a few good ones to get you started and see how easy marketing automation makes your job.
Marketing automation can help you send effective, personalized content to each member.
Online Community Manager
Sara is an online community manager at Higher Logic. She works with 5-6 customers at a time to maximize their success. She graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with a degree in Marketing and Psychology. In her free time, Sara enjoys reading and spending time in Washington, DC.
