Email Marketing Automation for Beginners

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Email marketing automation intro

Email marketing is part of digital marketing almost from when people started using emails. And it is still here, and still one of the most effective ways to get in touch and build relationships with clients and prospects.

You have to remember that email is a very personal way of contact, as you use it at work, as a channel to contact you directly, or personally to get in touch with friends or family. And every time you open your email client, you expect to see the content which is personal and which concerns you.

That’s why it’s so effective as a marketing channel. Creating a good email campaign can help you make rapport with your future clients, let them meet you and your product, and show them how you can help solve their problem.

A good email marketing campaign is not just one email; it’s a very often series of emails that go one by one in some time interval. I know from my own experience that you cannot be in front of the computer to send the next emails part at a given time, but there’s great news. You can automate your emails!

In this article, I want to show you how you can easily set up the email marketing automation with the tool I use, so you will never again forget to send your emails in proper time, and you will be able to always respond in the best moment.

Let’s start!

What is email marketing automation?

In the beginning, let me explain what exactly we are going to talk about. Email marketing automation is a strategy that allows sending emails automatically triggered by an event or scheduled at a certain time. That makes your email campaign fully automated.

It allows sending users on your mailing list personalized emails, depending on the data we took from them or on the action they took. Let’s imagine that some users registered in your application, on a free account, or on trial. As the user is new on the mailing list and in your app, you send him or her a series of emails. You can send different emails to the user who decided to buy the full subscription and different to users who didn’t.

The other example can be a birthday promo code, which you can send to a user if you know the birth date.

The other option is sending the emails day by day or week by week and simply just setting up the time schedule.

To create the email marketing automation flow, you need a platform that provides that functionality, and in the next point, I’m going to point some of them.

Email marketing automation platforms

So, to create email automation, you need to select a proper tool because not every email marketing software provides that functionality. Let’s go through some of them:

MailerLite - provides an easy to use and affordable tool with email automation functionality. It has two different types of events that we can use to trigger the automation flow, such as emails and e-commerce. You can also use 4 types of steps to create the automation flow. I’ll be using this tool to show you how to create an email marketing automation flow.

Sendinblue - is another tool that can be used to create an automation flow with email marketing. It allows to the creation of simple and advanced flows and provides an easy setup. It also allows to implementation of A/B tests for the emails you send.

Mailchimp - it’s one of the most popular tools for email marketing. It provides predefined automation like Welcoming new subscribers or „Happy Birthday” automation, so it makes things easier. Also, you can create one automated email or series of emails.

Drip - this tool is more adjusted to e-commerce email marketing. It’s possible to use two types of actions to trigger automation, rules, and workflows. Actions triggering emails can come from multiple directions like website, e-shop, social media platforms, etc. You can also use a ready-made workflow.

ConvertKit - this tool was built to be used by bloggers, but currently, it’s adjusted to other online business types. Here you can trigger series of emails by actions, events, and conditions. You can use this tool to build simple and advanced flows really easily.

Those are just a few email marketing automation platforms, which are worth your attention. Right now, I’d like to focus on strategies for email marketing automation.

Email marketing automation strategy

For every campaign, you need a certain strategy that will help you to get to your goal.

You can use email marketing automation for segmentation strategies, which will help you divide your mailing list into different groups based on user behaviors. If you can divide users into separate segments, you can sell them better.

Another strategy you could realize with email marketing automation is tracking users and making an action while needed, for example, when users leave the cart before checkout.

Another strategy you could use is promotional email series, where you can create a drip campaign and send a few emails, offering different discounts until a user will decide to buy your products.

With the same drip campaign, you can use while launching a new product or event, you can start building interest in users a few days before the launch and continue a few days after with promo codes.

There are a lot of different approaches that you can take with your email marketing automation to get the goal you want.

How to automate email marketing?

Right now, I’d like to show you how I set up the email marketing automation flow with MailerLite, the tool I use and really like.

If you’d like to see an example of series like this, you can sign up for our 5 weeks email course here, and you’ll get emails, which you can have as an inspiration to create your own email automation series!

Let’s start with setting automation flow.

1. Login to your account and select the Automation tab.

1. Select the Create workflow button on the top

1. Create an automation name and set up the first step. I will select the action When subscriber joins a group and select the specific group.

1. Use + button on the bottom of the first step and select Delay; after that, select Set delay and select how long you would like to wait. I’ll set 1 day.

1. Select + button once again, and select Email; after that, you can create your email; you can select between Rich HTML, drag and drop, or ready templates.

1. When the email is created and saved, press the + button again, and right now, let’s select a Delay first, and let’s set another 1 day, next let’s press + button again and select the Condition option.

You can see the sidebar to define the condition. You can set many rules and set if you need all of them to be true or just one of them.

Inside the Condition dropdown, you can see 5 options. I will select Workflow activity. At the bottom, you will have information about each option you’d select. Next, let’s select the previous email, and in the next dropdown, let’s select was not opened.

We can send different emails based on the user behavior; for example, we can resend the first email once again if a person didn’t open a previous email or just simply a reminder, or maybe don’t send them anything else.

1. Next, let’s go the red way, and let’s go with steps 4 and 5 as many times as you need.

1. When your automation flow is ready, you can turn it on with the ON button on the top right corner.

And voila! Your email automation is ready and working.

In the next article, I’ll show you how to build a website with a subscription form to your mailing list in few minutes.

Email marketing automation summary

This article went through email marketing automation, why it’s important and how you can benefit from this. In the practical part, you could see how to create a simple automation flow with MailerLite, an easy and affordable mailing software.

I hope this knowledge was useful and helpful for your marketing strategy and will help you to get clients and grow your projects!

In the next articles, I’ll show you how to create a website with a subscription form that will help you gather people on your mailing list!

Thank you for reading,
Anna from Duomly

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