How Marketing Automation Boosts Your Email Marketing ROI

Email marketing automation is all the rage among modern-day marketers. In fact, about 18% of marketers are leveraging email automation campaigns and are prioritizing message personalization and segmentation too.

Add to this the fact that 77% of companies have seen engagement increase in email marketing over the past 12 months. 

So, if you’re a marketer looking to grow your business, you should consider incorporating email marketing into your strategy.

But why are marketers leveraging email marketing automation, after all?

And why should you use it?

Let’s find out.

Ways Email Marketing Automation Boosts Your ROI 

Here are the various advantages of email marketing automation and how it helps in taking your ROI to the next level. 

1. Automates Engagement

One of the biggest advantages of email marketing automation is that it puts audience engagement on autopilot. 

From the moment a person signs up to the point they make a purchase, email marketing automation helps you engage with them at each step. 

For instance, you can start by leveraging a form creation platform that can integrate with your CRM and email marketing solution. This way, when a person signs up, you can automatically send out a welcome email to them. This helps you catch their attention and gives an opportunity to further engage with them. 

And guess what?

This method works. 

In fact, triggered emails such as welcome emails tend to have the highest email open rates at 38.03%. They even have high click-through rates which average around 6.76%.

source: GetResponse

Similarly, the click-to-open rate of these emails also hovers around 17.77%. You can further drive this up by leveraging a tool to analyze subject lines such as Attrock. This would help you find the most effective subject line that would get your receivers to open your emails. 

This means that you can easily engage your audience through such triggered emails and keep them hooked to your brand. 

But your engagement with the audience shouldn’t end here. In fact, this is the starting point. 

The next thing that you should do is set up an autoresponder sequence using an autoresponder software solution. 

An autoresponder sequence would essentially put your email engagement on autopilot. You can set up triggers for each of these autoresponder emails and ensure that whenever your audience takes any action, these emails would be sent out automatically. 

2. Drives Repeat Sales

One of the other ways through which email marketing automation can help your brand is by driving repeat sales. 

And it can help you do so by driving brand loyalty. 

Once your customers have purchased from you, it’s critical that you keep engaging with them to ensure that they remain connected with your brand. 

And how does email marketing automation help you with that?

By leveraging it, you can regularly send out helpful content to those customers and engage them. This could be in the form of weekly or monthly newsletters, webinar invitations, and more. 

They’ll thus remain connected to your brand and may buy from you again.

But guess what?

You can take this up a notch too.

And how can you do that?

You could send out your latest offers and product/service suggestions to them through emails. In these emails, you could include links to those products and services so that they can click on them and complete the purchase instantly. 

Pretty cool, right?

But it gets even better now. 

You can pair up email marketing automation with the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to skyrocket your repeat sales too.

You can personalize emails with remarkable precision using machine learning techniques by analyzing customer behavior patterns, preferences, and purchase histories. 

This tailored approach enhances customer engagement and increases the likelihood of conversion, making your email marketing campaigns not only efficient but also highly effective.

And how can you achieve that?

Let’s understand it with an example. 

Sephora, the beauty major, leverages ML and AI to understand how much time their customers typically take to finish using their products. Based on this, they create replenishment triggers. 

As a result, Sephora sends out automated emails to their customers just when it’s estimated that their product would get used up. 

This proves to be a great way to drive up repeat sales as the customer would indeed need to restock on their products. 

Sephora sends a short email with a call-to-action (CTA) to purchase the product. This, in turn, drives repeat sales for them.

source: LiveChat

3. Helps with Lead Nurturing

The other thing that email marketing automation can help you with is lead nurturing. 

And how does it do that?

Email automation lets you customize your emails for each recipient based on where they’re in the sales funnel. This means that you’ll be able to converse with them on autopilot and send email communications that are relevant to their position in the funnel.

For instance, when you’ve just got a new sign-up, you can share helpful blog posts with them through your emails. 

However, once the lead is checking your products or services out, you can start sending emails that contain case studies or testimonials. This would help in nurturing the lead and further drive them towards the conversion stage.

And even once the leads have converted, you can still leverage email marketing automation to engage them and help them start using your product or service. 

You could also leverage call-back software and incorporate your VoIP call center phone number in such emails. This would essentially help your customers get in touch with you for any issues that they’re facing related to your products or services.

4. Reduces Cart Abandonment

At some point, we’ve all added products to our shopping cart but never checked out. Cart abandonment is that common. In fact, retail cart abandonment rates are as high as 84.24%.

source: SaleCycle

But guess what?

It can be a big deterrent to growing your conversion rate and sales. The reason is simple — you’ve put all that effort into getting a lead and bringing them to the conversion stage. However, they add the product to their cart but never finish the purchase. 

This essentially means that you’d have put in all that effort for nothing. 

But this isn’t where it should all end. 

This is where cart abandonment emails powered by email marketing automation tools come into the picture.

Whenever someone abandons their cart, you can send out a cart abandonment email asking them to complete the purchase. In this email, you should mention the product that was abandoned and add a CTA to buy it.

To sweeten up the offer even further, you can add in a discount or coupon code. This would help you convert those who may be sitting on the wall due to the pricing. 

But do cart abandonment emails work?

Yes, they do. In fact, they’ve high open and click-through rates. Across all sectors, cart abandonment emails have an average open rate of 40.14% and a CTR of 28.64%. 

source: SaleCycle

5. Helps Improve Personalization

Email marketing automation can also play a major role in helping you personalize your offerings. 

And this is the need of the hour too because customers expect personalized marketing messages with 72% of them saying that they’ll only engage with messages tailored to their interests.

Also, personalization here doesn’t mean just the name. That is just the tip of the iceberg.

So, if you’ve taken the email marketing plunge and aren’t personalizing your communication, stop right there. 

You need to start leveraging email automation to send personalized content, product recommendations, and more.

All you have to do is combine email automation with customer analytics. This would allow you to understand the current preferences of your customers, including the products they viewed, added to their cart, and more.

Based on these analytics, you can send automated emails that are relevant to your customers and get them to take action. For instance, you can send automated upsell and cross-sell emails to them based on the products they’ve purchased. 

When we’re talking about personalization in email marketing, no brand comes quite close to Amazon. They send product recommendations based on products that a customer has been checking out. Such personalized recommendations help them drive sales. 

6. Improves Email Performance

One of the biggest advantages of email marketing automation is that it helps you improve the effectiveness of your emails. 

With marketing automation, you can easily conduct A/B and multivariate tests to understand which elements of your email work the best. 

You can then optimize your emails based on these tests by using a combination of the best elements to improve the performance of your campaign.

However, you must regularly perform these tests using the champion and challenger system. The champion is the current best-performing element and the challenger is the new variation that’s being tested. This would allow you to continually optimize your emails for better performance.

To further enhance your brand’s impact, consider using a professional email signature that aligns with your brand identity and adds a polished touch to every email.

Final Thoughts

Email marketing remains to be one of the most reliable marketing methods for modern-day marketers. With it, you can have one-to-one conversations with your customers. By harnessing the power of marketing automation, you can get even more out of your emails. 

It can help you automate engagement, drive repeat sales, move leads down the funnel, and reduce cart abandonment. 

What’s more?

With automation, you can do personalized marketing and even boost the performance of your email campaigns. 

I hope this guide to marketing automation helps you amp up your email campaigns.