Newsletters might get a lot of attention, but email automations are the true stars of email marketing.
Automations make it so you don’t have to remember when to send out specific emails. The email marketing service takes care of that for you.
They’re a great — and low lift — way to connect with clients. Here’s how.
What Exactly Are Email Automations?
Email automations allow you to send targeted messages at specific times or based on specific actions. These help you build relationships with past or potential clients.
They can be as simple as welcome emails for folks who join your newsletter or as complex as messages based on what your potential customers’ interests are.
To boil it down, you write a template email in your email marketing platform and decide what action causes it to go out. Your template can be the same email across the board for all people who receive it, or it can be customized to individual recipients. You can also customize the action that triggers the email to go out.
Let’s look at some of those options.
How to Personalize Automated Emails
You might be confused about exactly how automated emails can benefit you. After all, aren’t most of your emails personalized in some way or another?
Email marketing platforms offer several ways to tailor automated emails to the individuals receiving them:
- Personalization tags are pieces of code that go into your email template and pull custom information into the emails when they get sent out. Tags look different depending on the service you’re using, but they usually go between two symbols, such as brackets. Here are some common examples:
- [first name], [last name], or [full name] add the individual’s name to the email. This is a great tag to use in greetings!
- [email] and [phone number] add that information to the email. This can be helpful for class confirmation emails that ask clients to verify their contact info.
- Note that these won’t work if you don’t have that information available. However, email marketing platforms also offer some kind of “fallback” tag, which can replace the custom information with a default term. So if your email template says “Hi [first name]!” but you don’t have that person’s first name, it might say “Hi there!” to that individual instead.
- Trigger actions let you choose when an email goes out. This can be a special email on a client’s birthday, a follow-up email after they finish a training session with you, or a check-in email when you haven’t heard from them after a specific amount of time.
Tagging Customers
One other neat option that email marketing services provide is the ability to tag customers. This can help you create super targeted emails that boost your sales.
Say there’s a class you don’t yet offer but are considering for the future — maybe it’s sports competition training for beginners. You can create a “beginner sports training” tag in your email marketing platform and send out an email to everyone on your list with a link that says “Click here if you want to be notified when our beginner sports training sessions open!”
When folks click on that link, their email address is tagged with “beginner sports training” on your email list.
In the future, when you’ve added that offering to your schedule, you can create a simple email automaton that alerts all of those clients about it. And because they already mentioned being interested, you’ll likely have a higher conversion rate — i.e., more of those email recipients are likely to sign up!
Build Your Own Email Automation
This all just scratches the surface of what you can do with email marketing.
You might be overwhelmed, but don’t worry! Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to take you step by step through building out your first automation. I promise it’ll be easy — and one everyone can use.
In the meantime, if you haven’t set up your list or gotten folks to sign up, here are some steps to follow to catch up:
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