Email Marketing Automation: Tools You Need for Your Business

Email Marketing Automation: Why Use It

There are many different automation tools available that can help you in a variety of ways. If you need help with designing your newsletters, for example, then you can download software that has been created to specifically help you design beautiful and engaging newsletters using pre-built templates. Lead generation tools are fantastic for helping you build your email subscriber list in a variety of different ways, which we’ve explained below.

Once you’ve got a campaign going out, it’s important to analyze the results you’ve achieved and then compare its performance to other campaigns you have tried in the past. So many key performance indicators that could affect your email's performance, from the subject title, content, the call to action, to the time of day it was sent, or engaged with, are available.

Testing and analyzing all of this information can be hugely time-consuming and exhausting. Drip automation software can do a lot of this work for you, leaving your marketing team time to come up with new ideas to bring in more business.

Available Automation Tools: A Brief Explanation

1. Lead Generation Tools

These types of automation software will help you generate more leads. Meaning they will help you get more people to sign up for your mailing list. Below are some of the ways of how they work:

• Quizzes: People love quizzes. Some automation software will help you build a quiz that you can promote on your website and Facebook page that requires the “quizzer” to enter their details at the end of the quiz in order to receive the results. Clever, eh?
• Pop-ups: Some software will generate pop-ups while a user is on your website. Usually, it offers them the chance to register. These can appear within a short time of being on your site or can appear when your visitor leaves the site.
• Facebook page prompts: If you have people visiting your Facebook page who you would like to convert to your mailing list, then there is software that will immediately request that the visitor “like” your Facebook page as soon as they visit it. Further personal information can also be requested at that same point of entry that will yield their email address.
• Incentive-based: Various companies offer software that gathers incentive-based sign-ups. Some will offer a contest, gift, or reward for signing up directly. Others encourage that first sign up to also refer a friend. Only when their friend signs up do they receive their gift, which initiates a chain of referral sign-ups.

2. Drip Automation Tools

This type of email marketing automation is more technical than lead generation software. This is the software that saves you a lot of time in analyzing behavior and performance in order to achieve the best results from your email marketing campaigns. Many different software providers offer slightly different services, but we’ve outlined some of main services that you can look out for:

• Pre-built campaign templates: Firstly, software providers will almost always offer email templates to help you get started. Campaign templates will help you with an entire campaign rather than just a single email and will help guide you through sending out prompt and reminder emails to encourage more call-to-actions.
• Segmentation: Some software will immediately segment your email list to create different groups that you can then target in different ways. The software uses information such as the user's personal data, their original sign-up path, and even their onsite behavior to help you target the different segments with different content.
• Timing optimization: Some software will optimize each audience segment or personal email that is sent out to ensure that each person or group is receiving the email at the perfect time. They can optimize the email timing based on what time of day achieves the highest open rates and click rates for each email that goes out.
• Auto-response: Auto-response software can help you with what would be a lot of time-consuming response emails. Emails to thank people for signing up, purchase confirmations, and to remind your visitor of cart abandonment can be sent out automatically when needed.
• A/B testing: Testing is always good to help you achieve the best results. As such, software offering A/B testing will allow you to try two different emails to the same audience segments to see which layout or content achieves better results.

Email Marketing Made Easy

As you can see, life in the marketing department could be a lot easier with the help of one or two of the tools outlined above. Grow your email database faster with lead generation software, and then manage it with drip automation campaigns.

The ability to send out regular newsletters to specially segmented audiences will help you make the best use of your growing email subscriber list. Making sure that your newsletter subscribers get the right content will ensure that they remain interested and engaged with your brand. Finally, having the email sent out at the perfect time will ensure that you get the highest click-through rates, and ultimately, more customers.