high-quality experiences customers expect. This can drastically shorten the path to purchase, build brand loyalty and increase lifetime value.

Event organiser Media 10 have seen significant uplift by focussing on automation for their Star Trek event - By carefully targeting audiences through social media and forums, then using email to deliver valuable content to an already engaged audience, they saw email open rates of 76% which contributed significantly to ticket sales.

But for many marketers, the step towards full automation can be daunting - Concerns over new technology combined with doubts over the ability of other channels and departments to integrate with an automated email strategy often lead to a case of rabbit-in-the-headlights, leaving marketers paralysed.

Happily, due to the low cost-of-entry for email automation, with preparation and an honest assessment of current skills and resources, there is rarely a case where marketers are unable to implement a successful automated email strategy

Preparation Before Perspiration: Assess Your Current Email Strategy

Email works best when it is personal, targeted and timely. Can you honestly say that your email strategy ticks all three boxes? There is no doubt that email can be both incredibly cheap and effective (automation makes this doubly true), but unless used with restraint, it can prove to be a double-edged sword. In a busy marketing department where there are demands on data and insight from any number of quarters, it is tempting to adopt a spray and pray approach to email because it can seem that it’s a numbers game. This will almost certainly gain customers in the short term, but how many and for how long?

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There is plenty of evidence to suggest that targeted emails attract more new customers than blanket coverage; equally, it is clear that over-messaging with catch-all communications turns off new and loyal customers alike.

In Assessing Your Current Acquisition Strategy, You Should Considered The Following:

Target Audience

Have you worked on your data to make sure you’re capturing the right people, that the data is clean and that you have enough information to send relevant communications?

Time And Place

Today, 54% of emails are opened on mobile devices1 - where, and on what device(s) are your messages being read? Try to understand the relative behaviour of your target audience to discover if you should be messaging during working hours, during lunch breaks, on the commute, in the evenings or at weekends. This informs everything from content format to type, to audience segment if you are addressing more than one. Third party insight into consumer behaviour can be a real help at this stage.

Call To Action

What do you want your email to achieve? Does it need to drive the customer to a website or call centre? Is it most effective as a retargeting tool for dropped baskets? Automating an email is the work of seconds, managing the subsequent customer behaviour can take considerably more effort. Are you adequately resourced to handle it?

Short Versus Long-term

Email is clearly not a one-trick pony. It can drive the final purchase stage in a customer journey, convert first time customers to regular purchasers and regular customers into vocal advocates. Customers are increasingly willing to trade their time and information for content and other benefits. Try to view email (including automated email) as more than just a direct sales platform - use it to deliver value-add to your customers and understand its place in the holistic, whole customer relationship.

Outcomes

Many businesses start with the technology and then consider what the potential result might be, which is looking at the problem backwards. Clearly, it is easier to stick to a plan of attack when that plan has been devised with a specific goal in mind. Starting with the result will also help keep the project tightly aligned with overall business objectives, whereas the temptation to tinker mid-programme will give definitive outcomes, just not necessarily the desired ones.

Email As The Turning Point For Organisation-wide Roi

Research suggests that 74% of marketers believe the biggest benefit of marketing automation is the timesaving. 68% stated it increased customer engagement, while 58% believed it generated more timely communications - the same amount felt it increased opportunities including up-selling.

Time savings certainly increase ROI by decreasing organisational costs, but there is also a proactive role that email plays in driving customers from purchase consideration to purchase completion. For example, triggered emails, either from dropped baskets or purchase thank yous, are proven to increase conversion over time. Kissmetrics states that triggered email messages achieve 74.9% higher open rates and 161.9% higher click-through rates than ordinary messages3. But what of the use of automated email to drive ongoing customer satisfaction? Effective as a tool to encourage free trials for example, its use as a driver beyond initial consideration can be overlooked.

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Mobile Email Must Lead To Mobile Experiences

Mobile optimisation for both email content and landing pages should now go without saying. As stated above, more than half (54%) of emails are opened on mobile devices, but the customer experience is not just predicated on how well the email itself is received (relevant, attractive and easy to read) but the next step experience (link to optimised website, click-to-call, etc).

With its relatively low cost to create and send coupled with consumers’ high tolerance for receiving multiple emails, it is an ideal test-and-learn medium. Testing subject lines with small segments of the customer base, or even testing your customers’ tolerance for the frequency or your electronic communications, can be a powerful way to increase conversion. Testing subject lines with small segments of the customer base can be a fruitful way of increasing conversion.

Adestra surveyed more than 125,000 individual email campaigns covering more than 400 opened emails to discover the most and least effective subject line keywords.

Unsurprisingly ‘Thanks’ and ‘Thank you’ are often used in automated, transactional messages, yet they still feature among the best performing keywords. Perhaps this is symptomatic of customers’ willingness to give brands a chance at building more of a relationship. In which case, investment here could yield real results. If customers learn to expect value-add content, perfectly optimised for their device, leading to premium experiences when they click through, they will be much more willing to open your emails generally - even the sales emails.

For retailers or those who interact with their customers in person, there is one very basic adjustment that can drastically improve ROI and is often overlooked - actually capturing email addresses. Sending welcome emails is an excellent way to build a relationship and create loyalty, but offline capture still proves to be a challenge for many.

Companies leading the way in capturing email offline include Mothercare and Schuh, which both offer e-receipts in store. To enjoy the benefit of permanent proof of purchase, no flimsy strips of paper and, in Schuh’s case, extended returns, taking time at the till to provide an email address is little inconvenience by comparison. Happily, this data exchange focused on capturing email addresses also delivers more data to the company in terms of tying offline sales to traceable individuals, enhancing its ability to further segment and target - naturally via email!

Naturally, though, it is critical for companies to grow their email database beyond existing customers and again automation has a role to play. Rather than buying in expensive (and often not particularly responsive) lists, Welsh hotel resort, Celtic Manor, chose to use its existing customers as advocates.

Get More From Inbound Traffic

It’s clear that marketers need to create great, relevant content if they’re to attract customers, and that that content has to work across all the channels that make up the customer’s journey. Further than that, it has to be adaptable to whatever point in the customer lifecycle it happens to find itself at or the different customer personas who might interact with it.

With more consumers than ever accessing content via mobile, email now needs to deliver not just practicalities but engagement, particularly when selling more complex propositions.

When TheMediaBriefing organised the third annual Digital Media Strategies Conference, it needed a content-led approach that was relevant to a large email database covering media associations across Europe. Automation was a critical element both operationally and as a way to find efficiencies as the event registration campaign only had a very limited budget.

The team created mobile-optimised responsive email newsletters containing content created from interviews with key event speakers and editorial from the website. These newsletters were then supported by on-site advertising to drive registrations.

The campaign ultimately delivered a 161% year-on-year rise in delegate revenue, a 74% increase in the number of European delegates attending and a 40:1 return on investment. Subsequently, the organisers also saw their email database double in size, creating positive impact for future events (considering that database managers should consider growing their email lists by 30%+ annually to account for churn).

Creating Business Synapses

Linking email automation to CRM systems helps track customer interactions by making sure the right messages and content are served at the right time. For this to happen smoothly, it is vital to make sure that the organisation’s data systems, CRM systems and other marketing technologies are integrated. It is all too possible for email retargeting to fail and even turn customers off if a purchase has been completed through another channel but the resulting data has not made it to the email programme.

With a solid data foundation on which to build, it is then possible to integrate that information into an email strategy that will enhance its effectiveness. The ability of email to carry dynamic content, for example, is an important step forward in increasing its relevance while still enjoying the benefits of an automated system. Responding to a heatwave in one part of the country in real time to capitalise on opportunities is important, both in terms of gaining sales but also in not annoying a further segment of customers who are simultaneously enjoying a downpour. Combining transactional and behavioural data with real time browsing information also allows automated emails to deliver relevant and targeted upselling emails creating timely purchasing consideration.

More than anything however, these emails need to connect customers with experiences that will encourage conversion. Convenience is key, particularly if the customer is accessing other channels via mobile. Data is central to unlocking this potential, as the information that allowed automated email personalisation will also allow for a personalised experience on landing pages or in apps. Integrating data across the journey allows much of it to be automated thus freeing up the marketer’s resources.

Conclusion

Data will continue to be the key that can unlock a successful automated email strategy. Being able to link insights from data to create relevant content that can entice new customers, convert resistant ones and engage loyalists is vital to generating growth. As a result, automated strategies are only as good as the data that serves them. Clean and appropriate are two watchwords - there is no need to deploy excessive volumes of data, much better to determine from the get-go what data and messaging is most relevant to increase the campaign success.

Email doesn’t exist in a vacuum. While its purpose may be singular - to retarget a dropped basket, to encourage website registration - it interacts with many other touch-points in the business. This gives it the potential to be either a time saver or a time sponge. To make sure it’s the former, landing pages, call centres, eCommerce sites must be resourced to deal with the outcomes created by automated campaigns. In many cases, dynamic personalisation technologies allow automation here too, freeing up marketing professionals and customer service departments to focus on more resource-heavy tasks. Ultimately, with the right groundwork, email automation allows brands to achieve far more, more efficiently and more effectively.