Despite all the praise of social media and its promotional leverage, email marketing is still considered the most effective way of generating leads and converting them. Email marketing also comes in useful for businesses because it offers one of the best ROIs among all the other digital marketing channels.
One research report suggests that the median email marketing ROI is around 120%, which is four times higher than what you can get on paid Facebook or Instagram promotions. However, good email marketing ROI is only promised when you carry it out with the right set of measures. Automation is one of those indispensable ingredients that you need to add to your email marketing.
Why Email Automation Matters?
In social media, a single post is published for all your followers. However, in email marketing, you need to communicate with each of your subscribers separately. If you go with writing individual emails for every subscriber, you will need an entire team of writers. They will have to work round the clock to curate unique emails for hundreds or thousands of your subscribers. The resources and time spent on such a hectic customized email campaign are not worth it.
On the other hand, you can compose a standard email and click on “send all.” This way, you will reach out to your entire subscriber list with less effort and in no time. However, such efficient email delivery will do more harm than good. Many recipients will unsubscribe from your mailing list or mark your ID as spam.
Email automation offers the solution for such a bind where you are dealing with a lot of recipients and want to customize their email experience but without straining your resources. If you are already using an email marketing platform such as Mailchimp, you can leverage its automation feature for streamlining your interaction with existing and prospective customers.
As Mailchimp development experts and solution providers, we are going to discuss some steps and measures that you should take for making the most of its automation features.
5 Ways to Leverage Mailchimp Automation Features
Let’s look at all the valuable work that you can carry out with the help of Mailchimp automation triggers.
1. You Can Manage Your Audience
Many users think of mailing lists as a static record of addresses that you can use to send automated emails. However, that’s not the case. Any effective mailing list has a dynamic nature. It continuously changes. Since these changes are subjected to the actions of your audience, you can manage it in a better manner by using the automation feature. Here, we are going to share some Mailchimp automation trigger features you can use for audience management.
Automated Welcome Email upon Signup
If you want to welcome every new subscriber, you can use the Signup trigger. When you use this automation feature, you send an email to users signing up for your emails or have been included in your emailing list for the first time. Welcome emails have an impressive opening rate, making Signup trigger a great automation feature for making new prospects.
Tag Your Contacts and Verify Them
Mailchimp offers you to add tags to your contacts to make your mailing list more structured and organized. These tags allow you to identify and profile your hundreds of contacts. This profiling then helps you in keeping the customization intact while emailing them.
Mailchimp also offers the Added Tag automation trigger. This trigger entails sending an email to contact after you add a certain tag to it (prospect, media contact, influencer, etc.). This automated email is an effective way to be sure about the tag you have assigned to a particular contact. The tag verification done by this automation feature will go a long way in keeping your mailing lists organized.
You can also use triggers to send automated emails to those subscribers who have changed categories within your audience. In short, Mailchimp automation lets you interact with your audience in a more personalized manner without resorting to manual emails and communications.
2. Get More Traction on Your Campaigns
If you have devised a promotional campaign for your customers and want to make sure almost all of them interact with it, you can put Mailchimp automation to use. The email marketing platform offers its users an entire set of triggers centered on campaign activity. Let’s see what those triggers are and when you need to set them off.
Opened Campaign — For Nurturing Leads and Converting Them into Sales
You can use the Opened Campaign automation trigger to send an email to a contact who has opened your campaign. Opened campaign email shows that the subscriber is in the initial lead nurturing phase. With the Opened Campaign trigger, you can send them a more response-inducing email so they can move up the sales funnel.
Clicked Campaign — For Converting Lead into Sales
Clicked Campaign is a Mailchimp automation trigger that sends an email to a contact who has clicked on a link provided in your campaign message. The click-through suggests that the recipient is considering the campaign. At this critical juncture, a well-thought-out automated email can develop the intent among interested subscribers. Once recipients develop intention, they swiftly move to evaluate and then purchase the given product/service/ campaign.
Not Opened/Not Clicked Campaign— Getting a Second Chance with Subscribers
Mailchimp also enables you to send automated emails to all those contacts who haven’t opened your campaign message or clicked on the link provided in it. This automation trigger allows you to have another attempt to convince your target audience. The email written for this automation trigger must be persuasive through and through. Also, add an interesting subject line that can promptly draw out a response from recipients.
People who open a campaign message and click on the given link after ignoring it first pay more attention to its content. Therefore, email copies for those automation triggers should also be specific and clearly outline the deal that the campaign entails.
3. Streamline Your Drip Marketing Campaigns
If you are devising an email series for a drip promotional campaign, you need to utilize the automation triggers provided by Mailchimp for managing workflow activity. Many times, users start a drip campaign without putting checks and triggers in place. In many cases, they unknowingly inundate subscribers’ inboxes that only prove to be counterproductive. The workflow activity triggers allow you to steer your drip campaign for a better response.
Previous Email Opened and Clicked
These are two separate automation triggers that you can use to send the next email of your drip campaign once the recipients have already opened the previous email in the series and clicked on its link. By using the Previous Email Opened trigger, you can make sure that your drip campaign messages are not getting accumulated in inboxes without recipients opening them.
Previous Email Clicked trigger sends through the next email of the campaign when recipients have already clicked on the link provided in the previous email. Clicking on the previous email is a strong indication that your drip campaign is heading in the right direction. Therefore, make sure that email messages devised for this trigger further harness consumers’ interest in the subject of your drip campaign.
Previous Email Not Opened and Clicked
When you don’t use robust email automation software like Mailchimp, drip campaigns become tricky. For instance, you don’t get any idea about how recipients are responding to the earlier messages of the campaign. You can certainly track the impressions on the link you have provided in the mail. But it doesn’t always draw the complete picture of your drip campaign status.
With Mailchimp’s Previous Email Not Opened and Clicked Triggers, you get to know how your drip campaign is doing while also taking the necessary measures to keep it afloat. For instance, you can send a convincing email to all those contacts that didn’t click on the link given in the previous email of the drip campaign. Similarly, the Previous Email Not Opened trigger allows you to send click-worthy messages to people who didn’t open the previous email.
4. Devise a Dynamic Marketing Strategy for Your Online Store
The digital commercial landscape entails cutthroat competition. Customers find themselves with a lot of options every day, and thus e-commerce stores have to put their A-game to retain their existing customers. Customer retention on the digital medium is not possible without putting a dynamic marketing strategy in place.
While there can be many elements of dynamic e-commerce marketing, here we will discuss how Mailchimp automation can help you with that.
Reach Out to Customers When They Make a Purchase
Mailchimp allows you to send an automated email to customers when they purchase from your online store. The best thing about this automation trigger is it is not just about general purchasing in the store. You can also set these automation emails as per particular categories and products.
For instance, if a person buys a pair of shoes from your online store, you can send them an automated mail with more exciting offers of shoes and apparel available on your store. This trigger is a great way to customize the shopping experience of your customers. Also, sending those emails increases the recall value of your online store in the consumers’ minds.
Reach Out to Inactive Consumers
Gone are the days when enterprises would manually make lists of their dormant customers to devise a particular campaign for them. Mailchimp allows you to integrate this integral aspect of customer retention seamlessly. You can pick a particular duration since the last time a consumer bought from you and set it as a trigger for an automated email.
For example, you can devise a discount offer for all your consumers who haven’t bought from your store for 12 months. After fixing the duration and setting the trigger, you don’t have to do anything. The automation feature will send that discount offer mail to every customer who has completed one year without making a purchase.
Send a Reminder to Customers Who Abruptly Discontinue Shopping
You can also send an automated reminding mail to people who have logged in your online store but abandoned the cart in the middle or fail to checkout. Statistics suggest that such reminders record a great response from customers.
5. Make Your Consumers Feel Special
The whole point of customized email marketing is to give a personalized experience to recipients. The date-based automation helps you in adding that dash of personalization to your emails. Apart from sending emails on Christmas, Easter, 4th of July, etc., you can also reach out to your customers on their birthdays, anniversaries, and the date they have subscribed to your services or bought your products.
6. Create an Automated and More Personalized Customer Journey
Mailchimp has recently introduced a beta feature called Customer Journeys. This feature entails an automated path of an individual customer comprising of different interactions they will trigger as they move through the sales funnel while blazing their own trail. This unique path will be a sum of actions and interactions they have or haven’t gone through the entire process.
This new feature essentially works like a flowchart where a certain process is followed upon the fulfillment of a certain condition. If that certain condition is not met, it goes in another direction. By mapping out this customer journey, you can use email automation for interacting with customers more intuitively.
