How Email Automation Software Helps Small Businesses

Most business owners understand the importance of email to their overall marketing strategy. Email is never going to be obsolete, irrespective of other rising marketing channels like social media. It’s estimated that there are 3.7 billion email users worldwide and they send 269 billion emails each day. That’s much higher than the number of active Facebook users, which is 2.07 billion, the highest among social media platforms. And a key reason why email automation software (EAS) is so essential to growing your business. 

Small businesses with finite resources and a fairly consistent target market find email marketing easier to grasp and more effective. But how do they understand user responsiveness to their emails? Answer: Email automation software (EAS). It tracks user interactions directly related to email campaigns. It allows people to set up logical steps to further engage subscribers, such as email autoresponders and other follow-ups, based on click-throughs or past purchase behavior.

Email automation software for small businesses can be easily integrated with your CRM system. Alternatively, some CRMs come with a complete, built-in marketing automation solution that provides full email marketing capabilities.

Email software tracks the required information on your prospects, leverages data to segment and personalize campaigns, and provides sales teams with insights into how their prospects engaged with those campaigns. It helps SMBs to establish and execute email marketing strategies, which helps growing businesses get the word out and start nurturing new prospects. 

Email marketing is less demanding and is more sensible for small and medium enterprises (SMBs), as one can easily leverage standard email templates to create fresh content and re-use them for different campaigns. 

That all sounds great, but how can an email automation solution help growing businesses?

Maximize audience engagement

Email automation software is the best tool to nurture your leads. You can send out a series of highly relevant, timely emails that connect better with your customers. When email automation software is integrated internally with your CRM, you can send more personalized communications that speak directly to each individual recipient’s needs, interests, etc.

Unlike social media sites, emails provide a more personal approach to engaging prospects, due to personalization capabilities. You can increase engagement through personalized email subject lines aimed at the segmented audience, because as per the research, 69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line.

Encourage leads to reconnect

Email automation software, when aligned with social media, can increase engagement with and traffic to your website. With EAS, you have the control over the frequency and volume of your email sends. Plus, you can measure and analyze the results of emails you send. For example, with email marketing analytics you can track deliverability, open and click-through rates, bounce and unsubscribe rates, and much more.

By adding links to your email content, you can even connect customers to your social media pages. 96% of marketers promote company social profiles in the headers and footers of their marketing emails, with Pinterest and Instagram promotions seeing a significant rise in this practice since 2012. Email automation smoothly sends personalized emails which can deliver a six-fold increase in transaction rates.

Remove non-existing email addresses

You create a list of email addresses hoping to turn them into prospects, then email them assuming your messages are making it to their inboxes. How do you assess the non-responders? Should you believe that the prospect is not interested? Or is it possible that your email never made it to their inbox? The latter could be true in many cases. The fact is that 30% of subscribers change email addresses annually. So now the question remains, how can you be sure that the email address is active? Email automation software can tell you.

It helps you to track the total number of emails sent, how many of them bounced — hard or soft — and which email addresses bounced. A soft bounce occurs when either the user’s mailbox is full or the email server goes down. A hard bounce occurs when the email address is invalid or the email addresses do not exist. With that information, you can work on reducing your bounce rate and cleansing your list of all non-existing email addresses.

Set timely evaluation of email sending schedules

Setting up an email drip campaign (sending a series of emails to a single customer), is a great way of educating prospects about your company and promoting your new product to existing customers. When done correctly, it helps to build subscribers’ interest and encourage them to make a purchase. Agile CRM’s email marketing software for growing businesses does exactly the same and even more.

Setting up an automated email drip campaign is simple. All you’ve got to do is add a form to your existing website or create a landing page to capture subscriber information, and then set up a basic sequence of emails to be sent out at different intervals whenever a new person subscribes to the list.

Consider change in your design

When sending marketing emails, how sure can you be if the content is resonating with your audience? You may not be able to answer that until you have a system that helps you to track the results.

Email automation software has A/B testing through which you can understand the performance of email content or design. You test one element at a time and track the metrics. Create different templates of emails and measure the response rate for each template, and make changes in your design accordingly. This will result in you coming up with the best design that works wonders for your business.

Set actions based on the metrics

Email automation helps you to take the right action for your business. Based on the metrics, you can send those emails that are working at any given point, design eye-catching campaigns, send personalized prompts to your website visitors as they browse your site, or even set the right time for email.

Contrary to its name, email marketing automation is about building customer relationships. Through the automation process, you can bring together your customer data and all your marketing channels to build closer relationships with your consumers. Email automation can actually be extremely personal – if you do it right.

Conclusion

Email automation campaigns can be as simple or as complex as your business objectives and resources. Once you understand the potential of email automation software, you wouldn’t want to miss the boat. Email is making a comeback, years after social media overshadowed it. Now is the time to bring it back into your digital marketing strategy.