Streamlining Your Outreach Efforts for Maximum Results
Even though it's one of the oldest technologies on the Internet, email is still one of the most powerful marketing tools in your arsenal. Email newsletters represent the primary form of content used by 81 percent of B2B marketers for a reason. What's more, email has the highest potential return on investment of any marketing channel, at $42 for ever dollar spent.
In order to realize that potential, you need to know how to make the most of email marketing. That begins with basic email management: Creating a shared email inbox to improve communication, collaboration and productivity. To aid in personalization and targeting, you should also integrate email marketing into your CRM platform.
The true secret to maximizing your email marketing efforts, however, is automation.
What is Email Automation?
Email automation involves sending personalized messages to prospects, leads, and customers based on a set of predefined rules and conditions. These can be as simple or as complex as necessary. Many businesses create intricate branching email flows, allowing them to send an automated message in response to nearly any significant action.
For example, let's say your business sells project management software. Conditions for emails might include:
- Recently purchasing a license or subscription.
- Failing to finish onboarding within a certain timeframe.
- Subscribing to your newsletter via a blog post targeting a specific industry.
- An impending renewal date or credit card expiration date.
- Receiving help from customer support.
Benefits of Email Automation
Boost Revenue
So long as you've created an effective email marketing strategy, email automation can have a knock-on effect on your business's revenue. Not only can it help you increase conversions, it's also invaluable for customer retention, upselling, and cross-selling.
Enable 24/7 Outreach
Even the largest sales and marketing teams lack the capacity to respond manually to every lead. With an automated email workflow, they don't need to. Instead, they simply draft some templates and set some rules.
Rather than babysitting an inbox or sales portal, your team can let the sales email automation platform do the work for them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Create A Better Customer Experience
Email automation allows you to easily deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. More importantly, it allows you to do so while also building a relationship through personalized content. In the long-term, this can both improve customer satisfaction and make qualified leads likelier to convert.
Recapture Lost Leads
There are many reasons a lead may become disengaged during the sales process. In some cases, those leads are impossible to recapture, and likely weren't qualified to begin with. Most of the time, however, all it takes is the right re-engagement email to draw them back in and renew their interest.
Tracking user engagement and sending those emails automatically is an incredibly laborious task. With email automation, your business has a ready-made selection of pre-written messages that you can trigger based on criteria within your CRM software.
Improve Awareness
Today's customers deal with an incredible amount of noise. It's easy for your business to get lost in that cacophony, especially if you're smaller or less-known than competitors. Email marketing automation helps you prevent that from happening, allowing you to send perfectly-timed messaging that keeps you front-of-mind without overwhelming or annoying your audience.
This is just as valuable for customer retention as it is for lead management. Automation makes it incredibly simple to execute strategies to improve customer retention and boost customer loyalty. You can easily send everything from feedback requests to special offers.
Make Fewer Mistakes
Human beings make mistakes. An automated sales system does not. It simply does what it's been instructed to do.
Having a set of standardized email templates alongside an automation tool ensures that you don't need to worry about sending the wrong email, sending an email at the wrong time, or making mistakes in your messages.
Save Time (And Effort)
Managing, segmenting, and communicating with email lists represents a huge time commitment. It's also incredibly repetitive. Even though email marketing is extremely important, the time you'd have to spend manually drafting and sending every email is best directed elsewhere.
With automation, you're free to focus on other value-generating tasks, offloading the mundane aspects of email marketing to your software.
Reduce Marketing Overhead
As the old saying goes, time is money. The more time your sales and marketing teams have to spend managing your email flows, the more money your business has to direct towards them. The more money you spend, the lower the return on your investment into email.
Automation more or less eliminates that cost, allowing you to direct your budget to more impactful areas.
Improve Segmentation
Traditionally, sales teams relied on personal experience, intuition, and the sales funnel to segment a business's email contacts. With email marketing automation, they can put that responsibility aside. At its most basic, an email automation tool allows a business to organize people based on where they are in the sales funnel.
More advanced automation workflows can also incorporate lead scoring or grading and segment customers according to a wide range of different criteria. This in turn allows for even better targeting and personalization while also providing your sales team with insight into which leads are likeliest to buy.
Key Features of Email Automation Tools
An effective sales email automation platform should, at the minimum, include the following:
- Deliverability: The best-written marketing email is meaningless if it triggers a contact's spam filters. It's important to find an email marketing automation tool that allows you to test, assess and improve deliverability.
- Customizability and Flexibility: A good automation platform should allow you to configure multiple different types of email automation with triggers that include behavior, timeframe, date, and transaction.
- Personalization and Segmentation: Particularly if you're managing multiple lists, campaigns, or flows, robust segmentation capabilities are a must.
- Analytics and Reporting: Marketing is data-driven. Even with automation, you should always be looking for opportunities to optimize. Without detailed analytics on factors such as bounce rate, click through rate, and open rate, you cannot do this.
- A/B Testing: Closely related to analytics, an email marketing tool should also allow your business to easily test and assess the effectiveness of different email variations.
- Third-Party Integrations: Email marketing is just one facet of your sales and outreach efforts. Look for a platform that can integrate easily with your other marketing tools, ideally one with a highly functional API.
- Email Templates: Whether you're writing a newsletter or crafting a re-engagement email, it's much easier to write compelling content if you start with a strong base such as a library of predefined visual templates.
Master B2B Sales Email Automation with Fireberry
The right message at the right time can make all the difference in the world. That's what makes email marketing so powerful. It allows businesses to reach out to customers at the precise moment when doing so will have the greatest impact.
Without automation, however, that's easier said than done, requiring countless hours of tedious manual work and with the potential to still miss out on opportunities. With the right automation tool, however? Your sales team regains that wasted time, freeing them up to focus on closing more deals while your email workflow cultivates relationships with your most valuable contacts.
At Fireberry, we've created an industry-leading CRM built with integration and automation in mind. Easy to use, scale, and customize, it provides you with everything you need to automate not just your email marketing, but processes across your entire sales funnel.
Reach out to us today to see for yourself.
