Email automation campaigns can be extremely tactical and effective if done right. No matter if your organization is large or small, it is more important than ever to implement a proactive approach in order to raise awareness in saturated or untapped markets. To make things easier, there are many email automation tools on the market that are affordable and will help boost your pipeline value from the start of any email marketing campaign.
What’s so good about using an automation tool?
More often than not, you can reach out to thousands of contacts per month as opposed to a limited amount of contacts via a standard CRM. The reporting features allow for “intelligent” follow up management; meaning you can see stats on email bounces, open rates, click through rates but more importantly you can understand the behavior of each contact. So prioritizing follow ups for sales reps becomes so much more strategic as they can pull reports to show contacts who clicked on website links or people who opened messages multiple times. It eliminates blind follow up tasks, plain and simple.
Having trouble driving attendance to webinars?
Whether your company holds webinars once a year or once a month, it’s critical to maximize attendance from your target audience. Why not try an email automation program if your success rate hasn’t been as high as you’d like. A simple email highlighting a few main topics and why you thought they’d be interested in attending is all you really need to include. Try and keep the email clean enough where it can be read in under a minute. You can also provide a link for them to sign up or have them respond to you personally if they’d like to attend. With an automation tool, you can schedule and send follow up emails about the webinar based on behavior. For example, you can send a reminder about the webinar a day before to all the contacts who have already opened the initial message or send a revised invitation to the webinar to all the contacts that have not yet opened any messages. After the webinar has occurred you can still use the report analytics to follow up and prospect ‘non-attendees’ who may have clicked on multiple messages, website links and/or webinar links.
Some quick tips when facilitating an email campaign:
- Don’t try to “sell” in your subject line. If it looks like spam, it will get treated like spam.
- Segment the most targeted contact list you can. Focus on filling it with the most appropriate titles within the best possible industries and company profiles that match your criteria.
- If your contact list is not that targeted, try sending an initial mass referral email to uncover better contacts
- Don’t congest the body of your email with product dumping. Paste excess bullet points that contain additional features or benefits underneath your signature to make the email look more reader friendly
- Avoid sending on Mondays or Friday afternoons for the obvious reasons that people are more busy and are trying to finish up for the weekend. We’ve consistently had high open rates when sending mid-week in the early AM.
Why a sophisticated email marketing program often works is because you can personalize and target contacts based on a particular set of behaviors; not just throwing out an email to the masses and hoping something sticks. Have you ever had tried using this method? If so, what has your experience been?
