Personalization
One of the most impactful ways in which marketing automation allows us to improve the email marketing experience is through personalization. Customers today expect a lot from the companies they purchase from, and an effective lead nurturing program can provide a completely tailored marketing experience to meet each customer’s needs.
Statista notes that emails without personalization showed an open rate of 13.1 per cent, while those that included personalization boasted an 18.8 per cent open rate.
Personalization can include anything from using the customers’ name, inquiring about the performance of a recent purchase, or providing individualized product suggestions based on their search history and interest.
Segmentation and testing
With the information collected from a CRM, entrepreneurs will also be able to digest and spot similarities between their customers. This will allow for segmentation (or grouping) of customers with similar traits, such as demographics, purchase history and even open or CTR rates. Separate campaigns can then be developed for each segmented group, targeting specific actions or interests for each email campaign.
According to DMA’s National Client Email Survey, a segmented email campaign can drive as much as a 760 percent increase in revenue compared to a one-size-fits-all campaign.
Blending segmentation with marketing automation allows marketers to adapt to customer needs and test different approaches. Creative or alternate subject lines for a specific group of customers can be released as an A/B test.
Customer retention can be addressed by attempting to engage customers who have stopped opening emails by testing a new and refreshed email template. This will allow you to potentially reintroduce a relationship, retain customers and make sales, where previous marketing efforts may have been falling flat.
Identifying trends
All of this data and automation can help startups to identify trends within their customers and business cycle.
Perhaps emails that announce a special offer or sale have the largest open rate and lead to the biggest boost in revenue. Or, maybe you’ll discover that the CTR is the highest when an email links to a blog post with interesting and useful information.
Through the use of marketing automation and your CRM, these trends can first be identified and then used to predict the future performance of email marketing campaigns. Any identified trends can even help set ROI goals and expectations.
Your company’s email marketing campaigns will continue to thrive, as long as they are accompanied by the right marketing automation technology to help gather, analyze and use the information to create robust and effective campaigns that target the customer.
