If you aren’t leveraging automation workflows, you’re hurting your bottom line, and here’s why… The truth is that as an email marketer, your job is to produce more customers for your business. However, you’ll often find that one of your biggest limitations is time itself. There is so much to do, and only a finite amount of time. What if there was a way to get more time back?
Well, the good news is that this is exactly what automation workflows achieve. They are a way to “buy more time” so that you can accomplish more in less time, and get more customers for your business. The more marketing work you can outsource to automations, the more you can accomplish.
In a sense, automation workflows are like a hack that lets you kick start a positive growth cycle. However, you need to understand how to leverage them, and how the pieces fit together. That is what this guide sets out to help you with.
The biggest piece that most marketers miss
When people think of automation workflows, they tend to imagine automating marketing campaigns and email sequences. While that is the most basic default use case, it’s far from the most powerful thing you can do with automation.
All you have to consider is the following: what makes a good automated campaign or sequence? Well, the first and most important thing is the content itself.
However, the very next most important success factor is how well you have personalized the sequence. In fact, consider the following. What is “valuable” to one person, isn’t valuable to another. This is where personalization comes in.
But then, how do you actually implement effective personalization? What is the most important factor to personalizing in a powerful and effective way? Well, it is how much individualized data you have about a given subscriber.
The more data you have about what makes that subscriber unique, the more you can treat them differently to other subscribers. But here’s a kicker: gathering data is something you have to work on deliberately.
Now, at Emercury we do in fact gather some of the best raw data for you automatically. We track email opens, email clicks and if you enable tracking, also any website visits and events. But there’s a reason I refer to this stuff as “raw data”. There is one more step to converting this into actionable data, the kind you can personalize with, and that is what we’ll discuss next.
Leverage automation workflows to gain enhanced data
What do I even mean by “enhanced data”? Well, all personalization in email marketing is based on customer data. And while some of it works off of the raw data like opens, clicks and visits, most personalization goes a step further.
Yes, you can create sequences where “if a person opens email X, send this other upsell email”. However, once you go past the basics, most of your personalization will rely on enhanced data that contains additional context.
For example, you’ll want to send a different campaign to the “Highly engaged” segment, and a different email to the “Low interest” segment. And using segments like this is actually a perfect example for going beyond raw data.
If you go and try our advanced segment builder, you’ll find that you can create a segment using any combination of source data that you want. So you might decide to have a segment that includes anyone who’s opened your emails in the last 10 days and name it the “warm leads” segment. This is an example of enhanced data because it gives “meaning” that you can leverage in your personalization.
However, segments aren’t the only type of enhanced data. In fact, you often base segments themselves on a combination of other enhanced data such as tags, custom field values, etc. Basically anything outside of raw data (opens, clicks and visits) can be called enhanced data that provides additional meaning.
However, enhancing data in the first place is where automation workflows really shine
A lot of marketers will talk about all the things you can do once you have enhanced data. They will show you all the cool workflows and journeys you can build based on the different tags, lists and custom field values in your account.
However, for some reason, almost no one talks about the best way to obtain that enhanced data in the first place. And this is one of the biggest secrets that I often share on my consultation calls. Automation workflows are the best and easiest way to enhance data. Let our automation systems do the work for you.
At this point you probably want examples, and that is indeed the best way to understand this secret. Let’s say that you’re building an email sequence where you drop a condition like “If they open this email, then do X”. Most marketers will simply attach a module that sends the opener an email. What you can also do however, is also attach a tagging module and give the opener a certain tag.
This is how you attach additional meaning to raw data. For example, if the email they opened is about men’s clothing, you can attach a “Men’s clothing interest” tag to the subscriber. Do you see how this adds meaning to raw data?
Or to take things a step further, let’s look at our events and tracking system. Let’s say that the subscriber visits your pricing page. You can build a workflow automation that assigns a “hot lead” or “viewed pricing page” to this subscriber.
You can then of course use this enhanced data to treat such people differently. For example, you can build different segments based on the presence or lack of said tags.
Or you can use smart personalization to show different content to different subscribers. You can literally have the same email show different sentences to people who have the “Viewed pricing page” tags, versus those who don’t have it. Pretty cool, right?
The top things to automate with automation workflows
I am a really big believer in the 80-20 principle and leveraging a stepping stone philosophy to mastering things. And while there are literally thousands of things you can automate with a workflow, I think it’s best to focus on the stuff that has the highest leverage first.
The 5 types of automation workflows I’ll share with you are things that will give you an immediate boost in profits. And at the same time they’ll give you a good foundation in understanding how to build automation workflows.
1) Welcome sequences
This is something that every business must have. It doesn’t matter what your industry or business model is. If you have an email list (and you should), then you need a welcome email sequence. There are multiple reasons for this.
Please consider that first emails always have the highest open and click through rates in all of email marketing. No matter what you do, you’ll never have campaigns that can beat the engagement rates of welcome emails, or even welcome sequences.
The initial period after people sign up is when they are most likely to engage with your emails. And if you’re smart, you want to leverage this fact. If you do, you’ll experience quite a few benefits.
By delivering a great experience and offering lots of value, you leave a good first impression. And if you do it right, you can kick start the habit-formation process, so that people get used to opening your emails.
Additionally, as weird as it might sound, this welcoming period is also a good time to sell stuff. It is indeed too early to do hard-selling, but you can insert some softer calls-to-action and offers at the end of your emails. As long as the welcome sequence is mostly about providing value, it is ok to throw in an offer or two somewhere in the sequence.
To learn more about welcoming sequences, be sure to check out our Guide to Creating a Welcome Email Series
2) Re-engagement campaigns
List hygiene is an important part of email marketing. This means that you need to keep your list clean by removing people who no longer engage. If you fail to do hygiene and keep the dead weight on your list, it will lower your reputation with the email providers. None of them want to send emails to people who never open your emails.
Now, while most beginners fail at cleaning lists, you can take this too far in the other direction. When marketers learn about list-hygiene, many of them just go ahead and remove unengaged subscribers straight away. However, you always want to give the inactive subscribers one more chance to re-engage. This is where re-engagement campaigns come in.
Some marketers will just manually do a re-engagement broadcast here and there as part of list hygiene. While this isn’t too bad, creating an automated campaign has many more benefits. For example, you can create an intelligent sequence that involves multiple emails, and conditional branching based on the response of the subscriber.
In terms of how to set this up, the simplest way is to create a special tag. You will want your re-engagement automation to trigger when a subscriber is assigned this tag. How do you assign a tag to all the “inactives”? The best way is to leverage our advanced segment builder.
First, create a segment and use whatever criteria best defines “inactives”. Then set the special tag to all members of the segment. This will auto-enroll them into the automated workflow.
If you want to learn more about re-engagement campaigns check out this guide: How to Make a Killer Re-engagement Email Series and Win Back Lost Subscribers
3) Automated upsells and cross-sells
My job in this guide is to help you make more money from your email list, on autopilot. And one of the best ways to do that is to implement upsell and cross-sell automations.
I am often amazed at how many people leave money on the table by not implementing strategies like this. The fact is that people who have bought one thing from you, are the most likely to buy something else as well. This is where upsells and cross-sells come in.
An upsell is when you encourage a customer to purchase a higher-tier or more advanced version of what they have already purchased. Alternatively, a cross-sell involves nudging them to purchase a complimentary product or service.
As for building the actual automation workflows, you’ll generally have them trigger off of a tag. So you should spend some time planning what kind of tags you assign upon purchase, and whether the automations launch instantly, or after a certain delay.
To learn more about upsell and cross-sells campaigns, check out The Beginners Guide to Up-sell and Cross-sell Emails.
4) Abandoned cart recovery
If you’re thinking that this strategy applies only to e-commerce businesses, you are wrong, and I’ll explain why in a bit. However, if you do run an ecommerce store of some kind, and haven’t implemented abandoned cart automation, it should be a priority. You are literally rejecting money that’s yours for the taking, if you haven’t implemented this yet.
With that said, let’s go back to the businesses which aren’t traditional ecom businesses. If you sell anything online, or charge customers for a service online, you can apply this same strategy as well. And there are two ways to do this.
If you use an ecommerce solution to charge people for your product such as WooCommerce, you can still implement an email like this. It works just as well even if you don’t have a store full of products. And yes, you can use something like WooCommerce to charge for things like eBooks, memberships or services.
Alternatively, if you charge people another way, with most payment processors, there will be some way to implement this. You might need help from a developer, and they’ll need to trigger an email send from Emercury using our API, but it can still be done.
To learn more about abandoned cart strategies, check out our Best Practices for Abandoned Cart Emails.
5) Automated cross-system integration and handover
Whilst email marketing can, and should be at the core of business-growth, your business has other parts as well. And you often want to somehow integrate these parts with your email marketing in some way.
To give you a practical example of what I mean, let’s talk about sales. Your selling process might or might not involve sales reps. However, I’m sure you’re familiar with how important sales reps can be in businesses where they are behind most of the bigger sales.
But how do you actually create a link between sales and the customer journey process? On the one hand, you should be automating the customer journey using something like Emercury. Your email automations are leading subscribers from cold leads, nurturing them over time, and getting them ready for the sales reps. But how do the sales reps know that it’s their turn?
This is where integration comes into play. You can set things up in Emercury so that when certain criteria are met, we automatically send data to some other system. For example, perhaps your reps keep track of leads to work on, and they keep this list in some other system. Well, you can use integrations to send the right data elsewhere, when needed. You can accomplish this either with one of our many native integrations, or using outgoing webhooks.
This sales example is just one of an unlimited number of possibilities. Other examples of utilizing integration can involve getting data from elsewhere. So whereas outgoing webhooks are about us automatically sending information to your other systems, you can use incoming webhooks to automatically deal with data coming into your Emercury account from other systems.
To learn more, check out our example use case: Using Webhooks & Automation to Send New Sales Leads to a Google Sheet
Get A Strategic Partner On Your Side
There’s no need to go at this alone. While we do put out a lot of free content to help you, nothing beats a one-on-one conversation. In these articles we try to help clarify things as best as possible. However, every business is different, so we have to generalize.
If you want to understand better how to implement email marketing in your specific business, let’s have a chat. At the moment I am still able to do some free demos, so be sure to book one while I can still do these.
I would love to hear about your specific needs, challenges and any confusion you might have about email marketing strategies, including email segmentation. And then, help you see how you can use Emercury to improve your bottom-line.
Alternatively, or in addition to booking a free demo, you can also grab a username for our forever-free-plan while we still have it. It’s probably the most generous email marketing automation plan on the planet. We include almost every feature in this plan, with very few restrictions.
Remember, you get to keep this plan for life, for free… Provided that you grab a username while registrations are still open. Note that we might decide to pull this way-too-generous offering at any point. So click that link to check if we still allow registrations.
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