Best Practices for Email Marketing Automation

Illustration that symbolically represents the article topic - Best Practices for Email Marketing Automation

Everyone is talking about how amazing email marketing automation is, but that sidelines a dark secret. Just like with every other tool, there is a correct and optimal way to use it, and a lot of incorrect ways to approach it.

The bad news is that almost all discussions about marketing automation obsess about features and what’s possible. Very few go into actual strategies and how to do things the right way.

Fortunately, we just prepared this “best practices” guide. You really need to check this out whether you are completely new to automations, or already using them but wondering on the best approach.

Pick the right implementation partner

If we are going to be talking about best practices and getting things right, choosing the wrong platform is one of the worst mistakes you can make. If your email marketing automation platform doesn’t provide the support and guidance you need, it is guaranteed that you won’t get far with it.

Unfortunately, most marketing automation platforms put all of their focus on the software, and not the actual users. At Emercury we do things differently. Emercury is founded by experienced marketers and we see every user as a partner, not a “software user”. 

It is our goal to help you implement email marketing best practices in a way that improves your bottom line. The software is just the tool we used to help you achieve this goal. To get a sense of what this experience is like, consider booking a free demo while I still have time for those.

Delineate your goals before you start to automate

Look, automations are very fun to work with, but you have to remember that they are just a tool. Automating things just for the sake of automation will get you nowhere. You have to actually understand what it is that you are automating and why.

The phrase “email marketing automation” gives you a hint about what it’s all about. And that is automating marketing processes through the use of email. The reason I mention this? I want to hint at the fact that you first have to understand marketing in general.

What are you trying to accomplish with your campaigns? Is the goal of a campaign to build trust, improve your reputation, demonstrate social proof? Is it about taking a person who signed up in exchange for a lead-magnet and getting them to register for your free trial?

The most obvious example of a clearly defined automation is something like a welcome automation sequence. You can check out our guide on creating a welcome email series, to get some really nice insight on the relationship between goals and automation.

Decide on relevant data-points in advance, but don’t overdo it

I realize all this “data” jargon might sound-scary, but I assure you it’s a lot simpler than it sounds. When we talk about “data points”, we just mean “information relevant to the marketing journey”. 

For example if you are in b2b and your registration form asks about “number of employees”, this is a data-point that you can utilize in automation. 

For example you might have your automation send out a different offer to the companies with “1-10 employees”, versus those with “10-30 employees”. Or perhaps, you might even instantly have the latter added on a list for your sales team to phone up straight away.

Now, this is just one random example. And in this example we store a data-point inside of a custom field called “number of employees”. However, data can also be stored in the form of tags. So you can build an Emercury automation where if a subscriber visits the pricing page, they get automatically assigned with the “Viewed Pricing Page” tag. And then, by leveraging this tag you can have automations that treat contacts differently based on whether they have this tag or not.

You have to set the foundations first though

We’re here to discuss best practices, or rather how to get the best results and avoid frustration and unnecessary mistakes. And when it comes to data-points, the best practice is to plan them out in advance.

That is, you will need to actually sit down and consider which data-points are relevant to your business, sales and marketing processes. And then decide how you would utilize those data-points in your marketing automations.

You might initially decide to really branch-out and have the automations treat companies differently even on just small differences. So you might have a “1-3 employees” tag, another “4-6 employees” tag, and then a “7-10” employees tag.

However, from actually doing marketing automation and studying the reports you might find out you are doing too much work without much added benefit. So you might decide that it should be more like “1-10 employees”, “11-30 employees”, “50-200 employees”. 

Obviously, it can go the other way too

A reverse example might be only storing a lead’s state and not their city. But then you see that your volume of leads grows quite high, and you need to treat leads differently even within the same state. 

For example you find that leads from one city respond differently than those in another city in the exact same state. So you might add a “city” data-point and utilize that in your automations.

A mistake people make is that they try to predict everything in advance. You can’t. You will have to change how and which data-points you store and how. This will happen as you study your reports and learn from your activities in the real-world.

On that note, I’m happy to report we’ve recently introduced a pretty cool feature to help with the iteration process. You can now merge tags, which is pretty cool. Read about that and more in the announcement post here.

Keep things as simple as possible unless necessary otherwise

What I find with utilizing email marketing automation is that people go to one of two extremes. Some people jump into things with no prior education or thinking behind the automations. Others do the opposite and spend too much time studying and learning all the features before they send out a single email.

Both are equally bad. Fortunately I have identified the source behind both of these, and I have the solution. Due to all the marketing hype by different software companies, people have come to associate marketing automation with really complex and advanced scenarios utilizing all kinds of fancy and advanced features.

Yes, it is cool that automations can get so complex that they can micromanage every little difference between two customers. However, you don’t need that in order to make a profit. In fact just like everything else, the 90-10 rule applies. 

Simple automations will bring back 90% of the same ROI that you can get by going hyper-personalized and super-advanced and fancy. So the trick is to start off by building simple drip-sequence automations first, and then gradually add in more advanced features.

Here is what that looks like

To start, that means simply creating a sequence of emails that are sent some days apart. You go into the automation editor, place email 1, place a “wait 3 days” step, then place email 2, and so on. 

Then, you can introduce simple branching based on actions taken within the emails. Let’s say that email 3 is a key email in this sequence. It’s the main email in the sequence and the one that you want the most people to see.

So you would know that people who opened email 3 need to be treated differently than those who didn’t. So you put a condition such that people who didn’t open email 3 are sent an email asking them “Hey did you check out the email the other day”, or something to that effect.

Over-time you can get more and more advanced and personalize things based on an increasing number of data points. That includes whether people triggered some event (say they watched a video on your website), received a certain tag, or sets of tags, and so on.

Build automations that complement, not conflict with your broadcasts

One of the biggest misconceptions we see out there is that people think automations replace traditional broadcast campaigns. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, email automations and email broadcasts perform completely different roles.

And if you want to utilize automations in the right way, you want to make sure that they complement your broadcasts instead of being in conflict with them. To do that isn’t all that difficult, you will just want to get educated on the difference between the two. 

For that, I suggest reading my super-popular article about “automation vs. bulk” featured over at MailCon. If you want a short summary: automations serve the role of automating any process that is repeatable. Broadcasts are for things that are one-off. The best automations start off from an idea that was initially tested and verified with a good broadcast campaign.

email marketing automation complimenting broadcasts

In addition both can be used to gather data and track the customer journey, but in different ways and each one has different strengths and weaknesses.

And the most important part is that you need to know how to get the ratio right. It is possible to do too much of your emailing through automations, or too much of it in the shape of broadcasts. See the article to understand how to get the ratio right. Hint, it also changes based on whether you are new to email marketing, or the list has existed for a while. But more on that in the article at MailCon.

Integrate across the stack

Talk to an experienced marketer, and they will help dispel many myths for you. And one of the major things that experienced marketers have come to realize is that the promise of “an all-in-one marketing & business solution” is a lie.

A tool that tries to do everything will do everything poorly, and overcharge you for the benefit of trying to be a jack-of-all-trades. What do successful businesses do instead? They build their own “stack” composed of specialized best-of-breed solutions.

So they might use Emercury as the core of their stack, but then combine it with their favorite landing page builder, for example something like clickfunnels, elementor, or anything else. 

Instead of trying to get software that does both sales and marketing, they will integrate their core platform with a sales tool. And so, this can be the tool that the sales team prefers and loves using. That might be a CRM, or even just a plain and simple Google spreadsheet

The point is that when you build a stack you decide how to combine the parts and build a system that combines the different tools that you and your employees like working with.

This is where integration comes in

You want to choose a platform that goes out of its way to make it possible to integrate things your way. For example, at Emercury we’ve gone out of our way to make sure that you can integrate anything you want. 

Aside from building “native integrations” for the most popular tools such as Calendly, Gravity Forms, Shopify, etc… We have gone a step further. Emercury provides not only full outgoing webhooks, but also incoming webhooks, which is almost unheard of.

If you’re not familiar with webhooks, let me explain. You can set up a webhook such that the moment something happens in your Emercury account, this is sent to another one of your tools, literally in milliseconds. Whether this is a contact opening an email, receiving a tag, any change of custom data, an unsubscribe or any of these major events. You can look at a simple use case here.

That means that your automations are not limited to only working within the confines of the Emercury system. In fact, your automations can also influence other systems across your stack.

Incoming webhooks are the opposite. They allow you to instantly receive relevant information or changes from other parts of your stack. So with this, you can have your other tools send data to Emercury the moment something happens. And then Emercury can use this to assign a tag, change a custom-field, or anything else that influences or guides your marketing automations.

Don’t hesitate to ask for help

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, but every business is different, so we have to generalize.

If you want to see how automation can be implemented 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 best practices, and help you see how you can use Emercury to improve your bottom-line, because this is what it’s all about in the end.

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… That is, if you grab a username while registrations are still open. Be warned, 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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