Automation is a system with the help of which you can run an email marketing campaign that adjusts itself according to the given data on needs, interests and demands of your recipients without distracting you from the work. It always welcomes new subscribers, asks potential customers to take actions at the right moment, and even helps in adjustments to change inactive contacts into potential customers by constantly sending email at regular intervals.

In the modern world where engagement and personalized messages always remain top choice, automation transforms struggles of hours into useful interactions and engagements that drive instant results in the form conversions. It is a method in which you set up data in the form of contacts, templates, links and schedule the date, time and reactions of prospects on emails for sending emails one after another at regular intervals. This one time effort allows you to focus on the betterment of your product, brand or service rather than spending a lot of time sending emails by yourself. Want to start email marketing automation and don’t know how to start read out out tips to start automation email marketing.

Thus It is very important to explore the important benefits, best email marketing strategy of automation, tools used for automation, future trends in automation and real world examples of using automation. Let’s Dive In

Advantages and Disadvantages of Email Marketing Automation

Automation serves as the roots for your business in the marketing world. It gives you time to make your product, brand or service a top choice in the eye of your potential customers. As it is controlled by a tool or software that’s why it can make mistakes and does not make sense to understand the feelings of prospects thus there are certain challenges related to email marketing campaign automation.

Let’s discuss the Pros and Cons of automation in email marketing campaigns.

Benefits of Email Marketing Campaign Automation

Here are some of the important benefits of email marketing campaign automation;

• More Efficiency: Once an automated email campaign has started then it leads to more efficiency in repeating tasks like welcome emails and regular intervals follow ups.
• Personalization at Large Scale: Sending relevant messages at exact time on a regular basis leads to highly professionalism characters.
• Higher Engagement: Birthday emails is a feature of automated email marketing campaign automation which has the highest open rates of 45%. Same is the case in abandonment reminders.
• Lead Generation: In an automated email campaign all the content, offers and support is available for sending emails on exact time. It leads to increased lead generation.
• More Customer Retention: Auto arrangement of customers data after a purchase and updating them about future offers improves higher possibilities of a customer to return.
• High ROI: Automation makes campaign work in a more efficient and targeted way which leads to higher ROI.
• Consistent Communication: The best feature of automation is that it offers high standards of communication with the customers.
• Useful Insights: We can get detailed analysis from an automated email marketing campaign for launching future campaigns.
• Segmentation Facilities: Automation makes sure that the right content reaches the right audience based on their needs, behavior and interest.
• Better Customer Experience: On time messages tailored to needs and demands of customers satisfy them during their purchase journey.
• Less Cart Abandonment: In an automated email marketing campaign reminder emails are sent to customers asking them to complete their purchases.
• Trigger Based Offers: Automation regularly sends offer emails when a specific action is taken such as sign up, purchase or a page like which leads to more leads.
• Brand Awareness: Post purchase follow ups and thank you emails during an automation email campaign provide more brand awareness 

Drawbacks of Email Marketing Campaign Automation

Here are the drawbacks of automated email marketing campaign:

• Less Personalization: As it is an automatic system thus it will follow the given instructions about responding not the change in response from customers.
• Over Automation Risks: Automation is good to limit and crossing the limit can raise issues like feeling senders are robotic.
• Inflexibility: Automated email campaigns do not have the ability to adopt the changes in technology trends and make adjustments accordingly.
• Initial Complexity: Automation can be very disturbing for setting an automated email marketing campaign for the first time.
• Cost: For a successful automatic email marketing campaign a high quality platform is necessary which can over budget sometimes.
• Deliverability Issues: If an automated campaign is not set up properly then all the emails direct to spam which demonstrates the whole marketing campaign.
• Data Dependent: Automation is totally dependent on the entered data and a small bug in data can raise problems.
• Limited Creativity: Most of the email sent in automation campaigns are made on existing  templates which can be exhausted.
• Risk of Errors: In automated email marketing campaigns there is no Gap for error because a single error will make your marketing campaign a headache.
• Customer Fatigue: Customers can sometimes get tired of receiving emails one after another and they can report the emails to spam or unsubscribe from the list.
• Security Risks: Although tools provide data security but there is still risk of exposing customers data which leads to security breaches.
• Over Reliance on Templates: All the Automation tools provide pre built templates for making our work easy and relying too much on these templates is bad

Common Automated Email Campaign Types

Steps to Set Up an Automated Email Campaign

If we divide the an automated email marketing campaign in steps then following steps can be implemented:

Tool Selection

As we don’t have enough control on the automatic email marketing campaign and most of the steps are controlled by the tool, thus it is necessary to choose a tool which has multiple features.

Some common features of the marketing tools are given below;

• The tool must have proper prospects research and list features 
• It can segment the audience according to needs, interests and demands in different list
• It have pre built templates and content blocks
• It should have drag and drop feature for easy editing
• It must have responsive designs which are mobile friendly
• It must offers A/B testing feature
• It must have analysis features and offer extensive real time data
• It should tell spam score of email and offer suggestions
• Content suggestions are provided based on audience attraction
• It must have social media integration

Prospects Research

In both automatic and manual email marketing campaign research is necessary because you have to make sure that the recipient must be relevant so that you remain safe from deliverability issues in the future. The tools have made this research process very easy with the help of which you can easily fetch all the relevant prospects from a platform.

Competitors Research

If you want to be successful in the online field and want to grow your business then you will remain one step ahead of your competitors. In an automatic email marketing campaign you will do a deep research on your competitors and find out how they are approaching clients through email marketing. When you get an idea from your competitors on how to launch an effective email marketing campaign through automation then it brings desired results.

Set up Your Automation Workflow

In automatic email campaigns workflow matters a lot because it is very important that all the emails should be sent at the time and to the right people. If you invest time in setting a proper automation email marketing campaign then every sent message will give you better results than ever before. All the information you will put in mapping up your campaign for workflow will direct the path of the whole automated email marketing campaign.

A/B Testing

When you are ready to launch an automated email marketing campaign then run a testing campaign before going for checking how the content, subject lines and designs will perform in actual campaign. Almost all the email marketing tools provide this testing feature.

Manual Checking

After launching an automated email marketing campaign check the time at which the emails were scheduled to be sent, email design on different devices like mobiles, ipads and desktops, images loading time, and time between one and another sent email.

Data Analysis

We receive real time data through an automated email marketing campaign in the form of opens, clicks, interactions, engagements, and conversions etc. Analyze the data deeply and run another automated email campaign separately on those who opens, clicks, interact, engage and convert. This data analysis will allow you to remain toe to toe with your competitors.

Conclusion

After discussing the concept of automation in an email marketing campaign, advantages and disadvantages of automation in email marketing, types of automated email marketing, and steps for a successful automatic email marketing. We can summarize it as automation is the need of the hour in this modern world which has changed into a global village. Automated email marketing gives us an edge over competitors and provides us opportunities to build effective leads. Automated email marketing campaign is a sensitive marketing technique in which a single mistake can disturb your whole efforts. If you are busy with other concerns and want to gain quality leads through automation email marketing then you can hire an email marketing manager with our discussion on who can be an Impactful email marketing coordinator.