Digital email marketing
One of the best benefits of digital email marketing, is the ability to automate marketing communications.
You need an email marketing provider or really good programmer to help you with email automation.
Few automation scenarios are simple and some are simple conceptually; but they are very complicated technically.
The first type of email automation, is called an auto responder.
Auto responder is a single email sent automatically in response to a specific event or action.
Examples of an email triggered by a date such as a birthday, holiday, calendar date or an email triggered by a precise time such as mealtime or some hours before an event.
An email sent in response to filling out a form, such as an order, joining an email list or an email sent in response to a click; such as a click on a link to a website page or a video.
How to set up an auto-responder
To setup up an auto-responder, you need to create an email with content that is same for everybody who triggers the autoresponder email.
When you have created the email, you can use your email marketing provider to assign it to one or more events when triggered.
Sometimes it’s appropriate to send multiple emails automatically, in response, to an action or event. An automated series of multiple emails is called the sequence.
Sequences are perfect for targeting email content to individuals with different behaviours, interests or contents.
When a new prospect joins your email list, you may want to set up a sequence that automatic response with the following four emails.
- A welcome email thanking the person for joining the email list, which is sent immediately after joining.
- A follow-up email with links to a product catalogue, company information or other helpful resources, sent around three days after the welcome email.
- An email newsletter with articles and recommendation, sent approximately one week after the follow-up email.
- Lastly, a promotional email offering a special discount as a thank you, for joining the email list sent two weeks after the email newsletter.
Sequences create your emails more applicable as you can base them on a variety of relevant events and triggers; such as clicks, dates & period of time since a previous action when it comes to planning more sophisticated email sequences.
Your email marketing provider, has the ability to automatically stop or change a sequence based on multiple triggers for example to create a sequence for new prospects
To automate sequence changes, your email marketing provider needs to integrate with your database and link tracking, to identify changes in a customer profile.
So switching someone from one sequence to another, may be as simple as permitting to track clicks or purchase and adjust each sequence accordingly.
You can also manually add someone to a sequence, or stop a sequence by changing the data in someone’s database record, email automation takes a little extra time to set up.