The 3 Flavors of Email Automation – Growth Decoded

This article is a round-up of Growth Decoded – a show that explores the relationship between customer experience and business growth, one topic at a time. to register here and conquer the customer experience!

What is email automation?

Email automation is a marketing technique that businesses can use to schedule and trigger emails based on date, properties their subscribers or the behavior take their subscribers. It sends the right email to the right person at the right time.

Email automation enables you to continuously market your email list in a highly personalized way.

Email automation enables companies to track in moments that would otherwise be impossible. Emails triggered by a form submission, an action on a website, or an interaction with an app ensure that the email arrives at exactly the right time – and contains personalized information that makes it more relevant and valuable to the reader do.

Automated emails are (almost always) triggered by 1 of 3 things:

1. Time
2. behavior
3. properties

Let’s break these down:

Time: When would you like to send this?

behavior: If someone does something (or does not do) – send an email

properties: all the people who are this, this and this, but NOT that – they receive this email.

The 3 types of email automation

Email automation is available in 3 different variants:

1. Email campaigns
2. Email automations (aka email flows or email sequences – choose your vocabulary!)
3. Transactional emails

And each email type can take into account the 3 triggers.

1. Email campaigns

Campaigns are one-off broadcasts to a list of people. That could be:

The automated piece is the sending.

Email campaigns use the Time trigger – you decide when to send it. Perhaps you’re a clothing company and you want to send an email on Tuesday to let your audience know of a Thursday sale.

Email campaigns can use the behavior – You may want to send the sales announcement email only to customers who have bought from you in the past.

Email campaigns can use the properties the list – maybe the sale is for womens jackets so you only want to send the email to people who:

• Bought from you before
• Have bought women’s jackets in the past
• Live in an area that has weather conditions that would call for such a garment

Any additional feature that you can add to the email segment that matches the content of the email makes that email more targeted, more valuable, and likely to lead to some action by your recipient.

This is called Email segmentation and getting the most out of your emails goes a long way.

To send an email campaign:

1. You write the email (or design the email in an email builder … or maybe use a pre-made email template)
2. You indicate to which list, group or segment of your contact list you would like to send this email
3. You send the email campaign

Email automations (or flows or sequences)

With this type of email, the automated piece is based on a trigger.

Automation manufacturers vary. But here are the things that can trigger automation in ActiveCampaign:

Trigger for automation start in the Automation Builder of ActiveCampaign – NOTE: The start trigger “Sentiment Analysis” is also available, but not shown.

As you can see, some triggers are based on Time – like the triggers “date-based” and “RSS updated”.

Some are behavior based – okay, many are behavior based behavior. All of the top 2 rows and some beyond.

And some are based on properties – Tags added and removed or when a custom field changes.

These triggers can vary based on the email automation tool you choose, and there are unlimited additional options as you begin to integrate your other tools and get information about your contacts from other tools.

E-mails in sequences or automations are sent according to a cadence or a specified path. These are also named wait steps.

That could be:

• Wait a day (or 2 or 3 or (fill out the field!)
• When a contact clicks a link in the previous email
• When a contact visits a specific page
• When a contact takes a certain action
• When a contact’s status changes, business changes, mood changes, etc.
• Any number of other conditions that can be met before the next email is sent!

The possibilities are not endless, but they are close enough.

3. Transactional emails

Transactional emails are automated emails that are or are action behavior based.

These emails are triggered when someone:

• Buys
• Signs up to redeem. Take an action that has been indicated to be reciprocated

Boom. Transaction.

But you can still find ways to do that Time and properties in these emails.

For example:

Whenever someone makes a purchase from you, you should send an order confirmation immediately. That’s expected – and we know that you must meet or exceed customer expectations to create a great experience.

But what about after that?

There is a shipping confirmation, but also the option to send an email about the product or the thing purchased. You can Time this email – one day after purchase? Or maybe 2 days?

Maybe you want to send Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) that your customers may have as soon as the thing arrives, or maybe it’s a –

“Hey! You bought this thing – do you know what goes well with this thing? Some other things! Check these out!”

At long last, 49% of US buyers said they bought a product in the past three months that they originally didn’t want to buy after a brand made a personalized recommendation.

Notice how the last example includes the properties of the customer. The transaction could be the trigger for additional e-mails that bring in the 3 variants of e-mail automation.

As you can see, there are … an infinite number of email automation options that you can create and incorporate into your email marketing strategy.

Build your email automation program

So … now what?

How are you doing:

• Decide what to automate first.
• Do you decide what to automate next?
• Are you expanding your email automation program?
• Find out what’s working
• Do you identify and close the gaps in your automation strategy?
• Find out what you’re testing and determine a winner?
• Evaluate your individual emails, your automation processes and your program as a whole?

On the latest episode of Growth Decoded, we sat down with an email marketing agency founder and email automation expert to get answers. He is Chase Dimond, founder of BoundlessLabs.

Chase has outlined some great rules of thumb, strategies, and playbooks on how to approach and improve your email automation efforts.

Email Automation Best Practices

As we know with all marketing issues, it depends. However, there are some best practices and rules of thumb that you can follow with regards to your email automation program:

• Don’t set and forget – check your email, automations and your program every 3 months or so to evaluate, review, test and improve
• Update your email – Changes should reflect a new branding, new tone, any changes to your product design, skills, features, or anything!
• Plan the customer journey in advance – What content, messages, information need, want or expect your contacts at every stage of the journey with you?
• Don’t send your customers too many emails about similar things – especially not in a small time window
• In general, do not send your customers too many emails in a small time window
• Check your shipment – Keep track of how many automations are running at the same time in addition to your one-off campaigns.

And like always, Manage your contact’s expectations.

What do you expect?

Think about the emails that await you as you go about your daily life.

• Make a note of the places you receive automated emails and they hit the nail on the head
• Be aware of the times when you will not receive automated emails but will be expected
• Note the times you get automated emails, but … there is a break and they not meet your expectations

And finally and most of all – Know your customer.

When you know your customer well, you know what to send them. They know what their problems are and how to solve them. And you know how to answer their questions.

You will understand their expectations and how you can meet or exceed them with automated email.

There are several tools in your email automation toolbox.

You can use timing, behavior, and traits to your advantage. Make it relevant, make it personal. You can integrate these into one-off broadcasts, sequential automations or transactional emails.

The world is your oyster. Go ahead and automate!

This article is a round-up of Growth Decoded, a show that explores the relationship between customer experience and business growth, one topic at a time. to register here and conquer the customer experience!