Learn the foundation of email automation
Automation means having the ability to immediately reach your supporters. But why is email automation so important? Automating your emails means you’ll be contacting people at the point of engagement. Someone’s made a donation? Setting up a triggered welcome email at point of sale with encouraging statistics of where their money has gone will keep them engaged — rather than manually sending them a welcome email hours or even days later, when they may have lost interest.
Unless your team has unlimited resource, email marketing automation saves so much time. By creating an integrated events journey, which incorporated elements of personalisation throughout each of the emails, we managed to reduce resource by three quarters in the email team. Exporting data and inputting it manually was taking a huge amount of time — almost two hours per week. Creating a journey where data was inputted meant that we gained back an hour and a half every week, which could then be used to plan at a more strategic level and improve and refine the emails that were being sent.
The average reading time of an email is only 8 seconds (1). What does this mean? It means you don’t have long to get the attention of your audience. Automation means you’ll be sending emails at the right time, with the right information, which will keep your audience engaged for longer.
Objectives should be set to see if automation is right for your team. Depending on the size of your CRM database, it might not be necessary. The reason we set out to make our emails automated is because we wanted to improve efficiency and reduce resource, increase engagement and increase conversions and donor lifetime value. Make sure your ducks are in a row and objectives are created before you determine whether automating your email programme is important.
Making your emails automated will improve your rapport with your audience, if you use it correctly. We developed key programmes including: automating and personalising transactional emails, setting up abandoned donation emails and sending auto-populated newsletters based on the latest blogs we were writing. We’ve continually analysed results and optimised our emails according to the findings, seeing uplift in engagement. Our audience engaged more with our emails, encouraging a better rapport.
Automating emails still requires input. It’s a common mistake to think that once your emails are scheduled you can start working on other projects. Monitor open and click through rates, make sure you are logging your unsubscribe rate. An unsubscribe rate below .25% (2) indicates an effective email. Anything above, especially for an engaged audience, means you need to rethink your strategy.
Think outside the box. What else can be automated outside of the welcome journey? Most of our events now work through automation. Over Christmas, we used our newest product ‘Get Your Sparkle On’ and automated the email journey based on when the user was going to host their own event. The campaign lasted 6 weeks, and we’d input data once a week. People were getting every email according to the date of their event. Seems basic but it encouraged engagement and click through rate.
If uplifting open rates and click through rates is a target, email automation is for you. We found that post setting up an events email journey, we had uplift in engagement. Our events emails were seeing a 44.5% open rate and 6 months after launch, we saw this increase to 49%. Click through rates uplifted by 5%, before we were seeing average click through rates of 16% and this increased to 21%. Why the uplift? Emails were targeted: every email was sent according to the date of the user’s event, combined with personalisation — it meant people were receiving emails in a timely manner and receiving content that was appropriate to their needs.
Optimisation is a buzzword in marketing. Automating your emails means you have time to optimise. It means you spend less time sending and pulling together, and more time making sure your strategy is effective.
Now what? If you haven’t implemented automated email marketing into your communications strategy, now’s the time to do it. We use Adestra(3), which is an incredibly intuitive software which allows you to set up an automation programme with ease. There’s also other more integrated automated marketing software including Hubspot(4), Mailchimp(5) and Active Campaign (6).
Thanks for reading. I’m Meredith, and I am the Senior Digital Marketing Officer at NSPCC. I’m driven by results and love testing new things. Email marketing automation may seem daunting to start, but the end result will make it worth your while.
