The Ultimate Guide to Setting Up Automated Email Follow-Up

Is your e-mail setup letting leads slip through your fingers? If you’re not taking advantage of automation to follow up on leads, you may be missing out on valuable opportunities.

Automation allows you to create and schedule a series of emails that are sent based on specific triggers or actions while your team takes care of other duties. So, for example, you can send an email with a link in it, and then send an immediate follow-up to people who click on the link, while people who don’t click receive another message a week later with a different call to action.

By setting up triggers and workflows, you can automatically send welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, or follow-up messages after a purchase.

Once you set up your automated email campaign, you can sit back and let your system do the work for you. That’s why automated email follow-up is a game-changer for businesses of all sizes.

Automated Email Follow-Up: Why Are They Effective?

Automations save time and effort by eliminating the need for manual follow-ups. 

When you create a pathway that leads your prospects to a successful sale, your system will reliably and consistently do the marketing work for you.

Even better, having a system lets you test different approaches. You can continually monitor how your contacts are responding to each step in the sequence, which lets you tweak the content and timing of your emails to deliver the best possible results.

5 Benefits of Automated Email Follow-Up Sequence

• Saves time and effort: Automating the process eliminates manual follow-ups, saving you valuable time.

• Increase engagement and sales: Consistent follow-ups can nurture leads, build trust, and increase conversion rates.

• Improves your brand messaging: Automated email campaigns ensure that the communication your leads and customers receive is always top-notch and no one slips through the cracks.

• Provides insight: You’ll learn how your audience responds to different messages, timing, and call-to-action methods so you can create a high-performing email marketing system.

Implementing an Effective Automated Email Follow-Up Strategy

Creating an automated email sequence is easier than it may seem at first glance. Here’s a six-step method to building automations that will nurture your contacts from lead to loyal customers.

Define Your Goals and Objectives

Clearly laying out what you want to achieve with your follow-ups will help you tailor your approach and increase the chances of success. Each automation should have a single, clearly stated goal. For example:

• Re-engage with a prospect who showed initial interest

• Nurture a relationship with an existing client

• Persuade your customers to make referrals for you

A clear understanding of your objective will help you convey the right information concisely and compellingly.

Map Out Your Buyer’s Journey

The buyer’s journey is the path a customer takes from the moment they first become aware of your product or service to the moment they purchase. There are many different ways of mapping the journey, but they all follow these broad stages:

1. Awareness: Your communication at this stage is all about educating the consumer on how your business can make their lives better.

2. Consideration: At this stage, the customer is probably comparing different solutions. Your goal is to show them what makes your brand more appealing than your competitor and ensure they have all the details they need to make a wise choice.

3. Decision: When your customer is ready to make a purchase, you want to be in front of them with a call to action and a smooth buying process

4. Post-purchase: Immediately after a sale, you want to make sure your customer doesn’t have buyer’s remorse. Affirm that they made the right decision and make sure they have a successful onboarding experience.

For small items, the whole journey from recognizing a problem (“I need socks”) to choosing and purchasing can take place online in minutes. But for large-scale purchases like signing up for business software, investing retirement funds, or planning a vacation, the journey can take months.

In those longer buying journeys, email automations are the perfect way to nurture your leads throughout the process. Every time a customer opens an email or clicks on a link, you can guide them to the next logical stage.

Select an Email Marketing Automation Tool

Choosing a reliable tool that offers automation features is critical to your success. You want a simple system with an intuitive dashboard that lets you segment your audience into groups, set up triggers, and deliver messages automatically.

You also want a tool that offers detailed analytics data so you can see how each email is performing and tweak your system. At the very least, you need to know your open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. An ideal tool would also let you test different subject lines and calls to action side by side, so you can build an effective marketing system.

We may be biased, but we think beehiiv is the best platform for building automated follow-ups. beehiiv lets you create detailed journeys with a simple visual interface — plus you can use A/B testing to find the most effective ways to deliver your messages.

Create Your Follow-Up Email Sequence

The next step is to create a series of engaging and personalized emails for each stage of the journey. The number of steps and messages you can create is limited only by your imagination.

Schedule and Trigger Your Emails

Now you’re ready to consider the timing and triggers for each email in the sequence. Do you want a message to be sent immediately after someone clicks a link? Do you want to send an educational series over days or weeks and then ask for the close? Your answers will be unique to your business, depending on factors like price point, length of the buyer decision cycle, and whether you’re offering a product or an ongoing service. 

Analyzing the Performance of Automated Email Follow-Up Campaigns

Once your system is in place, your job is to track open rates, click-through rates, and conversions and use what you learn to continually optimize your campaigns. This is an area where automation has an enormous edge over individual emails — those are very difficult to track and optimize.

Why Trust Us? 
Lauren Haas is a marketing professional who spends her days creating social media and email campaigns for clients at her boutique agency, Main Street Marketing Mix.

Best Practices for Writing Automated Follow-Up Emails

1. Create personalized emails: Tailor your messages based on the recipient's interests or actions by segmenting your list in meaningful ways.

2. Write for one person: Your messages will feel more organic and genuine if you imagine yourself writing for a single person each time.

3. Prioritize readability: Send brief, digestible messages with a clear purpose. Use short paragraphs and visuals to make the text scannable.

4. Respect your reader’s time: If you bombard your readers’ inboxes, they will send you to spam very quickly. Consider sending emails weekly or twice a week instead of daily, and build breaks into your series.

5. Watch for overlap: If your customers are receiving a weekly newsletter from you in addition to a sales series, they could feel overwhelmed. It’s fine to do both but adjust your frequency accordingly.

6. Test, test, and test some more: Try out different subject lines, message lengths, calls to action, and timing intervals. Track the results and use them to hone your automation to perfection.

Incorporating Automation into Your Overall Email Marketing Strategy

Automated email marketing allows you to streamline your campaigns, save time, and deliver personalized and relevant content based on customer behavior and preferences. You can create automated drip campaigns that deliver a series of emails over time, guiding prospects through the sales funnel.

beehiiv offers an intuitive visual automation tool that integrates perfectly with your overall email marketing strategy. 

beehiiv also offers a suite of world-class marketing tools to help you scale your audience with ease. Try beehiiv for free and see if it’s the platform you’ve been looking for!