Email Automation Best Practices (10 Things To Consider)

Imagine a world where your email campaigns effortlessly engage your audience, drive conversions, and boost your business growth. Sounds too good to be true?

It’s not if you master the art of email automation.

Automation allows you to streamline your marketing funnel so that you can focus your efforts on developing new campaigns and ideas. With automation being an integral part of any email strategy, not learning to automate part of your email marketing is a sure way to fall behind your competitors.

You may need something simple like a welcome email or something more complex like a fully automated customer journey. In either case, following these best practices will ensure email automation success.

This article will dive into the top-ten email automation practices. Be ready to revolutionize your approach and use these hacks to propel your campaigns toward success.

Email Automation Best Practices

While email automation is robust in its capabilities and is always growing thanks to new technology developments, these ten best email automation practices stay rooted in basic principles.

1. Set Goals

Before starting an automation campaign, you need to set clear goals on what you want to achieve. By setting goals regularly, you will be able to conduct audits where you ensure all of your campaigns are on track and in line with your objectives. This will also give you a tangible way to measure what is and is not working.

Setting SMART goals can be a great way to start. Your goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Here’s an example: Increase online sales by 5% in 4 months through targeted email promotions.

Increasing sales in a determined amount of time is a straightforward goal that you can easily measure.

2. Segment Your Audience

This is a crucial practice that can significantly enhance the effectiveness and relevance of your email marketing efforts. By dividing your audience into smaller, distinct segments based on demographics, preferences, or behaviors, you can tailor your messages to their specific needs and interests.

Personalization increases the likelihood of engagement, as your subscribers feel that the email speaks directly to them, leading to higher open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

Segmenting your audience enables you to increase the impact of your email campaigns. Rather than sending generic, random messages to your entire email list, you can focus on the segments that are most likely to respond positively and show interest.

If you ensure that your target audience receives exactly what they want to see, great things will happen. Your subscribers are on your list for the value they can receive. Most recipients don’t want ads or promotions, but they are willing to accept them if you provide them with email content they can’t resist.

The opposite is also true. Do you like receiving an unexpected email about a product or service far from your interests?

I am guessing that the answer is no. And neither does your target audience. Sharing irrelevant or generic content most likely leads to low open rates, being ignored, unsubscriptions, and if your reader is having a bad day maybe being marked as spam.

It sounds harsh, but it’s true. Be sure to view your email list as unique individuals and not a uniform group. Just because they all subscribe to your newsletter, does not mean they enjoy receiving the exact same information.

3. Create Engaging Content

Creating content just to create content is not enough. You must prioritize researching what your target audience likes and dislikes. Utilizing your research, create content that resonates and allows for your email list to want to engage. The more you understand their pains and desires, the better your content will create bonds.

Surveying your list discreetly or asking them about their needs and challenges on social media are good ways to improve the quality of your research. Once you have good ideas, it’s time to craft a compelling message. You will succeed if you use storytelling and test until you find the best format for your audience.

In addition to the meat and potatoes of the content, ensure you are concentrating on the design aspect as well. Any images should be in high-resolution and you must use a clean color scheme and fonts that align with your brand identity. If you need help getting started, check out these ways to make your emails pop!

4. Use a Consistent Design

A consistent design helps to establish brand recognition and reinforce your brand identity. Consistent design elements such as logo placement, color schemes, and typography create a cohesive and recognizable visual identity that recipients can easily associate with your brand. This fosters trust and familiarity, increasing the chances of engagement and conversion.

5. Use a Strong Call to Action

A strong call to action (CTA) is essential for any email marketing campaign. It tells your subscribers what you want them to do, whether that’s visiting your website, purchasing something, or signing up for your newsletter. An impactful CTA will help you to increase open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

Here are some additional tips for creating strong CTAs:

• Use action verbs to make your CTAs more persuasive. Words like "click," "buy," and "sign up."

• Use strong visuals. Images and videos capture your subscribers' attention.

• Use urgency. Let your subscribers know that your offer is limited-time or that a limited quantity is available.

• Personalize your CTAs. Address your subscribers by name and use language relevant to their interests.

6. Personalize your messages

Personalization is a key aspect of any successful email marketing campaign. As humans, we tend to feel special when someone calls us by our name. Personalizing your emails shows your customers that you appreciate them and are interested in building relationships.

Emails today offer a high level of customization with token options.

Tokens allow dynamic content insertion, personalization, and automation based on recipient data, enhancing engagement and relevance.

7. Choose the Best Email Automation Tool

Creating high-quality emails is just the first part of the process. You also need to send emails that get successfully delivered to see results. With countless options on the market, choosing an email automation tool to help you with this can be daunting. Here are a few things to keep in mind when choosing an email automation tool:

• Budget: Does this tool fit my budget?

• Needs: Does this tool do what I need it to?

• Skill level: How tech-savvy are you or the members of your team?

Once you have considered these factors, you can start narrowing down your options; many options will help you maximize your email marketing success.

8. Test and Optimize Your Campaigns

Testing and optimizing your email automation campaigns ensures their effectiveness and allows you to continuously improve your results. One approach to testing is A/B testing, where you create different variations of your email campaigns and compare their performance.

By measuring metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, you can determine which elements impact your audience more and refine your campaigns accordingly.

9. Track and Measure the Results

Tracking and measuring the results of your email automation campaigns is essential to understand their effectiveness and making data-driven decisions for continuous improvement. By closely monitoring key metrics and analyzing campaign performance, you can gain valuable insights into the engagement and success of your email campaigns.

There are essential KPIs to track when creating an email campaign; some of them include:

• Open rate: Indicates how many recipients opened your emails. A low open rate may indicate that the subject line needed to be more compelling or that the email was not delivered to the inbox of the intended audience, to mention a couple of examples.

Make your research to set up a benchmark rate and then compare your open rates to determine how you are doing. There’s always room for improvement in subject lines, email list quality, email timing, the relevance of the content and personalization, etc. Once you establish a pattern, your new competition will be your past open rates.

• Click-through rate (CTR): Indicates how many recipients clicked on links within your email out of the total number of emails delivered. This metric goes a step further by focusing on the engagement your emails receive, not just the opens.

You can improve your CTRs by updating the placement, format, and design of your calls-to-action, making your content more relevant, and understanding better what your subscribers want, need, and lack.

• Conversion rate: Indicates the proportion of recipients who took action. (E.g. making a purchase or filling out a form.)

10. Stay Up-To-Date on Email Marketing Trends

Email marketing is constantly evolving and changing; being aware of the latest trends will allow you to adapt your strategies and enhance your results.

By understanding what techniques and strategies are effective in the current market, you can refine your email automation campaigns and differentiate yourself from competitors. Whether adopting new design trends, optimizing for mobile devices, or utilizing advanced personalization techniques, staying up-to-date allows you to continuously improve your campaigns and deliver exceptional experiences to your audience.

Using these email automation best practices will unlock the full potential of your campaigns and enable you to achieve better outcomes.

How Do I Optimize Email Automation?

Optimizing your emails, even if they are performing okay, is crucial because your email subscribers' needs and preferences evolve continuously, and your audience changes as more people join your list. At the same time, staying competitive by doing better daily is the only way to maximize ROI and stay relevant in this industry with many players.

From time to time, you should check these aspects of your campaigns:

• Are my campaigns being tested, and are the results being compared?

• Are the subject lines of the emails captivating?

• Do my emails have an option to unsubscribe?

• Are my CTAs working as expected? How can they be improved?

• Are shareable links available for the users to click?

• Is my content engaging?

• Am I designing with mobile devices in mind?

• Is the content of the email personalized?

What Are the Steps in Email Automation?

You can successfully implement your campaign by following these 7 steps.

1. Choose an email automation tool.

2. Identify your audiences.

3. Determine your email campaign's goal.

4. Determine which processes you want to automate.

5. Create your email copy and graphics.

6. Check your email automation setup and run a test.

7. Make your email automation workflow live and monitor its progress.

By following these steps, you can implement a successful email automation strategy that saves time, delivers personalized experiences, and drives desired outcomes for your business.

How Long Should an Email Automation Be?

The length of the email automation can vary depending on the specific objectives, content, and audience. However, keeping your emails concise and focused is generally recommended to maintain the reader's interest and maximize engagement.

In general, aim for emails that are concise and to the point. Most recipients prefer emails that can be quickly scanned and understood. Avoid lengthy paragraphs or excessive information overload. Instead, break up the content into shorter sections, use bullet points, and utilize formatting techniques like headings or subheadings to enhance readability.

Always keep your audience's preferences and attention span in mind. Test different email lengths and monitor engagement metrics to understand what resonates best with your specific audience. Finding the right balance that effectively communicates your message without overwhelming the reader is critical.

What Is the Difference Between Email Flow and Email Automation?

Email flows and email automation are strategies used to send emails to subscribers based on certain criteria. However, there are some key differences between the two.

Email flows are a set of pre-written emails that are sent to subscribers based on a specific trigger. For example, you could create an email flow that sends a welcome email to new subscribers, a cart abandonment email to subscribers who have added items to their cart but have yet to purchase, or a celebratory email to subscribers on their birthday.

Email automation is a more general term that refers to automatically sending emails. This could include email flows, but it could also include other things like sending out a weekly newsletter or a series of emails to promote a new product or service.

In conclusion, implementing these best practices can greatly enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns and drive better outcomes for your business.

Now, it's time to take action. Start by reviewing your current practices and identify areas for improvement. Then, implement the recommended email automation best practices and make necessary adjustments. It's also important to test different elements, track key metrics, and stay informed about industry trends.

If you're ready to take your email campaigns to the next level, try beehiiv now and see how it can help you drive engagement, conversions, and business growth. Get started for free here.

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Why Trust Us

Mateo Melgar is a family-first freelancer & digital entrepreneur from Mexico. He started monetizing the internet in 2016 (before “remote work” was cool) and never looked back. Mateo has reached hundreds of thousands of readers through his content marketing and newsletter initiatives with companies like Testimonial, NotionForms, Freelancer Fire, and beehiiv.