Set It and Forget It?

Email marketing automation is one of those life-changing, 80/20 strategies that no sane person would overlook. You know, the kind of thing that saves time, generates money, and contributes to the overall awesomeness of your business.

If you have an email newsletter, automation should be a no-brainer. We’re going to show you how to do it right, and answer some of the most common questions around email marketing automation.

But first, let’s address the elephant in the room: Should you even bother with a newsletter?

Are Email Newsletters Still Effective in 2023?

If you’re wondering whether email newsletters are still effective, consider that businesses generate an average of $38 or more for every dollar spent on email marketing.

But maybe you’re not impressed by a mere 3,800% ROI. And that’s fine. There are plenty of other reasons to have an email newsletter:

• 99% of users check their email daily

• A newsletter provides consistent branding at virtually no cost

• Your newsletter targets your best leads - readers who have specifically asked for information about your business

• Newsletters provide an inexpensive way to test new ideas, products, and offers

• Since you own your list, you’ll never be derailed by major changes in a social media platform

• A newsletter continuously provides value to your most enthusiastic readers

• You stay top-of-mind, leading to repeat business and referrals

To get the most out of your email newsletter, you need to do a lot more than simply write it and click “send.” This brings us to the heart of this article…

What Is an Email Marketing Automation Strategy?

At its core, email marketing automation strategy is the use of triggers, segmentation, targeted email sequences, and other actions to accomplish two things.

First, they increase engagement and conversion by giving your readers a highly personalized experience. Second, as the name implies, email marketing automation offers this personalized experience automatically, saving you a ton of time, work, and other resources.

For example, if you have a newsletter about real estate, you may have readers who are interested in either residential or commercial real estate. They also may have interests in buying or selling.

Part of your email marketing automation strategy would be to segment your list by these and other interests, and then automatically send an appropriate sequence of emails to each segment of your list.

Ultimately, each automated sequence of emails could feed into a specific funnel with one or more offers that will appeal to that specific segment.

Let’s take a closer look at how this might work.

What Are Email Automation Triggers?

Most email marketing automation starts with a trigger. This is an event where the user takes a specific action that triggers a specific result.

Let’s suppose you have a newsletter about cryptocurrency. At some point, you offer your readers a free guide to creating NFTs. Some (but not all) of your readers click the link and download the guide.

This action is a trigger. Right away, these users receive an email with a link to download their free guide. Over the course of several days or weeks, they receive additional content about creating NFTs.

Eventually, this email sequence could lead to an offer: You might sell an online course or coaching program that guides your readers through the creation of their first NFT. You could offer a paid subscription newsletter that focuses exclusively on NFTs.

All of these emails have been pre-written, and the entire process is automated.

In addition to providing more focused content and potentially generating revenue, you now know which of your readers are specifically interested in creating NFTs. This trigger could also “tag” these specific readers to receive any future emails that are specific to NFTs.

You can have multiple triggers to achieve all kinds of results, but they all boil down to a few email automation best practices. Let’s take a look at some of these best practices.

How Do I Optimize My Email Automation?

All newsletter email marketing strategies begin and end with the careful management of your list. This means several things.

First, keep your data “clean.” Remove inactive users who rarely open your emails, as well as emails that are undeliverable. Pay close attention to bounces. The quality of your list has a big impact on the deliverability of your email.

Next, segmentation is critical. Most of your triggers should also tag the readers who respond. A tag is simply a bit of information such as which offer a reader responded to, their specific interests, purchases they have made, etc.

Every business is different, and you will have to decide what your most important segments are.

In addition to segmentation, you should map out a clear flowchart for each trigger and the automations that come afterward. This can be as simple as the one shown below. Mapping out your triggers and user experiences will save you a lot of time and effort in the long run.

Finally, you’ll need to use an email service provider that not only handles your triggers and segmentation but is also able to enhance deliverability so that your subscribers get the content they request.

Now, let’s look at how to make your email newsletter automation successful.

What Are 3 Ways of Measuring Success in Email Marketing?

There are several metrics you should look at, depending on your specific goals. Here are three ways of measuring success in your email marketing that are often overlooked but are almost always relevant:

Average Lifetime Value

To measure the lifetime value of a reader, you have to have one or more ways of monetizing your newsletter in place.

Knowing the average lifetime value of a subscriber is useful in two ways. First, it shows you the effectiveness of your copy, offers, and overall branding. Second, when you can assign a dollar value to each subscriber, you can predict the income your newsletter will generate.

Click-Rate

Tracking your Click Rate is more comprehensive than the more commonly tracked Click-Through Rate (CTR). While CTR compares clicks to the number of readers who actually saw your content, Click-Rate divides the number of unique clicks by the total number of newsletters delivered, which should be close to the total subscribers on your list.

CTR measures the effectiveness of a single piece of content, while Click-Rate encompasses your overall deliverability, open rates, and reader engagement. This makes it a good lead indicator for your newsletter. A consistently high Click-Rate will ultimately lead to more revenue.

Churn Rate

If you are steadily increasing the number of subscribers on your list, you are planting seeds for future success. But if a significant chunk of these readers are leaving after a few weeks, you need to put more effort and resources into retaining your existing subscribers.

Churn is a function of the gain and loss of readers over time. Since so much of email marketing lives and dies by the list, an increase in long-term subscribers means success in your email marketing.

If all these metrics and best practices seem like a lot of work, remember that newsletter automation strategies are meant to save you time and effort. And it turns out there’s a great tool to make it happen.

What Is the Best Email Newsletter Tool in 2023?

Given the stunning ROI provided by email marketing, a tool that helps you automate your email marketing strategies is one of the best investments you can make for your business.

An email newsletter platform should provide a lot more than just a few templates and a way to send your email. You need to look at the reputation and deliverability that your email newsletter platform provides.

Also, your email service platform should enable you to segment your lists, build triggers, and implement all the email marketing automation strategies that we’ve described in this article.

There are many services that can do most of this, and we’ve compared several of them. It turns out beehiiv is the gold standard. The beehiiv platform has helped several email newsletters, such as Arcbound and SeedPhrase Daily, achieve rapid growth.

In addition to providing deliverability, segmentation, triggers, and all of the email marketing automatic automation strategies we’ve described, beehiiv is one of the only email service providers to include a referral program so you can rapidly grow your list.

And if you need it, beehiiv will even give you a website to host your email newsletter.

Because of all this and more, thousands of creators and entrepreneurs are switching to beehiiv. Now it’s your turn. Go ahead and start a beehiiv newsletter today.