Introduction

Ever felt like you're drowning in emails?

As a small business owner, you may be no stranger to mornings started with a flood of messages—each one demanding attention. Between juggling inventory, customer service, and marketing, emails definitely feel like extra work. One way businesses handle this is through automation. But it can be tricky because email campaigns are only effective when they feel custom, relevant, or personal.

How can you make it personal when you don't have time and automate it when you’re unfamiliar with this space? How much of it is practical for the small local business and how can you have email marketing and still have significant enough benefits without investing a huge budget and time?

In this blog post, we’re going to answer the following questions: What is email automation? How can you use it in your business in general? How can it transform your email marketing efforts? We’ll also answer questions and highlight some key tips and tools that can help you integrate it seamlessly into your business.

What is Email Automation?

Email automation basically means integrating systems or software that perform email-related tasks based on pre-set triggers. This automation is meant to help you create a much more seamless process for your email marketing and non-marketing (eg. customer service, supply chain, etc) efforts. There are lots of tools that are designed to achieve specific email objectives. For example, a tool like Lemlist is better for cold email outreach, while Aweber or Clickfunnels might make more sense for email marketing automation.

What are The Benefits Of Email Automation?

1. Faster and easier: Entrepreneurs are often on a time crunch. Automation helps you send bulk messages and free up your inbox quickly so that you can have time to focus on your business.

2. Set It, Forget It: Email automation can help you schedule follow-ups and set up responses in advance. So, even if you have a busy week ahead, you’ll still be able to get the right messages out to the right people at the exact time you need them to be.

3. Budget-friendly: Automating your emails doesn’t always have to be very expensive. So even with a small team and limited budget, there’s often a decent alternative with a moderate cost.

4. Build Connection: Email automation, when done right, can achieve the exact opposite of what many businesses fear. When automation is done right, it helps businesses add a personal touch (with the help of segmentation and triggers) to their messaging. Personalization can be hard to do as a business scales, but automation can help businesses stay on top of their email game consistently.

5. Reduced Errors: Email automation makes it easier to stay organized and to review what’s working and what’s not. It makes it harder to miss an important email or miss opportunities to build your customer relationships, especially in email marketing.

6. Increased Conversions (Sales and Engagement): Email automation helps you increase conversions and improve the impact you have on your stakeholders. And it helps you do this in a very efficient manner.

7. Brand affinity and touchpoints: With email automation, it is easier to create a well-structured strategy with multiple touchpoints to reach your customers. The tags, triggers, auto-response, and drip features go a long way to building a solid marketing strategy that can win you more trust and loyalty in the long run.

8. According to Alore, companies using email automation see a 14.5% increase in sales and a 12.2% decrease in marketing costs.

9. OmniSend reports that automated emails generated 42% of all email orders, even though they only accounted for 2% of emails sent (in their study).

How Can Email Automation Be Used For Your Business’s Customers?

1. To nurture leads

2. To recover abandoned carts, especially in e-commerce

3. To balance automation and personalization

4. To welcome new Subscribers

How To Start Automating Emails For Your Business

1.Decide what the primary objective is

What do you want to get out of your automation? Do you need help with your customer service, or you’re trying to find quality leads through cold emails? Or maybe you want to introduce email marketing into your business. Do you need basic automation for a small mailing list, or are you looking for advanced features like multi-step campaigns and detailed segmentation? Get clear on the end results you want because this will inform the tools you use.

2. Match the Tool to Your Needs

When you’re clear about your objectives and expectations, you can now search for the tools that may work best for you. Email marketing automation tools are numerous and come at various price points—even free versions.

Mailchimp:

Perfect for beginners, it offers an intuitive interface and robust reporting so you can track results without the complexity. It might, however, not be the best option for scaling your business.

ActiveCampaign:

If you want to create multi-step campaigns and target specific audience segments, this tool delivers powerful automation features that can personalize your outreach on a granular level.

Omnisend:

Designed for e-commerce, it streamlines your marketing efforts by integrating seamlessly with your online store, making it easier for you to drive sales.

Constant Contact:

Tailored for nonprofits and small businesses, it provides a straightforward, beginner-friendly environment to kickstart your email marketing.

Campaign Monitor:

A solid choice for marketing agencies, offering advanced customization and scalability that can handle client-focused campaigns with ease.

Consider how your chosen tool integrates with other platforms you use—WPForms, for instance, works well with many popular email automation tools. This integration allows you to capture leads effortlessly and launch automated nurturing sequences that feel both personal and timely.

3.Segment your email list

Divide your subscribers into smaller groups based on behavior, demographics, purchase history, or interests so that you can create hyper-targeted messaging that is written just for people within that segment. This makes people feel like you’re talking to them personally so they are more likely to take positive action to your requests. A few segments you can create are: behavioral, demographic, psychographic, and occasion-based segmentation

4. Decide on actions and schedules

Determine who you will target, what email automation they’ll receive, and when they’ll receive them. Set up a trigger (a predefined event) that will activate automated sending when the event happens.

5. Create a workflow

Bring everything together in your email automation software. Most tools have a visual workflow builder.

6. Design your emails

Design engaging automated emails with compelling subject lines, clear and concise copy, eye-catching visuals, prominent calls-to-action, and personalized content

Key Components Of A Successful Email Automation Strategy

The following should be considered when mapping out and setting up an email strategy:

1. Audience segmentation and buyer persona - Segment by behavior, purchase history, demographics, etc.

2. Behavioral triggers and drip campaigns - based on actions like web visits, abandoned carts, re-engagement

3. Personalization

4. Split-testing or A/B testing

Measuring Success In Email Automation

After you successfully set up your email automation, the following metrics will be useful to help you understand how well you’re doing. Compare it to the industry standards (you can find that out with a bit of research) or with your past data as time goes on.

Open rate: Tells you the percentage of people who received your email and opened them

Click Through Rate (CTR): Tells you the number of viewers who took action

Overall Return On Investment (ROI): At the end of the day, you’re still running a business. It is best to monitor how much you’re spending and what your results are, especially if your automation is centered around marketing or lead generation efforts.

One very important way to gauge your success is by seeking customer feedback

Email Automation Tips For Businesses

1. Make sure that your automation integrates well with your sales funnel and existing tools

2. You can outsource your email marketing automation even on a budget

3. Avoid over-automation. Automating everything and an overreliance on AI will make you sound like a bot.

Instead:

• Conduct manual checks periodically to make sure that everything is in order

• Don’t spam people with many messages.

• Make sure that your emails aren’t just sales and promotions

• Don’t use generic subject lines

• Conduct test emails (using a test email, not yours) to see if there are any flaws in your email automation

• Include storytelling in your content

• Try to add a personal sign-off or introductory portion when possible, so that it feels very personal

Conclusion

Email automation can be a powerful way to save time and boost conversions, all while building a personal connection with your audience. Integrating email tools into your business can seem very complicated at first, but you can start small with beginner tools like MailChimp or any other software that makes sense for your business. Doing this can help you schedule your email success even as a small business with a small budget. To learn more about email marketing or any other form of marketing relating to business, check out our blog to discover practical tips now.