Email marketing automation provides marketers with a powerful set of tools to significantly improve campaign efficiency, targeting, optimization, and ultimately revenue generated from email efforts. By leveraging workflow automation, segmentation, and testing capabilities, companies can achieve substantial increases in email marketing ROI through greater productivity, higher deliverability, and data-driven optimization.
How Automation Boosts Email Marketing ROI
Marketing automation enables companies to get exponentially higher ROI from email campaigns compared to traditional manual email efforts. Below are some of the key metrics that typically see substantial improvements with automation:
- Revenue per email sent - Automated segmentation and personalization result in higher conversion rates from each message.
- Marketing qualified leads - Workflows nurture more leads through the sales funnel by sending timely, relevant follow-ups.
- Sales team productivity - By handling repetitive tasks like lead nurturing via automation, marketers free up more of the sales team's time.
- Email deliverability - Features like sender authentication and reputation monitoring maximize inbox placement.
- Subscriber engagement - Hyper-targeted content keeps email open and clickthrough rates high.
- Marketing team productivity - Automating manual tasks like list cleaning, tagging, and segmentation enables doing more with less.
According to Forrester research, over 8 in 10 users of marketing automation indicate it provides a positive ROI, with more than half experiencing an ROI higher than 125%.
Streamlining Workflows with Automation
Automated workflows send timely communications without ongoing manual oversight, enabling marketers to scale personalized campaigns.
Welcome Series for Onboarding
Welcome series automatically send a pre-defined sequence of 3-5 emails to new subscribers over their first week. These emails aim to:
- Educate on key product benefits
- Provide special join offers/discounts
- Ask for feedback on their initial experience
- Introduce company values
- Cross-sell related products
Automating these repetitive onboarding messages improves new user retention by making them feel valued early.
Lead Nurturing Workflows
Lead nurture workflows automatically deliver a series of touchpoints aimed at moving prospects down the sales funnel. Typical nurture emails may:
- Send content upgrades like ebooks, whitepapers, or demo videos
- Notify of new features or product releases
- Offer special discounts or trials for qualified leads
- Remind them to complete certain actions
- Answer common questions/objections
Ongoing nurturing keeps leads warm by communicating based on their stage and interests until sales is ready to reach out.
Re-Engagement Campaigns
Win back disengaged subscribers through automatic workflows that re-activate dormant contacts. These may send:
- Promotional offers for re-engagement
- Cart abandonment reminders
- Polls/surveys to solicit feedback
- Requests to update their preferences
- Content that aligns to their interests
Automated re-engagement workflows reduce subscriber churn by bringing inactive contacts back into the fold.
Segmentation for Personalization
Marketing automation platforms enable a granular segmentation of your subscriber list based on attributes like demographics, interests, past behaviors, and more. This allows sending highly targeted content to each subscriber segment.
Demographic Segmentation
Divide contacts by attributes like:
- Location - Send localized content and offers
- Age - Tailor messaging based on preferences of Millennials vs Boomers
- Gender - Adapt content based on interests of men vs women
- Job title - Customize emails for C-levels, managers, individual contributors, and more
Behavioral Segmentation
Group contacts automatically based on actions they've taken:
- Downloads - Follow up with related content offers
- Purchases - Send cross-sell recommendations
- Cart abandons - Offer discounts to complete the purchase
- Email clicks - Send more info on topics of interest
- Webinar views - Promote other relevant webinars
Integrating Third-Party Data
Incorporate external data like social media activity, lead scores, or web analytics data to build 360-degree subscriber profiles. This enables ultra-targeted messaging aligned to contacts' demonstrated interests across channels.
For example, sync email subscriber data with Facebook to segment by ad interactions. Then send content that mirrors their social media activity.
Optimizing Campaigns with Testing
A/B and multivariate testing allow optimizing email components like subject lines, content, designs, and send times based on hard data.
Subject Line Testing
Test variations of subject lines to learn which drive the most opens. Compare subject line length, wording, emojis, personalization, urgency, and more.
Content Testing
Test different offers, headlines, designs, and calls-to-action to determine what resonates best with each subscriber segment.
Day and Time Testing
Find the optimal send times for each segment by testing different days/times. Compare weekday vs. weekend and morning vs. afternoon performance.
Getting Started with Marketing Automation
Here are some tips to help implement marketing automation for maximizing the impact on email ROI:
- Start small - Don't try to automate everything at once. Build competency on foundational workflows like welcome series first.
- Focus on quality over quantity - It's better to have fewer highly targeted segments than a high volume of broad segments.
- Use data to guide optimization - Let testing insights and campaign analytics steer ongoing refinements to boost ROI.
- Integrate with CRM - Sync subscriber data with your CRM to combine email behavioral data with sales and support data for complete context.
- Provide subscriber value - Build trust and loyalty by providing truly useful content tailored to each subscriber's needs.
The Automation Advantage
Marketing automation transforms email from a static, batch-and-blast tool into a dynamic, intelligent engine for lead generation and revenue growth. Workflows, segmentation, and optimization enable marketers to cost-effectively deliver hyper-relevant messaging and offers tailored to the needs of each subscriber. This drives significant improvements in email marketing ROI through increased productivity, engagement, and conversions.
Ready to maximize your email marketing ROI? SensorPro's marketing automation platform provides powerful workflow automation, segmentation, A/B testing, and analytics to boost the impact of every email you send. Learn more about driving higher ROI today!
