After all these years, email remains an effective method for businesses to reach their target audiences. There are approximately 4.03 billion people that use email today, and that number is expected to grow as high as 4.6 billion users by 2025. For that reason alone, businesses should begin developing quality email marketing strategies and investing in email automation technology to amplify results.


Email marketing automation is not a new trend, but it is a growing one. With email automation, marketers can send highly personalized emails to customers – ensuring the brand is catering to consumer needs, behaviors, and preferences by sending the right message at the right time – without the need for manual intervention. In this post, we will discuss what email marketing automation is, the benefits of automating emails, best practices, and more.

What is Email Marketing Automation?

Email marketing automation is the process of sending time- or action-triggered emails to customers using automation technology. Some examples include sending automated welcome emails when a customer signs up for an account, reminder emails when a visitor abandons their cart, or other product recommendation emails after a customer has bought an item from a website. Essentially, email automation takes the tedious tasks away from your email marketing to-do list, enabling you to focus your time and attention on value-added endeavors. 

In addition, combining email automation and customer analytics can empower you to refine your targeting strategy – enabling you to target users based on behaviors, preferences, and previous purchases. In doing so, you can personalize each customer’s experience and amplify the relevancy of your email campaigns.

What are the Benefits of Automating Emails?

Here are some of the benefits of leveraging email marketing automation technology.

Boost Revenue with Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are automated emails sent to website visitors after performing specific actions such as purchasing an item or resetting their password. Email automation enables marketers to leverage transactional emails to help reach broader sales goals. For example, marketers can include product recommendations when sending order confirmation emails to customers. It’s important to show a selection of product recommendations that are unique to each individual customer based on their user activities and profiles. Personalized product recommendations can offer relevant cross-sell and up-sell opportunities that catch the customer’s attention, resulting in them purchasing more items from your brand and ultimately driving revenue.

Personalize Customers’ Experiences

80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalized customer experiences. For that reason, it’s important to leverage email personalization to move toward 1:1 customer experiences that exceed customer demands. Email marketing automation allows marketers to include personalized fields (name, location, company name, etc.) within their messages. Through personalized marketing messages, brands can continue to nurture their relationships with customers.

Scale Your Marketing Strategy

Let’s face it, a myriad of factors including staff size and capacity limit the number of emails that can be sent manually, which in turn limits the number of customers that receive promotional content. Fortunately, email marketing automation can help scale efforts and ensure messages reach your customers without an additional strain on employee resources. Scaling your marketing efforts enables you to convert more leads, improve your sales revenue, and further grow your business.

Segment Customers Effectively

Email marketing automation enables marketers to create highly segmented mailing lists based on subscriber activities, purchase history, lead stage, and more. As a result, marketers can send relevant and personalized emails to their subscribers – ensuring they receive promotional offers that appeal to them. By meeting your segment’s needs and delivering better quality propositions, your customers will continue to derive greater benefits from your offerings. In doing so, you can increase the lifetime value of your customers through repeat business and referrals.

What Tools Help Automate Marketing Emails?

Let’s take a closer look at the different tools that help automate marketing emails to drive customer engagement, establish long-lasting relationships, and boost revenues.

Content Creation

We recommended creating unique email templates and leveraging them for every campaign in order to save time and boost brand visibility. Many email marketing automation platforms provide email content editor tools that use simple blocks for speedy email creation. These tools enable marketers to seamlessly design their own branded campaigns and have complete flexibility to make changes in the email via inline editing.

Deliverability

Email deliverability issues, like blacklisted IPs and authentication snafus, can cause all of your efforts in developing high-quality content to go down the drain. Fortunately, an email marketing automation platform can analyze your email campaigns and guide how you optimize your content for deliverability – resulting in higher conversions and lower unsubscribe rates.

Personalization

Many email marketing automation platforms have tools that analyze the behavior data collected from your website and leverage it to deliver personalized recommendations to all customers across email, web, and mobile. This tool can even ensure that customers see the most relevant and up-to-date recommendations based on their activity – without you needing to lift a finger!

Branded Email Templates

Oftentimes, email marketing automation platforms provide pre-built customizable templates that are available to use for your campaigns. By leveraging unique email templates, you can dramatically save time with content creation and boost brand visibility – with a click of a button.

Email Marketing Automation Strategy and Best Practices

Here are some best practices for creating a successful email marketing automation strategy.

  • Nurturing leads on an ongoing basis should always be top-of-mind for businesses – it’s what turns prospects into customers! It’s important to understand your prospects’ needs and desired level of engagement so you can effectively provide them with relevant educational content and offers at each stage of the funnel. As you think through this, ask yourself the following questions: Are they aware of the benefits of using your service or buying your products? Do they know how to use your products/services to their fullest potential? You can create a solid lead nurturing email campaign by leveraging automation technology to send personalized blasts to potential prospects based on their interactions with the brand. 
  • Continuously manage and maintain your mailing lists to ensure you’re sending the most relevant messages and offers to your prospects. For example, if a subscriber made a specific number of purchases, it may be beneficial to add them to the mailing list for future VIP reward points. Email marketing automation software does all of the heavy liftings, so you only need to simply check off this option when creating an email flow and choose the appropriate list. 
  • Re-engage passive customers that naturally lost interest in your brand over time. However, acquiring new customers can cost you five times more than retaining existing ones. For that reason, it’s important to re-engage your customers when they haven’t opened any of your emails for an extended period. Consider asking your customers if they still want to remain on the mailing list and provide them with a unique offer to win them back. With email marketing automation, you can trigger a re-engagement email at the exact time when subscribers are dropping off inactivity.  
  • Reducing shopping cart abandonment can directly lead to a boost in sales and revenue. That being said, you can leverage email automation technology to help recover these abandoned sales. We recommend sending automated cart abandonment emails to remind customers about the items in their carts and offer a time-sensitive discount to encourage them to complete the purchase. You can also consider including a photo of the item, its price, shipping fees, and the total price in the email.

How Emarsys Helps Personalize and Automate Email Marketing


Email marketing enables you to connect with your audience, promote your brand, and boost sales revenue. However, not all email marketing campaigns are created equal, so it’s vital to know how to make the most of your campaigns. Implementing the right email automation technology can amplify the results of your campaigns by delivering relevant emails in real-time based on your customer’s activity. Compared to typical bulk emails, triggered emails result in 8 times more opens and greater earnings. Without a doubt, email marketing automation drives customer success, increases retention, and accelerates business outcomes. By leveraging the power of email marketing automation that is built into the Emarsys Customer Engagement platform, you can deliver personalized and relevant emails on a mass scale – and accelerate your business innovations without sacrificing that personal touch.