As a marketer, you likely have more and more things competing for your limited time and resources, but email marketing still remains one of the most impactful of all. Setting up automated emails is still one of the most effective channels for marketing your business today.
Every organization aims for delivering a great customer experience. In the competitive world, where retaining a customer is a huge challenge, a good CX (Customer Experience) can significantly facilitate an organization to retain the customer easily.
As a marketer, you have to maintain a good relationship with your customer, for better customer experience, and to make them loyal to your brand.
CX or Customer Experience Simplified:
It is the experience of a customer at each stage of the interaction process with the organization. The terminology has become popular among many marketers, as they acknowledge customers are the revenue generators for their business. It is impossible to sustain in the market without customers.
As per a quote by Jes Kirkwood, an organic marketing leader:
“Customer experience is one of the two core pillars of customer retention; the thing is, you can’t grow if your customers don’t stick around.”
So, how does email marketing automation deliver an enhanced customer experience?
Below you can find the key takeaways that would help you as a marketer to streamline your approach for better customer experience via marketing automation:
With the help of email marketing automation, marketers can save their time by sending email messages at the right and convenient time to the best prospect.
As every customer checks the email at their sweet time, so sending an email at their convenient time significantly helps in improving customer experience, with increased click rate and open rate.
2. Data Analytics & Marketing Automation:
Email marketing automation with data analytics can help you to deliver great customer experience. Using data analytics has become a rage in all the industries, as it helps to deliver accurate and desired results.
If you are a shoe retailer, you would be interested to know how many shoes your customer is going to purchase this year…..
This would help you to send creative emails with the right shoe products. Every time you do not need to do that. Email marketing automation is here to take charge of sending planned emails to these customers. The approach would hugely help to remain in touch with these customers so that they can choose the best ones received from the automated emails.
This marketing strategy is absolutely necessary for not losing your customer to the competitors. The right communication at the right time makes your customer satisfied, and happy.
3. Sending the Personalized Content:
Every customer is different, so are their choices, likes, preferences. Email marketing automation plays a crucial role in sending content to these customers as per their needs. The personalized content helps to ignite the right emotion among the customers.
This is also one of the steps in the lead nurturing process, where you have to fulfill the needs of the customer. A report by Annuitas Group stated, marketing automation to nurture leads results in 451% more efficiency.
4. The Seasonal Sending of Emails:
Just as there areseasonal fruits,there are also seasonal promotions.
You cannot wear winter clothes during summer and vice-versa.
With the help of marketing automation technology the process is made easier and streamlined. You do not need to craft an email for every season. Marketing automation appropriately executes it. It can automatically shoot out the pre-designed emails for every season. This can greatly improve the customer experience.
5. Welcome Messages:
You cannot every time send a separate welcome email to every customer.
Email marketing automation makes it easier by sending automatic welcome messages to the customer immediately. The tactic helps to improve the customer experience as they receive a positive response instantly.
Find the below example:
6. By Improvising Customer Engagement:
Customer engagement is the keyto success!!!
Have you heard that statement before?
Well, that’s true. When you can engage your customer the right way, you can expect the desired outcome of better results, which means customer satisfaction, ROI, revenue, sales, and so on.
Almost 36% of the respondents stated customer engagement is the main reason for implementing marketing automation.
7. Providing Better Service to Existing Customers:
As you already know, attracting a new customer would cost you 5 times more than retaining the existing ones; you should never lose an opportunity to keep your existing customers happy.
This would make them keep coming back for more.
As a marketer, isn’t that you want?
In this scenario, integrating email marketing automation is the right approach. You can see in the below example, the brand Ivory Ella is inviting its existing customers for joining the loyalty program:
Source: uplers.com
Don’t you think this would make the customer feel special?
8. Making an Emotional Connection:
Just providing exceptional service would not help in the long run.
It does not mean that you have to pester them with emails that would put them off. Develop a plan by understanding each of the customers. Some customers prefer weekly emails, while others prefer monthly emails from their favorite brands.
In the below graph you can see the same:
More than 80% of the respondents prefer monthly emails, followed by 60% preferring weekly emails
So, segment those customers and automate the emails as per that frequency. This would not only help you to be in constant touch with your customer but also make their experience with your brand worthwhile.
As per a statement by Bain & company:
“Consumers with an emotional connection with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value.”
9. Allowing the Customer to Choose Content Type:
Every customer has different preferences when it comes to choosing the content type. You should let your customer choose whether they prefer newsletter, case studies, blogs, etc. Accordingly, you can automate the email campaign with their preferred content type.
This would significantly improve the experience of the customer with your brand.
10. Surveys:
If you want to understand your customer much better, it’s necessary to have frequent surveys. With the help of email marketing automation, you can send smart surveys including questions through which you can better understand the needs of your customer.
This gives a better scope in delivering exceptional customer experience.
Find the below email example of a survey:
11. Benefiting the Sales Team Leading to Better Customer Experience:
Customer support and sales team are the first point of contact from an organization with the prospect. They are the ones who interact with the prospect to understand their needs for providing them better service.
With email marketing automation, the marketing approach becomes streamlined and effective. The prospect is already aware of your service, and products, which make the task of the sales team easier. They are able to close a high number of deals quickly. It eventually leads to better customer experience as they made a quick decision, just having few interactions with the sales team.
12. Boosting Brand Awareness to Extensive Customers:
Brand awareness is part and parcel of any marketing strategy. If you are a growing business, you need to reach out to a broader customer range. This is only possible with the right promotion of your brand. With email marketing automation, you can connect with prospects across the world. As it is an automated process, you do not have to worry about sending emails to the global prospects.
With the right exposure, customers would have a good impression of your brand.
13. The Right Email Strategy:
Planning the right strategy is essential for any business. Email marketing automation helps you in executing the right strategy at the right time. You can keep the focus on the tasks that need urgent attention from your end, while marketing automation can send bulk emails to different customers based on demographics, gender, geography, etc.
This way, you do not miss out sending emails to prospects who can be converted as your customers. The concisely designed automated email sent to the accurate customers is one of the useful tactics to win the customer.
14. Reducing the Chances of Errors:
Email marketing automationsignificantly reduces the chances of errors.
As a marketer, you would multitask in planning, developing the right content, finding the right visual, etc. for your campaign; in such case, if you have to also send emails to multiple prospects, and then there are higher chances of committing mistakes. Any mistype such as spelling error in name, or body content can tarnish your image as a brand.
Here, email marketing automation is a true savior that can take up these repetitive tasks, thus eliminating the chances of errors.
Conclusion:
Email marketing automation has significantly improvised the marketing approach. Marketers could connect with the right customer at the best time, helping them to deliver better service, thus leading to better customer experience. In the process, it helps them to achieve their target with ease.
If you have still not implemented marketing automation, then it's better late than never. You can implement it now to witness the best results. The above blog helps you with some great implementation tactics of email marketing automation.
Kristin Mortis is a Marketing Manager with 7+ years of experience at TDInsights based out of Plano, Texas. She helps businesses deliver the strongest marketing turnaround with cutting-edge digital strategies and tools. She writes about Marketing, big data, enterprise mobility, artificial intelligence, and other technological innovations.
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