Automation is a powerful tool to create a more personalized experience for your email subscribers, leading to higher engagement and greater ROI. As your email list grows, sending relevant messages to every subscriber becomes a challenge.
Automation is essentially a series of emails, evaluations, and events strategically plotted out to create a personalized journey. Because automated journeys are closely linked to subscriber data and behavior, they're much more likely to have strong engagement and are delivered when they are most timely.
Automation use cases
Our easy-to-use automation tools allow you to quickly build personalized journeys around these common marketing strategies:
- Re-engagement: Over time, you may see parts of your audience stop engaging with your emails. By setting up a re-engagement campaign, you can see which of these disengaged subscribers may still have interest in your brand.
- Onboarding/welcome: Building a multi-email onboarding automation to new subscribers can set expectations, provide important information about your company, and simply positions your brand as approachable and nurturing.
- Product launches: If you have an exciting announcement coming up, a single email may not always reach everyone right away. Build anticipation or reiterate details over time leading up to a launch to get people excited, but also informed, with your new product or offering.
- Advanced notice of contracts expiring, subscription renewal: Leverage automation to drive action from your audience if you have date-specific contracts or renewals. This takes the heavy lifting off of trying to individually follow up with each subscriber close to that looming due date.
Other examples can include long & short term lead nurture, abandoned cart, post-purchase, and win-back. Truly, if you can dream it, you can build it in Delivra.
Need some inspiration? If you are
new to automation or short on resources, our automation guides have been finely tuned to help you do anything from building out your first prospect nurture series to requesting product reviews, so you can start seeing results from your campaigns sooner.
Types of automation
Automations can be initiated in a variety of ways. Your options will depend on your license, integrations, and products purchased.
- Event: set up a condition that subscribers meet to enter the automation. You can use changes in subscriber data & tagging, clickstream (web page view), or purchase activity.
- Email: configure a regular, triggered, or automated Email campaign to start an automation.
- Triggered: build segment logic to evaluate date/time stamps, subscriber action or inaction. When the criteria is met, subscribers enter your automation.
- SMS: configure a regular, triggered, or automated SMS campaign to start an automation.
Best practices
While you can create, test, and schedule a journey all in one session we recommend that you take time to think through your goals, logistics, and email design before setting up your automation. This will result in a faster build time and clearer testing priorities.
- Identify the goal for your automation: Knowing the goal will help you identify how many campaigns and what actions to include in your workflow. An informative campaign may be as simple as 3 campaigns plotted out across 10 days. A cross sell automation may be more complex and include several branches in the workflow.
- Consider your timing: When would you expect customers to take action on your emails? What does your buying cycle look like? Make sure you are not setting pauses, flags, and Wait for Events arbitrarily but considering your customer's behavior.
- Be prepared to test: We make testing easy with pause overrides. Make sure you are prepared to test all possible paths for your workflow and make necessary changes.
- Build a template: Your automation should all look like it is part of the same communication set or from the same brand. Consider using an easily changeable template to make sure recipients know right away who the email is from and what it wants them to do.
Once you have developed your plans,
- Double-check your automation trigger: Make sure your automation initiates exactly as you want and targeting the audience you intend. Consider all the ways subscribers could enter your automation, ensuring subscribers will not enter when you do not want them to, i.e. via bulk imports that may inadvertently kick off an automation.
- Keep an eye on analytics: Consistently review analytics to track performance of the emails in the automation workflow. Knowing your baseline statistics allows you to identify under-performing emails and take action.
- Review content: Is your content still timely and relevant? Consistently review the emails included in the workflow to ensure the messaging is still accurate. If you have discount codes or links, make sure they still work. It's also a good practice to make sure your messaging is still in good taste.
Wrap up
Email automation is one of the best tools in an email marketer's toolbox, giving you valuable time back so you can cross out more on your ever-growing to-do list. While automation helps you, more importantly it helps your audience. Showcasing timeliness, relevance, and personalization, your subscribers can better connect with your brand.
Availability and access
Automation features are available to all licenses; # of automations you can build and feature sets vary depending on license. For more information about license packaging, please visit https://www.delivra.com/pricing or email our Client Success team.
Administrator permissions: To create and launch an automated journey an account administrator's permission set must include: View Automation, Manage Drip Campaigns, Manage Templates, Add Content, Edit Content and the Mailing permissions. Please email Support if you need assistance managing admin roles & permissions.