6 Underused Email Marketing Automations

Automated email is one of the biggest—and most under-utilized—growth opportunities in marketing. Small businesses in every vertical can benefit from strategic automation. Yet, repeatedly, we see incredibly juicy low-hanging fruit halfway through the sales funnel. Let’s look at six email marketing automations you should be using for your small business. 

Post-Purchase and Post-Shipment Emails 

Your relationship with a prospect doesn’t end when they become a customer. In fact, that period after you close the first deal can be crucial to ensuring the long-term health of your and your customer’s relationship. 

Are they happy? Are their needs being met? Has their success (or failure) with your product or service left them hunting for additional products or services? 

It’s crucial to know the answers to these questions as they will signal whether the time is ripe to ask for a referral, a recommendation, an upsell or even do some damage control. Especially for first-time purchasers, this journey can give the user an exceptional experience and build a foundation for repeat purchases.  

The business impact of this automation is straightforward: increased revenue through customer LTV (lifetime value transaction). 

Welcome or Account Creation Emails 

Sending welcome emails is an opportunity to set the tone with new subscribers or customers. Tailor the experience and communication to fit the channel and content that draws new subscribers. Approach this series as an opportunity to set the tone on the frequency and type of communication users should expect. 

We’ve mixed and matched promotion-heavy messaging with messaging that builds brand connection and equity. Both are content themes to test with your users.  

The business impact of this automation is more upper-funnel and nurture-focused. Metrics affected include time to purchase, purchase frequency and brand affinity. 

Re-engagement (“We miss you”) Emails 

A whopping number of emails hit your subscribers’ inboxes each day. With so much competition for attention, it’s inevitable that a percentage of your subscriber list will lose interest in and stop engaging with your email marketing campaigns. It may not seem like a huge deal, but as a great percentage of your list stops engaging, the greater the risk you run of damaging your sender reputation and your email deliverability rates. 

It’s been reported that, on average, marketers lose 25 percent of their email list each year (simply to attrition). Therefore, list retention should be an absolute must for anyone utilizing email marketing automations. 

When done well, re-engagement emails can reduce list churn rates and boost incremental engagement. In terms of deliverability, re-engaging your inactive subscribers can enhance or at least help you maintain inbox placement rates for your emails. Often, if your overall engagement levels from significantly, IPSs (internet service providers) are more likely to consider you a low-quality sender, block you and make your engagement problems even worse. 

The metric to watch here is the conversion of little-engaged users into medium or high segments of engagement. 

Birthday or Anniversary Emails 

Collecting birthday details at sign-up opens fun options to show appreciation for your users. Birthday emails offering small freebies, exclusive discounts or offers and ideas for using a brand’s products to help with a celebration are all effective ways for brands to build connections with their users.  

The same is true for celebrating anniversaries of when users joined brand communities. Using automations to increase personal connections may sound unintuitive, but it’s a win for brands.  

Business benefits here are brand equity, brand awareness and incremental direct-response revenue. 

Abandoned Cart Emails 

This journey is an absolute must-do for e-commerce brands. If users make it far enough in their web experience to put a product in their cart, they likely just need a small nudge or reminder to complete their purchase. Think about how many times you get an email with a promo code for a product you were lukewarm about purchasing. How fast did you click on that link as a “sign” to make that purchase? 

Abandoned cart emails are a huge revenue driver. One of our most successful abandoned cart journeys is with an e-commerce client who started with 1-2 emails in the series. Many iterations and testing tactics later, the difference is absurd: an 88 percent increase in total conversions and a 150 percent increase in average total revenue compared with the basic abandoned-cart series. 

Setting up an abandoned cart email series can look like a lot of setups on the front end, but with an effective approach, you’ll get a huge return for your efforts. 

Browse Abandonment Emails 

This is generally one step in the purchase journey before cart abandonment. Suppose a user is browsing your website and has been interested in a specific product or product category, but the product hasn’t made it to their cart yet. In that case, this is the time to sell them on that product and double down on that product’s use cases and benefits to get them over the finish line. 

Though we don’t see the direct response levels of abandon-cart emails here, this step is a definite source of increased revenue. 

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Whether your company has been using email marketing automations for a long time, just started or hasn’t tried it yet, Rooted Web is here to assist you. Our dedicated marketing team knows there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to email marketing, and they take the time to truly learn about your unique business. Contact us today to see how Rooted Web can ensure sales aren’t falling through the cracks through the effective use of email marketing automations.