Menu
Email marketing involves two activities: email campaigns & email automation.
Campaigns involve emailing your existing database with news, updates, new products or services, and special offers.
Automation involves an automatic series of emails that trigger when a registered user completes certain activities on your website.
Both are highly effective at driving revenue.
These are more straightforward than automation but require regular updating.
You get to decide when you run an email campaign. You may have launched a new product and you want people to buy it. Perhaps you’ve opened a new store and you want people to visit it. Maybe you just want to give your loyal fans an update on all things relating to your business.
Whatever your reasons, you simply build your email, identify to whom you want to send your email, and off you go.
You can only contact people that are actively subscribed to your email database. Campaigns are brilliant at re-engaging existing customers, but they are less effective at generating new customers.
Automation is a term used to describe an automatic series of emails that trigger when a registered user does something important on the site.
The most common use for email automation is the Welcome / Subscription series that rewards users when they subscribe to a website’s newsletter and Abandoned Checkout flows that trigger when a user starts to buy something on your site, but doesn’t finish.
You can send out automated emails to encourage users to spend money on your site or enquire with your business by pushing urgency & special offers.
Email automation can be triggered 24/7, and once it is set up, you can leave it running as long as you like.
It is suggested, however, that you optimise it to make sure you’re getting as much from it as possible.
In both formats, email marketing is excellent at driving revenue, but that revenue is proportional to the number of site visitors you have and the size of your database.
It’s nearly always hugely profitable regardless of how big a business you are, however, and as your business grows, a stable email automation campaign can increase your overall customer conversion rate significantly.
It is effective at convincing undecided users to become customers, and pushes existing customers to stay connected with your business, becoming brand ambassadors while doing so.
A staple of Shopify eCommerce stores, Klaviyo is an immensely powerful email marketing tool.
With endless customisation & audience segmentation options, if you’re running an eCommerce business on Shopify, you need to be on Klaviyo.
ActiveCampaign is a comprehensive email automation & campaign tool that specialises in lead generation, although it can do eCommerce as well.
It’s more popular with WordPress websites, but is very popular on other platforms as well. It integrates easily with most websites, and is ideal for beginners.
MailChimp is one of the oldest automation platforms, being founded in 2001 shortly before ActiveCampaign (2003).
It’s predominantly deployed as a Lead Generation automation platform where it shines brightly.
Omnisend is a younger email automation, launching in 2014, when it was originally known as Soudest.
Its easy integration with Shopify made it a popular automation tool for eCommerce stores.
It’s easy to use, while it has a slightly more limited range of features than its biggest competitor, Klaviyo, it is cheaper.
Hubspot is rapidly-growing in the world of automation because first and foremost, Hubspot is a CRM.
You can manage all your customer communication from Hubspot, from support tickets, deals, emails, chatbots, all the way through to your email marketing.
It’s pricey, but you’ll be getting a CRM and email platform in one.
If you know what Pardot is, you’ve probably used Salesforce.
Pardot is the email automation component of Salesforce, which is the biggest (and easily most expensive) CRM in the world.
With huge capabilities comes increased complexity, but a tremendous amount of marketing power. If you can afford it.
Yes and no.
Generally, you pay a monthly subscription to the platform. The cost of this subscription can vary depending on how large your database is, and how many emails you plan on sending to your audience each month.
You don’t, however, pay-per-email. Your subscription will generally let you send a certain number of emails each month. If you need to send more than that, you can increase your monthly allowance.
However, if you plan on using SMS marketing, then you’ll need to pay a fee for every SMS you send to cover carrier charges.
If you use an agency to manage your email campaigns & automation, you’ll need to pay them as well.
Most email platforms offer an extensive range of basic templates to get you started on email campaigns & automation.
The optimal words in this are ‘basic templates’ and ‘get you started.’
The possibilities of email marketing are near endless, and the key to success is customisation and personalisation.
With this comes increasing complexity as it involves dividing your audience into segments and then communicating with them independently. This is more time consuming than difficult, but inexperienced marketers may find they are quickly overwhelmed by the possibilities.
If you want a thorough & effective email marketing strategy, it’s best to partner with an agency.
There are three main reasons your emails go into spam folders:
Mail Servers Don’t Know Who You Are
No one likes unsolicited emails, so mail servers such as GMail & Outlook endeavor to minimise spam emails for their users.
If these servers aren’t familiar with your domain (website), they are more likely to send your emails to spam folders. This is usually common if you have a new domain, or have migrated from one email platform to another.
Email Details Don’t Match Up
Email marketing offers you the chance to customise your email address. For example, your marketing emails could come from email.yourbusinessname.com.au as opposed to email.klaviyo.com.
When your email address is written as “hello@yourbusinessname.com.au “ but the actual email address from which the email was sent is 12345@sendgrid.com, this triggers a spam warning that could land your emails in spam folders.
The way around this is to use a custom email domain that contains your website name.
Your Emails Have Been Marked As Spam Frequently
This is common for businesses that scattergun emails out every couple of days or that purchase email lists.
When this happens, users are quick to mark emails as spam. The more this occurs, the more likely mail servers are to treat your emails as spam by default.
It is very hard to come back from this, and generally you’ll have to migrate email servers and start from scratch.
Prevention is better than cure here. Make sure you don’t spam your users with emails, and don’t buy email lists.
There are two ways of doing this:
Generally, you’re asking people to submit their details to you. “Keeping up to date” with your business isn’t a particularly strong Call To Action, so usually you need to offer something to the customer in exchange for their email address.
This usually takes the form of a special offer of some sort. Think “10% off your first order”, “Free Shipping For New Customers,” or “Free Consultation.”
You’ll see examples of how to do this on almost every website you visit. Think about whether these other website’s offers entice you or not.
Above all, make it easy to sign up. If you have a multi-step form that asks for a range of details such as date-of-birth or address you risk putting people off, or worse, getting false details.
Most email platforms offer SMS as a service but it comes at an additional cost that generally means you pay a small charge for every SMS you send.
You don’t need SMS marketing to run effective automation & marketing campaigns, but its success varies depending on your message and what you’re promoting.
In a time where unsolicited phone calls and texts are becoming an annoyance, more and more users are opting out of SMS communication.
This is a largely subjective question as it depends on what type of business you have and how your website has been built.
If you’re an online store selling products through Shopify, choose Klaviyo. Shopify & Klaviyo are now official partners, and their ability to share data for maximum impact is unmatched. Klaviyo is also available for WordPress as well, but it shines brightest when used with Shopify.
For lead generation, ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, Zoho, Hubspot and Omnisend all fight it out with pros and cons to each.
All have points of difference that lead to a difference in pricing. For example, Hubspot’s automation & marketing tools are add-ons to its popular CRM, meaning that it’s more expensive than other options. However, it means all your customer communication is managed in one place.
This depends on what you’re sending.
Generally, if you want to send emails to your entire customer list, I suggest no more than two emails per week, and you’d better make sure the content you’re sending is engaging.
However, if you’ve split your customer list into 50 different segments, and you’ve written unique content for each segment, you can send as many emails as you like provided that you avoid sending those emails to people that can be found in multiple audiences.
For new businesses starting off, you should aim for 1-2 per fortnight, and gradually scale up as email providers such as GMail & Outlook get used to seeing your email address pop up in users’ inboxes.
If you’re an established business with a large database and equally large product/ service offering, you can do two per week.
Automation is a different matter. Automation is generally used as a ‘reminder’ that the customer has started something on your website but not finished. Generally, your first email comes a few hours after the user abandoned whatever they were doing, with the second email coming 12-24 hours later. You can even follow up 48-72 hours later. It’s not even uncommon for email automation flows to last over a week.
Remember that less is sometimes more, however. If you send too many automated emails, you can actually push your audience further away from becoming customers.
Because of the sheer number of options for customisation, you can improve your campaign performance by conducting A/B tests.
You can test:
As long as you plan out and think about what you’re testing and why, you can continue to tweak your email campaigns for maximum impact.
This all takes time and experience, however, so if you want this level of optimisation, partner with an agency.
Copyright All Rights Reserved © 2024