5 Ways a Small Business Can Put an Automation Engine to Use in Their Email Marketing Campaigns
A huge marketing list chock full of customers does not always translate into repeat sales. In order to get customers to shop with you again, you must have a strategy that keeps them attentive, active, and engaged with your brand. A good automation engine can help your small business accomplish each goal, especially when using it for your email marketing campaigns.
1. Capture leads
A common feature of an automation engine is allowing users to capture leads from their website. This function typically integrates with the existing HTML forms on your site, collecting the data from leads and automatically sending it the destination of your choice, or the systems centralized database. Throw in an arsenal of lead management tools, and you have a solution that can be used to effectively track leads throughout the entire conversion cycle from prospect to customer.
2. Establish Relevance
When used effectively, an automation system will allow you to create one-on-one relationships with subscribers by ensuring that your communications are relevant. The technology makes it easy to employ the best practices of email marketing, providing a way to utilize segmentation, targeting, and event triggered communications to deliver content that it is the most relevant to the recipient. These solutions are increasingly proving to be quite efficient at engaging consumers.
3. Achieve Personalization
Aside from relevance, personalization is something all email marketers should strive for. It helps you stand out from the spammers by showing that your business has a human pulse and is not just firing blindly to the masses. Personalization becomes significantly easier to achieve when utilizing a fully integrated automation engine. Coupled with customizable email templates, rich, detailed profile data enables you to easily tailor your messages to the preferences of individual subscribers. There are even some systems that offer flexible batch signature rules that help you build trusting relationships with leads and customers.
4. Create Multi-Channel Campaigns
More small businesses are using automation engines to enhance their email marketing campaigns by integrating them with other communications channels. Most solutions allow you to reach out to clients and prospects via direct mail, voice messaging, and even fax. This gives your brand even greater reach by allowing your audience to communicate through their channel of preference. Furthermore, the ability to launch multi-media campaigns will help you enjoy an edge over competitors who are still confined to the email platform.
5. Analyze and Execute
Most automation engines provide analytics methods such as forecasting, dating mining, and market analysis, each of which helps the email marketer predict customer behavioral. This is in addition to opens, clicks, conversions and other standard metrics. The analytics data is provided to you in the form of comprehensive graphs, charts, and tables, making it easy to dissect the information and execute your campaign strategy accordingly. An automation engine is only as effective as the data it has to work with, so the more data you feed it, the better your results.