A digital strategy agency’s insight on email automation
The average B2B sales cycle ranges from four to six months. And during this timeframe, you need to nurture and follow up with your newly acquired leads proactively. If email marketing is a key part of your overall digital strategy, you could streamline lead management with the help of email automation.
In this blog, we uncover how using email automation can supercharge your sales and deliver a healthy return on investment. Read on to discover:
- What is email automation, and how can it benefit your company
- What types of email automation would a digital strategy agency set up
- How would a digital strategy agency plan out email automation
- Ways a digital strategy agency would ensure high email deliverability
What is email automation, and how can it benefit your company?
Email automation uses predefined rules to trigger emails based on specific actions leads take or don’t take. The rules determine which emails get sent, when to send them, and what content to include. You can send highly targeted and personalised emails to prospects at specific intervals, all while doing less manual work.
But creating automated email workflows requires some technical know-how. You need to be familiar with specific conditions to ensure your emails are sent to the right audience members at the right time. Then you need to be aware of the deliverability challenges and how to overcome them for the best results.
The good news is that a digital strategy agency can help you implement email automation effectively. With the right agency partner, you don’t have to rely on poor automation to drive your engagement efforts and get a strong return on investment.
What types of email automation would a digital strategy agency set up?
A good digital strategy agency or email marketing services provider should be able to find the most effective automation workflows for your campaigns. The selection will naturally vary based on what stage of the sales cycle a prospect is in, but you can expect the following automations:
- Welcome emails break the ice and introduce your brand to prospective customers. Companies typically send them when someone opts into the company newsletter.
- Follow up emails keep leads in a loop and provide insight into their initial impression. The agency can automate these to trigger after a demo call with potential leads or after a webinar or other event.
- Activation emails remind prospects why activating their account with you would be worth their time. Your agency partner can set up account registration as the trigger for these emails.
- Re-engagement emails encourage inactive leads to return and check out your content. Service providers automate these with a start trigger that goes off once a lead stops engaging with your emails after a predetermined period.
- Milestone emails celebrate feats prospects have reached with your company. The digital strategy agency creating your email automation can link these to actions like whitepaper download or contact form submission.
- Usage statistics emails feature interesting stats on the businesses that have an account with your firm. Companies use them as an opportunity to highlight their premium offer. Late-stage page views (e.g., views of your pricing page) can trigger these emails.
- Drip campaigns are automated emails that are sent on a predefined schedule. They usually go hand-in-hand with content production (blogs, informational graphics, etc.) and aim to encourage leads to achieve specific results. ‘
How would a digital strategy agency plan out email automation?
The agency would work with you to ensure email automation brings you maximum benefits. Expect to take the following steps:
1. Define your objectives. This will help you measure the ROI of your automation campaigns. Be sure to be as specific as possible.
2. Segment your list. This step allows you to categorise your prospects based on their actions. With proper segments, you can tailor workflows and content to specific groups of prospective clients.
3. Personalise your template. Whether it’s a welcome or re-engagement email, it’s critical to personalise the content to make it stand out. With the help of a digital strategy agency, you can use data from your segments to create templates that hit recipients just right.
4. Humanise the smallest details. For example, your signature should contain a head-and-shoulder image, company name, and contact info (website and phone).
5. Optimise landing pages. The landing pages you direct the recipients to must be consistent with the automated emails. Your agency partner should help you achieve cohesive messaging and visuals, which should help increase your conversion rate.
How would a digital strategy agency ensure high email deliverability?
One challenge with email automation is that automated messages have a high chance of ending up in the spam folder. But a digital strategy agency can help you overcome this with best practices.
For example, they may start by ensuring you’re not crafting subject lines that sound spammy. It’s easy to use promotional-sounding words in the subject of your email message, but spam filters may recognise them as spam depending on the content. An experienced agency should advise you against using words like “exclusive” and “potential earnings”, as well as things like “RE” to ensure your automated emails reach prospects’ inboxes.
Another way the agency would help you ensure high deliverability is by educating you on email marketing regulations. Certain regulations, like the CAN-SPAM ACT, GDPR in EU define how to send emails to subscribers and prospects. Make sure you comply with these regulations when creating a single or series of workflows via email automation.
Moreover, the agency should inspect your emails for varying or different versions of HTML, as they can be the cause of an email being marked as spam. Some email clients have specific criteria for HTML elements, so it’s crucial to work with an agency to ensure you’re using the right HTML code.
Choose a leading digital strategy agency to automate your email campaigns
Based in Warwickshire, UK, virtualROI is a digital strategy agency that specialises in helping business-to-business clients get the most out of email marketing. We can help you leverage email automation to ensure your campaigns and lead nurturing gets maximum impact.
P.S. We work in leading platforms and can design workflows according to your present needs. For more information, speak to us today.