Automate Email Workflows for Success with These 5 Tips

Every online business that wants to maximize its marketing effectiveness, drive traffic, and achieve a higher conversion rate uses automated email workflows. Email workflows help small business owners market to as many people as possible without spending hours on end writing individual email advertisements.

But even automatic email marketing tools might still require a lot of time and effort on your end, especially if they don’t have in-depth customization options or ready-made templates for different email messages or marketing goals.

Let’s break down some key strategies you can use to automate your email workflows for enhanced success.  

1. What Are Email Workflows?

In a nutshell, email workflows are collections or series of automatic emails that are sent based on certain static or dynamic triggers, like a customer entering your e-commerce store’s shopping cart, a shopping cart being abandoned before a purchase is made, or a website visitor checking out a specific page.

Online business owners use email workflows to save time and energy. Automated email workflows allow marketers to send messages to the right target consumers at the right time, increasing the odds of website visitors converting into paying customers.

While practically all email workflow tools are “automatic” in that they send emails automatically once certain triggers are met, you can increase the efficiency of your workflows through a number of smart strategies.

How to Automate Email Workflows

Let’s break down how you can further automate your email workflows (email workflow automation ) for even greater success and a higher conversion rate.

Plan to Automate Different Workflows for Different Customer Groups

Before sending out a single email to your target customers, set up several different automated workflows for varying customer groups.

It’s not a good idea to send out the same email workflows to all people who visit your online store website. Instead, you should customize different email workflows to different consumers or needs. Here are some examples (email workflow best practices) :

• Welcome workflows are automatic emails that are sent to visitors’ inboxes once they provide their email information. These personalized messages can connect visitors to your brand and increase the chances of them converting into customers. These emails are possibly the most important: 74% of online shoppers expect them after visiting a site!
• Abandonment workflows are great at reminding customers that may have clicked away from their shopping cart that they still need to finish their purchase
• Prospecting workflows are emails sent to website visitors that visited a page for a particular product but didn’t make a purchase. These emails can use convincing ad copy and engaging graphics to convince the visitor to make a purchase

These are just a few examples. The point is to plan out your email workflows before creating the emails themselves. This will allow you to tailor or specialize the content for specific users.

In general, the more specific an ad for email is, the more likely it is to connect with a target user.

Use Versatile Templates for Email Ads

You can also save time and money by leveraging versatile templates for your email ads and their visual assets. It’s tough to create a personalized email for each workflow in your list, especially if your business relies on a dozen or more distinct workflows for different triggers or consumers.

Tools such as PosterMyWall offer hundreds of free templates for small business flyers and other graphic design elements you can easily use in your workflow emails. Because these templates are easily adjustable, you can tweak them here and there to make them more appropriate for specific workflows or objectives. Since PosterMyWall is totally free, there’s no reason not to give it a try.

Using these tweakable templates, you’ll be able to craft engaging yet still relatively personalized email messages to your users for different marketing goals. For example, you can make a generalized email marketing template for your business, then use that core template for welcome messages.

To keep the theme for your business consistent, use the same template but tweak its contents slightly for your cart abandonment or upselling email workflows.

Create Personalized Lines or Messages to Connect with Consumers

Each email workflow you create should include several personalized lines or messages so they will better connect with your consumers or users. You can create template sentences and let your email marketing tool fill in the blanks with specific names. For instance, these lines serve as good greetings you can use for your welcome email workflows, but they can be tweaked for extra personalization:

• “Hey (blank name)! We’ve got an offer you won’t be able to refuse!”
• “Welcome to (company name)(blank name). We’re so excited to bring you into our family that we’ve got a special offer just for you!”
• “Welcome to the team, (blank name). Here’s some site credit to get you started.”

Optimize the Text

You should also optimize the text content in your marketing emails. Word count is a precious commodity when it comes to ad emails since user attention span is so low and it’s unproductive to clutter your emails with too much text.

You can use word counting software, such as Easy Word Count, to track how many words go into each email and make sure that your message is concise, punchy, and engaging. You should also use tools like Grammarly to make sure your message is informative and clear rather than wordy and obtuse.

Use Tests to Maximize Workflow Effectiveness

The best way to maximize long-term email workflow effectiveness is to test individual workflows from time to time. You can use A/B testing (i.e. sending two very similar but slightly different email workflows to different consumer groups) to see which versions of your emails are more effective over time, for instance.

Gather a lot of data and run tests regularly. This takes effort initially, but it can help you automate your email workflows even better in the future once you find the ideal template or email message style for your target users or customers.

Summary

All in all, automating your email workflows is key to mastering email marketing and making the most of your mailing tools. Be sure to combine multiple free or affordable tools simultaneously to produce the most engaging and effective online marketing campaign you can.