How To Develop a Successful Email Automation Strategy

Because of this, you recognize the value of consistent outreach with personalized messages that feature quality, relevant content. But this will quickly drain your time and resources when applied to hundreds, if not thousands, of leads and prospects.

Since you can’t change the number of hours in a day, email automation seems like the obvious remedy for increasing efficiency. Email marketing automation tools, such as Email Sequences within the HubSpot Sales Hub solution, will allow you to track, schedule, optimize, and distribute sales email messages on a large scale throughout your growth marketing and sales enablement efforts.

At the end of the day, just careful not to mistake email automation for a silver bullet. A tool alone will not make you a better rep and magically increase your sales conversion. Its success is entirely dependent on proper planning, implementation, and optimization.

Follow these five steps when planning an email automation strategy for your email campaigns.

1. Define Your Goals

• What are your objectives for an email automation campaign?
• What will you consider a successful sales email campaign?
• What are your current conversion rates? What would you like them to be?

Defining your goals is absolutely necessary for measuring the campaign's success and will help you pinpoint what is and isn't working.

2. Understand the Needs of Your Customers

• What is the buyer persona you are targeting with each campaign?
• Where are they within your sales cycle?
• What content do they care about, need, and want?
• What are frequent questions they asked?

Defining a detailed buyer persona is an essential step before you develop the nuts and bolts of your automation campaign. This customer insight will guide your campaign’s messaging and content.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.  -HubSpot

3. Define Your Sales Nurturing Path

The next step is to outline the email sequence that your prospects will follow through your campaign. Keep your series sequence focused by referring to your campaign goals and targeted buyer persona.

• How often will they receive emails? What will the variables be?
• What actions or triggers will move the prospect from one email to the next?
• What is your end goal and how does each email work towards that goal?

Keep in mind it's better to start with a simple automation workflow than diving into something complex. It should also be reusable, meaning that it is easily modified and applied to your other buyer personas.

4.  Create Your Messages

Create each email template using your nurturing path as the guide. The body of each email should include new, valuable content that provides value to the recipient. The messaging should also be successive from one email to the next. Here are the things to consider on how to write a sales email:

• What quality, relevant content will you provide the prospect with each message?
  • Consider lead magnets and content offers
• What is the goal for each message? What will be the call-to-action?

The key to successful campaign emails is to balance the use of templates with customization.

• How much of the message will be a template?
• How much will be personalized?
• Where will you leave room for the personalization so that the message flows naturally?

This allows you to demonstrate a genuine interest in your prospect and develop a personal connection. Automated workflows should be used to free up time so that you can better research your prospects and personalize your messages.

5. Test, Measure, and Optimize

Start by segmenting small batches of contacts, and be prepared to test and measure your results at every stage of your campaign.

Variables should be tested individually and gradually, as this allows you to determine what version of the variable works better than another.  Examples of different variables to test include:

• Subject Lines
• Landing Page Triggers
• Call-to-actions
• Message Frequency
• Time and Day of Scheduling
• Body Copy, Images, or Links

An automated campaign should never be one and done - always be ready to continuously monitor, optimize, and improve!

If you have any questions with your email automation strategy, or growth marketing in general, email us and we’ll be happy to help out!