l marketing automations: 6 essential tools that are underused.

Automated emails are one of the most powerful and underutilized growth opportunities for marketing. Strategic automation can be beneficial to brands in all verticals. We see low-hanging fruits at the onboarding phase of clients.

Email automation is a great fit for ecommerce, food and beverage and hospitality.

This article breaks six email automations down that should (but don’t often) drive significant incremental growth including:

• After-purchase or after-shipment
• Welcome to account creation
• Birthday or Anniversary
• Abandon cart
• Browse abandonment
• Re-engagement / “We miss you”

You will learn about the business benefits and potential impact of each type of automation. We’ll examine the misconceptions that prevent marketers from using these tools — and the tech options available to enable them.

Email automations that you must have

1. Emails sent after the purchase and shipment

An ecommerce website is a great way to interact with a user about their new product. It could be shipping details, status, upsells or customer service information, as well as content about the brand or community that the customer has just joined.

This journey is especially useful for first-time buyers, as it can create a positive experience that will encourage them to make repeat purchases. This automation has a direct impact on revenue, based on customer lifetime value.

2. Welcome or Account Creation Emails

It is a great way to establish a positive tone for new subscribers. This is a great tool for CPG brands.

Customize the communication and experience to the content and channel that will attract new subscribers. Use this series to establish the expectations of users regarding the frequency and type communication they should receive.

We’ve paired messaging that promotes with messaging to build brand equity and connection. These are two content themes that you can test with your users. This automation has a higher-funnel, nurture-focused impact on business. The metrics affected are:

• When to buy?
• Buy frequency
• Brand affinity.

3. Emails for birthdays or anniversaries

By collecting birthday information at signup, you can offer your users a variety of fun ways to express appreciation. Brands can build relationships with users by sending birthday emails that offer small gifts, discounts or special offers and suggestions for how to use a brand’s product to celebrate.

It’s also important to celebrate the anniversaries when users first joined brand communities. It may seem counterintuitive to use automations to boost personal connections, but brands will benefit from this. Brand equity, brand recognition and direct response revenue are the business benefits.

Dig deep: What marketing automation is and how can B2B marketers benefit from it?

4. Abandon Cart Emails

The ecommerce brand must take this journey. If users have made it to the point where they put a product into their shopping cart, then all they need is a little reminder or nudge to finish their purchase.

Abandon Cart Emails can be a major revenue generator. Our most successful abandoned-cart journey was with an ecommerce customer who began with just 1-2 emails. After many iterations, testing and tactics, the difference was absurd: 88% more total conversions with 150% average increase in total revenue.

This is what an abandoned-cart-series might look like.

It may seem like a lot to set up, but if you use an effective strategy, your efforts will be rewarded.

5. Browse abandonment

Cart abandonment is usually the last step before a purchase. Imagine a user browsing your site and is interested in a certain product or category but has not yet added it to their shopping cart. This is the perfect time to convince them of the product and its benefits and use cases.

This step can increase revenue even though we do not see the same direct response as abandon-cart email.

6. Re-engagement / ‘We miss you’

Sometimes, the differences in philosophy can be the deciding factor for use cases with this audience segment. Enterprise-level businesses are often reluctant to let go of subscribers who have not engaged with their content. They believe that more people, no matter how unengaged, will lead to more engagement.

This is not true in the long term, especially if engagement strategies aren’t refined. Continue to treat them as fully engaged users can also be detrimental to the sender’s reputation, unsubscribe rates, and overall engagement rate.

Instead, I suggest understanding the level engagement of your entire audience (high-medium and low). If a user falls into the “low” category, you can move them to a reengagement workflow with content that is tailored for them and less frequent emails. It is important to get these users back in the funnel as a medium or high level subscriber.

Push back if your leadership sets KPIs based on total subscribers and new subscribers without considering best email practices.

This metric is the conversion rate of low-engagement users to medium and high engagement segments.

What is the best way to enable marketers to utilize these automations?

It’s a surprise to me when I see that the series above aren’t implemented, and this happens all too often. What’s stopping brands from achieving their goals? The main reasons are data and technology capabilities, and the belief that the payoff won’t be worth it.

A poor data setup in the ESP (email provider) is one of the most common reasons why brands do not use automations. Sometimes:

• There are several fields that map to the same type of data.
• The data collected is not accurate.
• The data mapping of theirs is scattered all over.

As a first step to effective email automation, we’ve undertaken a number of data cleansing projects. There are many partners who can help brands if they cannot do it in-house.

A lack of integration is another common problem. It requires IT resources but will quickly pay off if you set up a cart abandonment series.

Three of the automations above require minimal API work. API is a simple way to create the welcome series. No API is required to run the birthday and reengagement series directly from your ESP.

Martech stacks

All of the above opportunities are dependent on having a quality ESP. Klaviyo, as much as I like Salesforce Marketing Cloud is my recommendation if your internal IT resources are limited.

It has a lot of options that are ready to use. If you don’t want to use Shopify and have lots of data, Salesforce or Emarsys may be a better option.

Getting started

You won’t get to step 10 without first taking the first step. This means you should take a close look at the data hygiene of your ESP and make sure it is working from the beginning.

Automate a few emails at each of the six steps above and you will be way ahead of most big-name brands.

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