7 Strategies for optimising your email marketing automation

Maybe you thought email marketing automation would solve the worlds marketing problems?

It would end the hassle of remembering to send out all those pesky follow up emails to the right people at the right time. That somehow this marketing automation software you just persuaded your boss to invest in would finally do everything for you. That once you created a miraculous recipe you could sit back drink coffee and watch the leads roll in? until ....they didn’t? 

Well, all is not lost folks I have compiled a list of effective optimization strategies to help you make the most out of your marketing automation campaigns.

Follow up immediately

When someone fills out a form, follow up with an email sent out immediately. even if you have redirected them to a thank you page to access the content.  Don't leave them waiting. Your prospect has just engaged with you by taking action. Reach out to them and say thank you for requesting free samples/ downloading this ebook etc.  This acts as a reference in their inbox that they can always refer back to later. It also serves as a way to offer more options for engaging. You can do this by including some links to relevant blog posts or encouraging social sharing. A great example of this is to include a tweet this button. Like in the this example - 

Event-triggered marketing can potentially save 80% of your direct mail budget >> Click to Tweet
[Source: Gartner Research] 

Include snippets & read more buttons

If you are sending a follow up email the goal is not for them to read the email but to take action! Ideally you want to encourage people to click through to your site or landing page by including a snippet of text with read more rather than a full version as in the screenshot below. 

This is similar to adding the play button to images to encourage click through to watch a video.   In this example Ragan Communications the CTR doubled. 

Make sure all images are clickable

Use CTA's

Make it clear what action you want people to take. Explain why this benefits them, what is the value? Remove any barriers to clicking. e.g. a button with 'GET STARTED'  requires a lot of commitment where as a button with ' SEE HOW X WORKS' requires less commitment.  

[source http://www.marketingexperiments.com/website-optimization-transcripts/2011-11-09.pdf]

Timing

If you have access to email marketing data that you have built up over time, use this to calculate the best time of day or the optimal day of week to send out your automated emails. This may help to increase the open rates. 

Test

Try A/B testing or using a sample of contacts to test the automation on before sending it out to the rest of your database. 

Analyse

Check the data! What are the conversion rates or ROI (return on investment) for emails. Is there a higher conversion on one email over another?

These are just some suggested ideas for optimisation. Have you any examples of what works well for you? Include them in the comments below. I would love to hear from you.