Tips and examples
Email marketing is a popular means of retaining existing customers, making offers or simply providing information. This form of online marketing is gaining in importance and has become indispensable for most companies. This usually involves an enormous amount of time; email newsletters or mailings have to be planned, prepared and sent to the relevant target groups. They are often sent out at regular, predetermined intervals and to a wide range of customers.
At the same time, personalisation in marketing is an important tool to address your customers personally and to stand out from your competitors. Non-specific email newsletters usually do not meet this requirement, as they send the same information to a multitude of customers with completely different needs, interests and buying behaviour.
In this blog post, we have already discussed how you can use email automation and personalisation for the success of your business. In the following, we would like to take a closer look at how you can use email automation to support the five phases of the customer journey and thus combine personalisation with modern email marketing.
Why automated emails at all? You may already be doing email marketing very successfully and getting great feedback on your email newsletters. Here are just three of 21 statistics that speak for email automation:
Through newsletters or free trials, customers usually give out their email address before they make their first purchase. This is where you can link to the first automated email to target your leads. You can ask about their individual interests or offer your help in answering questions that arise. The answers you will receive will give you detailed information on how to approach and win over these customers in the future.
Examples, such as email notifications after a shopping cart abandonment, show that these initial contacts can be extremely effective and successfully start the customer journey.
During onboarding, a welcome email is already standard for many businesses. This can take the form of a successful registration, successful order acceptance or order confirmation - depending on what products or services you offer. Such mailings offer the possibility of personal appreciation, for example through a signature of the CEO or a personally assigned contact person. Helpful links and tutorials can also be included in this email and create examples of use for your customers.
Of course, this phase is highly dependent on the complexity of your products. If you need to implement and roll out your product for a longer period of time, timed emails can support and train your customers over a longer period of time. If your customers have not accepted any of this assistance, you can offer individual help through customer support after a certain period of time.
If more of your customers' data is needed to drive customer onboarding, email reminders can help you pick up your customers.
Further information such as training offers, videos or community tips can be shared during this phase, offering your customers an optimal user experience and laying the foundation for long-term cooperation.
Most importantly, during this phase you should reduce the frequency of your mailings so that your customers do not perceive them as spam.
Nevertheless, the longest phase of the customer journey also offers potential for automated emails: a simple example is birthday greetings. It is important here that the mailings are not sent weekly or monthly, but depending on clearly defined triggers. Here, for example, we have shown how quality management was automated for our client.
Here, too, what is feasible depends very much on the products and services you offer. Reductions of products from the customer's wish list or sales in preferred product groups of your buyers are just two ideas at this point.
Automated emails can also be used during this phase to prevent your customers from churning. Remind your customers why they bought your product or that they should use it again. To be effective, it is important to know your data: What are your customers' intentions to churn? Are there any recurring patterns that can help you recognise this phase? Based on this, you can then write emails reminding your customers why your product meets their needs.
Complementary products or services, reminders to renew your membership or an offer to upgrade your expiring trial - you know best what opportunities are available to you during this phase of the customer journey. Use them!
Timing is everything - for this you need to know and understand your customers and their needs in the first step. It may also be necessary to optimise your processes. The chances of success are promising.
Covid19 has shown how much is still ahead of us in terms of digitalisation and automation, but also how much is still possible. Be one of the first and use automation to make your company more efficient and crisis-proof. Together we will find individual solutions that are flexible and scalable.
Cloud Integration, iPaaS, SaaS, BPA… Ough, hard to keep track of all these terms. They are currently used frequently (and increasingly) in the context of automation, and it is sometimes difficult to make a clear distinction and distinction. We have already written blog posts on the terms iPaaS, SaaS and BPA, but we’ll take them up again here to make the difference.
But let’s start with cloud integration, because that’s the central umbrella term in which we embed all the other technologies in this blog post.
Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
To illustrate these advantages, an example is suitable that we know well from our everyday work as an automation agency:
The central data to be used here is the data of a major customer. This can be the simplest information, such as the address. This address is required in numerous but completely different processes in the company: on the one hand, for correct invoicing in accounting. On the other hand, in the CRM system, where all the data of the large customer is also stored. But the address is also important in sales, for example, when employees go to the sales meeting on site.
Now the customer announces that the address of the company has changed after a move. This information will reach you by e-mail. There are now two options:
01. The e-mail is forwarded to all affected departments, accounting, sales, customer service, marketing… All persons open their corresponding program, CRM, accounting software, marketing tools (such as newsletter marketing) and change the data already stored there of the customer. This means that in multiple applications, different people do exactly the same thing: change one address.
02. But there is also an alternative: By connecting your applications, thus by integrizing them, the customer’s e-mail, or rather the information it contains about the address change, is automatically passed on to all affected applications: CRM, accounting, marketing, ERP. This does not require any clicks, because the cloud integration detects a trigger, i.e. address change, and thus automatically starts the process.
What sounds unimpressive in a single process becomes more effective when such a process occurs several times a day or weekly. Because there is a lot of data that is available in different applications and should always be correct. If these applications are cloud applications they are suitable for cloud integration.
But cloud integration doesn’t just happen. There are now a variety of applications that enable and implement this. Such tools usually allow us to link the relevant cloud applications on a central platform and define clear rules on when, how, where, how much data should be passed on and what happens to them.
To realize cloud integration, there are various applications and technologies that are sometimes used interchangeably.
We have made a first distinction between iPaaS and BPA here.
We explain the term SaaS in more detail here.
Cloud integration is rather an umbrella term that includes numerous technologies, such as SaaS, iPaaS and BPA, and this is also absolutely necessary. Cloud integration is a concept that is made possible by appropriate technologies.
However, all terms share the commonality that they are cloud-based and thus offer enormous potential for growth and scaling. In addition, they are often cheaper to implement and maintain because changed requirements are easy to implement.
As an independent automation agency, we implement cloud integration according to your requirements. We use a variety of SaaS tools and iPaas (strictly speaking BPA) software. Together we find individual solutions that are flexible and scalable.
