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Movable Ink

Why Email Automation Is a Marketers Must-Have Tool

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You’ve heard it (many times) before: relationships are everything. And as ESPs develop more advanced features, it becomes easier for marketers to continuously cultivate existing customer relationships while also nurturing new ones—the staple of any business.

At the core of that staple? Automation, which has emerged as one of email marketing’s most valuable assets. That’s likely why 67% of best-in-class companies are more likely to use an automation platform for marketing.

Despite the indisputable benefits, “email automation” remains an elusive yet casually used term for many; less than half of companies are using automation — and missing 100% of its benefits. Yes, email marketing’s ROI still beats out other tactics by a large margin, but marketers who have gotten too comfortable with the status quo fail to utilize the advantages of automation, which yields a more innovative email strategy — and superior results.

Take the “too many emails” complaint, a top reason people opt-out of subscriptions. Automation makes it easier to send fewer, but more relevant and personalized, emails, reducing churn rate. That’s important, since reducing churn by just 5% can boost profits by as much as 125%.

SaaS startup Groove reduced churn by 71% after they used data to figure out which customers were more likely to walk away. Turning to automation, they set up a trigger that sent an email to customers whose sessions lasted less than two minutes, one of the “red flag metrics” that indicated a high chance of loss. By sending an email that offered to help with the setup process—and generally securing a presence in the inboxes that needed it most—they saw a 26% response rate.

The profit doesn’t just come from sales; with technology doing the legwork, businesses can do more in-house with a smaller team, in less time.

With segmentation, automation has the capacity to seamlessly improve how customers interact with your emails. In the case of accessory supplier Isotoner, tracking data revealed that a certain percentage of subscribers were clicking on just one category of links in emails. After segmenting this group and sending more targeted emails, they increased their revenue substantially.

Automation software has also made the days of long waits for coding and production a thing of the past, and real-time, meticulously customized emails a thing of the present. For example, Movable Ink offers ready-to-go HTML for your creative, eliminating the wait time for coding. For those that want to work with their own code, our platform provides your team with tools to speed up the process. And we came up with another feature that reduces lag time: our web cropping tool lets you pull already created and approved content directly from your website.

Another big ingredient that automation addresses is personalization. It’s common knowledge that personalization is highly effective; according to a VentureBeat insight report, 96% of marketers saw open rates rise when they employed personalization strategies. So how can automation make great, greater? Take JetBlue, for example, which set up an automated trigger that sent an “anniversary email” 365 days after a customer subscribed. By going beyond the “Hello, [*First Name*]!” With the ability to personalize CTAs based on behavior, like abandoning a shopping cart or seeing which customers are more likely to open emails at what times.

While ESPs have some handy automation features — like the personalization and tracking —they’re still relying on volume-based subscriptions. That can discourage email marketers from fully leveraging what is now a necessary aspect of a more successful campaign. The secret to making automation as powerful as it can be is to use data to learn who your customers are, get creative, and avoid letting subscription parameters dictate your strategy.

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