The 5 Key Items You Need to Automate your Email Marketing

Emercury Email Automation

Do you know why most businesses fail to achieve the growth they deserve? They take too long to implement the technologies and techniques that would give them an edge. And why do they spend so much time delaying what is necessary to implement right away? That’s easy, the reason is a feeling of overwhelm.

You see, I’ve worked with many entrepreneurs, business owners and managers over the years and one of my passions is trying to figure out why businesses implement or fail to implement the techniques that I (and they) know would help them boost profits almost overnight.

What I keep seeing over and over is that they bombard their minds with ideas about all the latest and coolest tricks in marketing. And they are constantly starting one thing, not seeing immediate results, seeing some hype about another thing, starting on that, then dropping it for some other newer fancier thing, and just doing this ad infinitum. And nothing ever gets fully implemented.

Can you relate to this?

We can all relate to this, but it’s not entirely our fault. It stems from a lack of a clear vision. To get a clear vision you need to decide on your goals. This will help you define your business processes, which will then help you determine what marketing techniques you want to implement.

While many get step 1 right (defining the goals), it’s step 2 (defining those business processes) that most will just skip, and this is where most of the issue comes from.

And again, it’s mostly not your fault if you do this, it comes back to that sense of overwhelm we talked about earlier. And why do we even have this sense of overwhelm? Because we’re surrounded by experts and companies who are always trying to sell us on the latest and fanciest “cutting edge” ideas. So we feel lost and have no idea where to start.

That’s why our mission at Emercury is the exact opposite to the one utilized by most providers of marketing platforms and knowledge. We actually care for our clients and want to see you succeed. And we know that the best way to ensure your success is that you quickly get started in implementing what works. And the best way to do that is to keep it simple.

The best email marketing automation is the one that you implement today

As long as you define a set of clear goals and well-defined business processes, you will get a huge advantage over most of your competitors who are procrastinating or stuck in overwhelm.

You will get most of any and all possible benefits even if your automation is “simple”. In other words, you’ll get tremendous results even if you “fail” to utilize all the latest and fanciest automation tricks that you hear about. You know the 80–20 rule right? Well, it applies to everything, including email marketing automation.

And hey, you wanna hear a secret? You know those super-fancy cutting edge automation tricks you hear about? They only serve 2 goals:

1. To help big corporations get an extra 0.5% in profits
2. To help platforms sell you more expensive plans when you don’t even need that amount of complexity

If you have millions of customers and your profits run in the billions, then yes those super-fancy cutting edge automation tricks can help you squeeze out maybe an extra 0.5% in terms of conversion, which in the case of a big corporation will bring a couple of million in extra profits. Which is why they can afford to spend money implementing the latest cutting edge techniques and technologies. For most everyone else, you’ll just end up wasting money on hype.

Clarity is your friend

If overwhelm and overcomplicating things are the enemy, then getting down to the basics and clarifying them is your best friend. And that’s what I want to help you with today. We’re going back to the basics, and it actually starts with your business as a whole.

First things first, we need to define a couple of things

I hinted at this above, but marketing automation is really just a way to “automate your business processes”, and most often this will be about your “marketing processes”.

What is a business process though? That’s simple, a business process is a set of activities that moves your business closer towards a goal.

But here’s where the issue arises. If you’re not clear on your business processes, then how are you going to be clear on your marketing automations? You just can’t. So you have to take a step back and start at a higher level. Makes complete sense right?

Here’s your step-by-step roadmap

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll use an example business with some example business processes. However, most of what you’ll see here should help give you clarity about how to do to the process.

Number 1 — Define your goals

Obviously, a business will have many different goals, but to simplify, let’s say that you’re selling software-as-a-service. Your goal is to get people to sign up for your service as paying customers. How do you actually achieve this? That’s where step 2 comes in.

Number 2 — Define your processes

Again, we’ll work on a simple scenario to illustrate things. Obviously, in the real world, you’ll have many more processes and goals running at the same time. In a typical scenario for a business like the one outlined above, the processes might look like this:

1) Acquire leads (people who give you their email address)

In this scenario, it would typically be in exchange for a free trial or signing up for a free plan. It could be in exchange for a lead magnet or whitepaper of some sort

2a) Give them a great onboarding experience that maximizes the chances of user activation

This involves motivating them to use the service and educating them about how to get the most out of their free trial.

2b) Simultaneously educate them on why the paid service is so great

The educational material in the onboarding sequence should also work to educate them why they should upgrade. If they joined a free plan, educate them why the paid plan is so much better than the free plan. If they joined a free trial, convince them why they should continue after their trial.

3) Segment the leads based on their engagement during the free trial

This is because you will want to have a different process with those who barely engaged, those who used the product a ton and didn’t sign up for a paid plan, and then those who immediately signed up for the paid plan

Number 3 — Map out your marketing automations

Let’s look at the processes above and which parts you could automate. While we could get super-fancy, we’ll keep it simple to get you started.

Automating the onboarding and upsell experience

This refers to the business processes that we defined as 2a and 2b in the example above:

2a) Give them a great onboarding experience that maximizes the chances of user activation

2b)Simultaneously educate them on why the paid service is so great

If you map out your plan, it might look something like this

• Create a basic autoresponder that triggers right after they sign up for their free trial
• Write a number of emails with great educational content. This will be content that helps with both activation and converting that lead into a paying customer
• Decide the order in which these emails are sent, and at what intervals, that is how many days between each email
• (Note: The total length of this autoresponder should correspond to the length of the free trial)
• At the end of the sequence include an email that asks them to “make a choice to upgrade”. This is sent right before their trial ends

Automating the segmentation process and the processes that follow

This refers to the third process we defined earlier:

3) Segment the leads based on their engagement during the free trial

You will want to sit and brainstorm a little bit on this one, but it will be worth it. You want to build an automation that does this segmentation for you. The actual process of building the automation can be quite simple (especially with Emercury ), but you have to decide what the automation is based on. You have to decide what those segmentation decisions are based on.

In our simple example, you could segment the people who go through your free trial sequence based on three different kinds of conditions:

1. The people who decide to purchase the paid plan right after the free trial
2. The people who don’t upgrade to a paid plan, but did open many of your emails (high-responders)
3. People who failed to engage with your onboarding sequence emails (low-responders)

If you map-out the automated segmentation for those who upgrade, it might look like this:

• Create an automation that adds them to a list for “brand-new customers”
• Then set up an automation that triggers when a person joins the “brand-new customers” list
• Tie it into an autoresponder that has lots of content aimed at keeping them as a paying customer for as long as possible.

If you map out an automation for those who don’t sign up but engage, it might look like this:

• Create an automation that places them in a “warm leads” list, or something equivalent
• Build an automation that triggers whenever a person joins the warm-leads list, and attach an autoresponder that continues to nurture them towards becoming a paying customer

And then, if you map out your segmentation plans for the non-responders, it can look like this:

• Create an automation that places them in a “low-engagement” list, or something equivalent
• Build an automation that triggers whenever a person joins the “low engagement” list, and attach an autoresponder that continues to re-engage them and attempts to convert them into a warm lead

Obviously, email automation can get very exciting with all of the possibilities it offers

You can make this a lot more complicated if you wanted to. For example, you can have different automations that fire based on how much people engage with the service and how much they use it during the trial. Or you can send more or fewer emails based on how much they read the emails or how heavily they use the service.

However, I want you to notice something. Most of the biggest SaaS services out there will have a very simple autoresponder sequence. If you don’t believe me, you can test it out for yourself. You’ll get the same sequence and content whether you use the product a ton or never activate. It’s only after the sequence is done that you’re segmented out in terms of being a high or low-responder.

The truth is that (if well-crafted) even a basic automation like this can get you some great results, and especially if you couple it with personalization. I’m not saying you never want to get fancier with your automations. But it’s ok to start off simple, in fact, it’s the best thing you can do most of the time.

Number 4 — Build your automations

There’s a reason we harp on so much about simplicity and keeping it simple. A lot of people never get their automations off the ground because they get stuck at the building stage. Much of the automation software out there simply overwhelms you with super-complicated and advanced features that you don’t really need. In fact, it’s hurting your ability to get a clear and concise process going.

We’ve made building your automations in Emercury extremely simple. In fact, if you’re clear on your processes and goals, you could build the related automation in minutes. This is without having to go through any documentation, watch a bunch of tutorials or anything of the sort. Just open our automation builder, and build it.

In fact, currently, we have a time-limited promotion where the automation builder is complimentary at under 2000 contacts. Just sign up for our forever-free plan. The total time it takes to sign up for the free account and start playing with the automation builder is probably under 3 minutes.

Number 5 — Refine your automations over time

It might go without saying, but there’s a reason we have this as the last step and define it as one of these 5 key steps. A lot of people make the mistake of trying to build the “ultimate-perfect” automation before they launch. They worry themselves sick with all the possible scenarios and permutations and how to do things “right”.

The truth is, if you know that you can always change and refine your automations later, you will be a lot more relaxed about just getting it launched and getting it to go live.

With that said, if your email marketing software has a good analytical component (and Emercury does), you can delve into the results and find out what is working, what isn’t working and what could be improved. If you study the reports you’ll be able to plan your tweaks and refinements as you go along.

Bonus: The sixth item that you need to handle before you can automate your email marketing

You want to (obviously) get access to an email service provider that allows you to build email automations. Here’s the part that’s not so obvious — finding the right platform isn’t as easy as it seems. There are a ton of choices out there, and most of them will be wrong for you when you’re starting out.

In fact, if you go for the marketing hype over automation, you might make the perfectly wrong choice and go for a platform that’s contrary to your goals and everything we’ve talked about in this piece.

Remember, overwhelm is your enemy, and simplified clarity is your best friend. It’s easy to get starry-eyed about fancy sounding automation gimmicks and overpay for email marketing automation. That is until you realize you won’t need to use them until much later (or ever) unless you grow into a fortune 500 company.

At Emercury we’ve worked really hard to make email automation super-accessible and perfectly tailored to what you need. There is none of the overwhelm, you will not be bombarded with filler features. Just what you need to get that 80/20 done right away.

To prove this, we’ve included most (almost all) features in our forever-free plan, and currently, it includes all of the email automation. We’ve made it so straightforward that you can grab your free account and build your first email automation in minutes.

Go ahead and give it a try right away. It’s ok to build a test automation just to get a sense of how simple and straightforward things can be. And then after you do that, be sure to go back and do those five steps. I look forward to your newfound business success.

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Michael Batalha helps startups and businesses with making their sites work for them like a sales machine, from building your story to collecting leads to nurturing those leads into customers. He has successfully created numerous startups and sat on the board of the Entrepreneur Organization. His passion is working with entrepreneurs and building businesses. You should follow him on twitter @mikebatalha for tweets on awesome marketing tips.

Originally published at www.emercury.net on May 23rd, 2019