Email Automation: More Traffic for Less Work - Cool, Right?

This content awaits you in this blog article:

What exactly email automation means

What software is needed for email automation

What role personalisation plays in this
Playout of relevant content
Identifying the relevant target group

Best practices for email automation in conjunction with personalisation
The perfect follow-up email
The themed newsletter to bite into
The return emails with bright spot

Conclusion: There is no excuse: email automation is a must-have

What software is needed for email automation

For email automation, it is important to define a wokflow. For this, you need an email delivery system that offers you this option, e.g. Sendinblue, Inxmail or Mailchimp. The workflow strategy is up to you. However, there are some best practices that you can use immediately, such as various trigger emails like the welcome email or the birthday email. For this reason, various email delivery systems also have templates that help you, as can be seen in the following example from Sendinblue:

The workflow behind a welcome email then looks like this:

What experiences have you had with email automation? Tell us about it!

What role personalisation plays in this

Emails are even more effective when they are personalised. Therefore, it makes sense to send automated and personalised emails at the same time. If a customer has signed up for the newsletter, the welcome email can already send initial recommendations (products or content) that match the online shopper’s taste. After all, before the customer has signed up for the newsletter, he or she has already been in the online shop and has displayed a certain clicking and possibly also buying behaviour. Otherwise, top sellers can also be played at the beginning (fallback strategy).

For example, if an online shopper has looked at various Levis trousers, it makes sense to recommend Levis products in the welcome email, since the shopper has a proven affinity for them. This increases the click probability and provides an additional traffic boost in your online shop. One study, for example, also states that 75% of those surveyed are frustrated by websites if they are shown content that does not match their interest.² This negative shopping experience is counteracted by personalisation.

Playout of relevant content

In order to include personalised content, you need to have a Personalisation software. This enables you to incorporate the click and purchase behaviour of your customers from the online shop into your emails. This is achieved by the personalisation software generating a knowledge base with an AI engine for your online shop. This allows you to automatically send the right content to each customer at the right time. All you have to do is insert the placeholders into your email template using HTML code and determine the placement of the recommendations. After the email has been sent, the recommendations are displayed in real time when the email is opened and thus always correspond to the current click and purchase behaviour of your online shoppers. In addition to the traffic boost, you also increase customer confidence because you send relevant emails.

Identifying the relevant target group

If a customer has left a shopping basket, then the target group is clear, likewise with transactional emails etc., which are sent after a purchase. But what about when you have a new product in your range and want to select the right target group for it? Of course, you could fall back on existing segments and send an emailing to exactly this target group. But it can be done even better.

Ex Libris has increased email sales 10-fold and won an email award for this AI-supported targeting. Learn more about this use case in the case study: Increase e-commerce sales through automated and personalised emailings.

Best practices for email automation in conjunction with personalisation

It is not surprising that a shopping cart abandonment email contains abandoned shopping cart items and possibly still offers an incentive to complete the purchase. However, there are best practices that are predestined for both automation and personalisation. We now want to go into these and uncover the potential for your email marketing:

The perfect follow-up email

A customer buys, for example, in the online shop of Tableware24 tableware of the Kurland brand. Tableware24 responds to this purchase with a follow-up email containing suitable cross-selling articles for the Kurland brand that pick up on the customer’s taste. Tableware24 does not do this manually, of course, but via the online shop’s knowledge base, which determines the appropriate recommendations for the respective customer in real time. Customer A thus receives the Kurland brand and customer B the Versace brand etc. Tableware24 only designed this email workflow in the email dispatch system and created placeholders for the personalisation.

The return emails with bright spot

Returns are unfortunately still a permanent feature of online retailing. But there is a ray of hope. Why not use the return emails to trigger another purchase by sending alternatives to the returned item in the transactional email? The advantage here: Transactional emails have a higher open and click-through rate than other emails.³ That’s exactly what Outletcity Metzingen does. In the return mail, recommendations are sent that are similar to the returned product and match the customer’s taste. This is all made possible by the knowledge base with the AI engine.

Do you already send automated and personalised emails? Share your experience with us!