Marketers can’t be blamed for assuming that creating workflows are a long-winded task. In reality,...
Email automation workflows are a series of emails that are scheduled automatically and sent to leads in the hope of nurturing them towards becoming customers. They play quite an important role in the inbound methodology. In the words of Hubspot - they say it best - you'll be a marketing hero if you use them.
Here are just some of the benefits of email automation workflows:
- Once created, there is no need for manual sending
- Nurtures leads and makes them more receptive
- Benefits your sales team because leads are more educated
- Content is relevant to the email recipient and therefore a more positive experience with your brand than cold outreach efforts
- Increases brand affinity and touchpoints
- Better personalisation for prospects
- Carefully planned email strategy
- Reduce the potential for errors
- Save time so you can focus on other tasks
- Reduce costs
- Boost business revenue
- Better targeting and segmentation
- Keep existing customers interested
- More detailed reporting
- Understand your customers more
1. No need for manual sending
One of the biggest benefits of an email workflow is that it works its magic all on its own. After they're set up, you can choose a specific criteria to trigger the workflows and off they go.
You don't need someone to click send. You can rely on the email automation to work 24/7.
2. Nurtures leads to make them more receptive
Some businesses get their sales team to contact new leads immediately before they go cold. However, it might be that these leads aren’t quite ready to be contacted by a salesperson yet.
Just because a contact has downloaded a free how-to guide from your website, it doesn't mean they want to talk to your sales team.
Email workflows nurture your leads by following up their interest with helpful information and resources. If these emails are relevant and engaging, the contact will learn more about your business and be more receptive when they’re approached by your sales team further down the line.
3. Benefits your sales team because leads are more educated
As email workflows are designed to nurture potential customers, this is a huge win for your sales team too. They can see what emails and content the lead has engaged with so there's a higher chance they'll be interested in what your business has to offer.
Some email workflow tools, like HubSpot, will send internal emails to employees if and when an email recipient makes a specific action. For example, if a person has completed a free demo form, it would suggest they’re ready to be approached by a member of your sales team. Then your workflow can automatically send an email so they know it's time to pick up the phone.
4. Relevant to the email recipient
When you start planning your email workflows, you can make sure they’re completely relevant to the recipient.
There’s nothing more annoying than several emails from a company that aren’t tailored to you. They’re irrelevant, unhelpful and clogging up your inbox. Most people will unsubscribe or send your emails straight to their spam folder.
Your email workflows will entice more people if they’re relevant to the person reading them.
5. Increases brand affinity and touchpoints
When automation does the heavy-lifting of your email sending the results are more consistent and professional-looking. In short, email automation makes businesses appear better organised and more responsive.
When the email contact receives helpful and relevant emails from your workflow at the right time, they’ll naturally have a greater awareness and understanding of your business.
So when it's time for a salesperson to contact them, they’ll know exactly who and what your business is and they’ll likely be more interested in what you have to say.
6. Better personalisation for prospects
When an email is automatically sent in personalised email workflows, it’ll have personalisation tokens that are filled with the contact's information. Instead of saying, 'Hi, there,' the email will instead say, 'Hi, Bill.'
Some email workflow tools can also add other personal information like location, the company they work for and much more. Getting personal in email automation adds a further layer of relationship strengthening between a prospect and your business.
Personalisation is being used more and more to engage with contacts and it's incredibly beneficial in relation to inbound marketing. Adding a personal touch can also increase the open rates and click-throughs of your emails.
7. Carefully planned email strategy
While some companies just like to send the occasional email to their contact database, email workflows are carefully planned and have one key goal.
It benefits your overall email marketing strategy because with each workflow, you have the opportunity to plan out how they’ll work. So ensure each email is relevant and has a purpose.
8. Reduce the potential for errors
If you currently have one person writing and sending emails to new leads, then there’s a high chance a mistake can happen. Getting somebody’s name wrong is a cardinal sin - it’s right there in the email!
Making spelling mistakes or hitting send prematurely can cause the email recipient to have less trust in your company. It shows a lack of interest and attention to detail but with email workflows, they can be proofed and checked over and over before you put them live.
9. Save time so you can focus on other tasks
When everything is automated, it saves a lot of time. You can just let the software handle repetitive tasks that would be time-consuming to complete.
You and the rest of your team can focus on other tasks while the email workflows independently work. You can nurture leads and contacts while doing other jobs and then approach your leads when they're ready.
10. Reduce costs
You don't need a large sales team making cold calls every day. They can approach people when they're ready to be contacted and you don't need additional admin teams ensuring emails are sent out regularly. Paying for a large team to constantly contact prospects isn’t needed.
Also, you don’t need to be tech-savvy to use marketing automation, meaning that even less-experienced marketers can manage workflows.
11. Boost business revenue
Using email automation workflows to implement a successful lead nurturing system can dramatically increase conversion rates.
Increasing the probability that a lead will convert with targeted communications - even by a small amount - has a huge effect on overall revenue figures.
Once you find the right formula and timing of your emails, you can speed up the conversion process, freeing up your salespeople to pursue meatier prospects.
12. Better targeting and segmentation
One of the most effective, yet often overlooked, ways to use automation is to segment email contacts into different groups or lists based on their attributes, behavior patterns and other relevant conditions. This can all be stored in your handy CRM.
You can also implement advanced workflows like lead scoring so you can gauge interest and purchase potential for different leads. This means you follow-up with the right message accordingly.
By dividing your main list into smaller lists, you can send more targeted emails to subscribers. This not only increases engagement rates and conversions but it also improves customer satisfaction. How great is that?
13. Keep existing customers interested
Marketing isn’t all about attracting new customers. A key way to boost revenue is by getting existing customers to spend more throughout their lifetime with your brand.
Email automation makes retention and loyalty strategies a breeze, increasing customer lifetime value like it’s child’s play. It allows you to automate requests for feedback, send exclusive offers to high spending customers and trigger re-engagement campaigns if subscribers are straying.
These tactics all strengthen your relationship with your customers after they’ve purchased with you and it increases customer lifetime value.
14. More detailed reporting
The reporting function of email automation workflows makes your team more accountable. Any marketing automation software worth its salt comes with useful reporting capabilities.
Comprehensive reporting means you can quickly see how your marketing activities support your sales pipeline. This allows you to pinpoint the exact areas where results can be improved, empowering your team to make the changes needed for better results.
15. Understand your customers more
How do you learn about your customers when you have a million other tasks to do? Email automation allows you to understand your customers better.
You discover what links they tend to click on, which pages they visit more and the types of content they are interested in. Email workflows are an optimised way of marketing to your ideal customers.
As an HubSpot agency partner, there’s nothing we recommend more than HubSpot for companies who want to create successful inbound marketing campaigns.
HubSpot provides everything you need when setting up and managing an inbound strategy. It also offers in-depth reporting tools so you can see how well your campaigns are performing. With HubSpot, you can set up email workflows and reap all the benefits of automation.
In this example, you can see how HubSpot email workflows provide yes and no branches depending on what the email recipient does. The workflow automatically adds contacts into different lists and there are specific delays put in place so the emails are sent over a specific period of time.
There’s no need for manual work or supervision. Once all the rules are set the HubSpot workflows does everything independently.
One of the things we love about HubSpot is that they regularly update their tools to make them better and easier to use.
Ready to create your own email automation workflows and see the results of inbound marketing?
Now you've seen the benefits of email automation workflows, try creating your own in your inbound marketing campaigns. In our Year of Inbound guide, you’ll see all the strategy involved in implementing it, learn how long it takes to start seeing results and also how you convince your colleagues it’s the way to go.
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This post was tweaked and updated in March 2024