How to Build an Email Automation Series to Help Your Business

Building an email automation series will help reach the right people at the right time. Triggered emails have higher open and click-through rates than routine newsletters. This is great news for us marketers! Not only will automated emails perform better than regular emails, but once you've put the work in you can leave them to fire off on their own (with some optimisation every now and then).

Let's talk about how you can build your own email automation series to help your business.

Choose Your Goal

What are you trying to achieve? If it's ...

• Welcoming your new subscribers and building relationships = create a welcome series.
• Increasing sales and recover abandoned carts or sessions = create an abandoned cart series. This usually requires the user to be signed in when they abandon the session.
• Gathering credible reviews - set up an automation series for a set time after someone has made a purchase.

Create Your Segments

Next, segment your list for each goal. For a welcome series, set it up so new subscribers get their first email as soon as they've subscribed. Next, you can create different segments for the rest of the series. I think two or three emails is the perfect number - a series helps you to build a relationship with your audience from the beginning, and sometimes one email isn't enough.

Your first segment will be made up of recent subscribers. Segments that follow will be based on a receiver's engagement with your emails. Splitting by engagement gives you a chance to directly speak to people who haven't engaged with your emails and use easing tactics to motivate them to.

Get Creative With Your Emails

For each segment, create an email that will help you to achieve your goals for the automation. With your welcome series, you want to introduce your brand, give your discount code if you offer one for signing up, and build a relationship with your audience.

Moving on to your abandoned cart email, you want to encourage clicks back through to your website and conversions. Think of original ways to build your business.

For your reviews email, you want people to share their experience. Encourage them to give feedback using emojis, three words, or whatever you can. Most of the time, they'll have a lot to say.

Set the Emails to Go Live

The final step is setting your email automation series to go live. If you use a platform like Mailchimp, it's as simple as heading to the automate tab, most other platforms will have a similar setup. If you use DotMailer, check out this guide on setting up a program.

These email automation tips will save you time in the long-run, whilst helping you to achieve your business goals!

Written by Alice Bjorkstrand