Email automation workflows are a sequence of pre-written, automated emails that are sent to a customer following a specific action trigger.

With the rise of millennials, it has never before been so important to be as specific, targeted and personalised in your response marketing than ever before. Recent stats have shown that your audience require a more personalised customer experience and are turned off by blanket mass-marketing messages.

Automated email workflows can help you get more specific, more targeted and more streamlined than ever before in your outbound communications with your audience.

What Are Email Automation Workflows

Email automation workflows are a sequence of pre-written, automated emails that are sent to a customer following a specific action trigger.

Automated email workflows can help you get more specific, more targeted and more streamlined than ever before in your email outbound automation communications with your audience.

A workflow is a series of steps or business processes that are taken to complete a task. The task can vary in size and complexity and can span multiple departments, channels, and functions. Workflows can also lead into other workflows, depending on the fulfilment of conditions. Typically when speaking about email workflows, the viewer triggers an action, which leads to a sequence of events that follow the trigger. Relevancy and immediacy are important facets of email marketing automation.

Example, a customer may browse your e-commerce store website and spend 2 minutes on a product page, however, they might not add this product to the basket and simply leave the website. You could have a personalised series of automated emails that are now triggered and sent to the potential customer offering help, advice, more information, and even discounts on that particular product to bring them back to the store and lead to a sale.

Every email automation workflow has a goal, a trigger and a series of events that help nurture, engage and strengthen your relationship with the lead and edge them closer to the end goal.

Here are 10 major benefits of utilising email automation workflows in your marketing strategy.

Why Use Email Automation Workflows

1] It's Automatic

One of the absolute all time most important aspects of email automated workflows is quite simply that they are automatic. Once your workflows are set up, whenever a viewer triggers the event, the sequence of actions in the marketing workflow will begin. You don't need manual intervention, or a member of your team monitoring customer activity and manually sending emails 24/7 - it simply flows by itself. Many email marketing systems even term their automations 'flows'.

2] Nurture Your Leads

Business is a relationship. It's a relationship between the customer and vendor. Relationships are based on a number of factors - relevance and specificity being a massive aspect of building strong associations and relationships.

Email workflows are designed to for lead nurturing when you create strategies around lead generation.

Many customers have an internal buying strategy (conscious or subconscious) which means that they do not necessarily want to be contacted by a sales person almost immediately after they've downloaded your free PDF lead magnet - they want, and need, to be nurtured in the process.

Email automation allows you to do just that. By sending engaging, relevant, specific information that helps the contact learn more about your business and service, meaning they become more receptive when they are approached by your sales team or offer.

3] Sales Team Benefits - Warmer Prospects

Reviewing statistics from email campaigns, sales team members can see exactly what information a prospect has read, clicked, engaged with and so on. This means that the prospect is not 'cold' but 'warm' and the sales team have a greater understanding of the potential customers interests, aspirations, goals, and thought process. There's a higher chance the lead will be interested by what your business has to offer.

Certain CRMs (customer relationship management) tools have integrated systems that trigger internal email notifications when a prospect takes certain actions (such as clicking on a link, filling in a form, or opening a certain email). This allows your sales team to take appropriate and relevant action.

4] Relevance To The Email Recipient

When planning out your email workflow automations, you can start at the higher level and ensure everything is personalised and relevant to your prospect in each workflow campaign.

We have all experienced the irritation of receiving multiple communications from a company that are clearly irrelevant, non-specific and an absolute turnoff trigger. Most of us just unsubscribe or click SPAM at that stage - a very negative impact on your business marketing efforts, where future communications simply become lost.

Your email workflows will nurture more people if it's relevant to what the recipient is interested in. This allows you to cut out the junk and irrelevance and cut straight to what the prospect has shown interest in already with killer call-to-actions.

5] Increased Brand Awareness

By sending out engaging, interesting content of value that is specific and relevant, the customer is already building a relationship with your brand and identity - all on auto pilot. This is pivotal for the moment when a sales agent makes contact, or, and offer is sent. The customer is aware, receptive and engaged all on autopilot. Your pre-set campaigns have built your brand relevance and awareness without you having to lift a finger.

6] Personalisation

With most email automation workflow technology you can get really personal with your email templates. This means that the data gathered from your prospects digital footprint, you can target very specifically and personalise everything.

Things such as first name and location, business and so on can all be dynamically generated in your email responses to create the illusion that somebody on your team has hand crafted your email responses personally for the prospect. This is vital, since humans like to buy off people, and they'll base that purchasing decision on their relationship with the people they interact with over a faceless entity any day. Getting personal in email automation adds a further layer of relationship strengthening.

Personalisation has been shown to increase both open rates and click through rates.

7] Carefully Planned Triggers and Responses

If you plan your email automation workflows strategically, the content is dynamic and evergreen. Meaning a prospect could trigger a workflow today, tomorrow, next month or next year and the content is relevant and automated no matter when.

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 will work and ensure each email is relevant and has a purpose.

8] Error Reduction

Years gone by, companies would use a person to email each prospect or attempt to manually create a process to contact customers - which introduces a lot of human error with the more volume of email sending required. With automated templated and workflows, you can revise, assess, update and improve your flows on the fly in one simple, single location to ensure everthing is optimised and always error free.

9] Time Saving

Saving time, this is a huge one! When everything is automated it simple saves so much human involvement in the process which saves your company so much time. Time that your sales team can invest in more relevant and successful tasks such as contacting warmer prospects with more information about their prospects leading to a greater ROI - whilst catering to existing customers.

10] Cost Saving

This almost goes without saying. When sending automated emails to your email list, you're saving many hours which means your saving money - rather than blowing it on social media ads all the time. You don't need a massive sales team making cold calls all day long with a low ROI. You don't need additional admin teams ensuring emails are being regularly sent out.

With automation software, you can save your man hours for more relevant tasks and an opportunity to invest less in a greater return on time investment. Quite simple email automated workflows are an investment to save you a lot of money.

Ready to learn more about our email automation workflow strategy - read further into our email automation packages to help save your business time, money and increase your ROI.

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