Marketing automation has been one of the biggest trends as more and more affordable solutions with simplified interfaces surface the SaaS ecosystem. Smaller companies are now able to deploy automation campaigns in matter of hours and with very little investment.

Here are 6 effective, easy to setup email automation processes that are proven to increase conversion and increase sales, if implemented properly:

Onboarding Emails

Sending new users a series of emails to help them onboard your platform can have a positive effect on your conversion. Not everyone who signs up to your app is ready to use it, this is why staying in touch with your users post signup is a very smart way to spark re-engagement. Not to mention that users like hand holding when it comes to new systems, it makes them establish a connection with you knowing that you provide guidance if they got lost getting familiar with the features you offer. Many companies use onboarding emails with new employees as way to get them started with their rules and manuals.

Signup or Purchase Abandonment Emails

When a user abandons your checkout process or your signup form before completing the transaction, you lose a new business opportunity. Given that you have collected their email in the process, you can use automation to fire up an email, ideally within 2 hours of abandonment, and offer them an incentive or coupon to come back and complete the process. Here is a great resouce on cart abandonment and email retargeting case studies.

Background Live Emails

Your user’s behavior on your website or around your marketing campaigns, like email and social media, should serve as an indication on how interested they are in “doing business with you”. Background email triggers is a powerful technology that lets you base your targeting based on those behaviors. Let’s take a quick example: You send out an email campaign to a large list of subscribers and the goal is to get them to take any of the following actions to qualify for a follow-up email: (a-click on a link from your campaign, b- watch a demo video you have made, c- visit 3 pages on your site or d- spend 5 minutes on your website). You can insert this subscriber into an email workflow that will be sent based on specific timeframe that you configure. Below is a quick automation sample from VBOUT of 3 emails to be sent out based on one of the conditions listed above:

Re-activation Emails

Sending email campaigns to users who haven’t been active on your website for a while could be a great way to get some traction back and regain some lost business. If the user is not ready to use your service or buy your product today, he might be ripe ready few weeks from now. Try offering an incentive like a discount or a free trial renewal in order get people interested. Here is a great resource about tips on re-activating users and a sample of a reactivation setup on VBOUT

Content Awareness Emails

Educating people on topics of interest is a powerful tactic used by marketers to establish credibility with users in the hopes of converting them later on into customers. Many bloggers and content writers invest time in creating beautiful articles but fail on delivering this content in a sequential and timely manner to their subscribers. You can use email automation to send out that awesome content you create to your newsletter subscribers in a consistent and well structured manner. Ultimately you want to drive them from their inbox to your website or blog.

Birthday / Date Emails

If you ever wondered how large retailers remember your birthday every year and send you that special email, rest assure it is done via automation and not some magical team of marketers checking thousands of records daily. It is obvious that you have to collect the user’s date of birth via your opt-in form or CRM in order for you to apply the automation on the list. Make sure to personalize the emails using shortcodes, offer a redeemable coupon inside the email so that you can track the performance of your birthday campaigns and lastly, do not send the coupon way to far from the redeemable date of the included offer so that users can act on the email immediately. Below are two samples of email automation sent by known retailers:

Conclusion

Marketing automation is a process that should work for you, not against you. You have to make sure your goals are clear, your content is well written and your timing is perfect, or your hard work will not get you the results you expect. If you implement your automation properly, it will definitely increase user engagement which can lead to higher conversion.

If you need help setting up the perfect automation for your business, you can book a FREE consultation or get started on your own instantly using VBOUT.