Expert Tips For 5 Types of Automated Email Campaigns

Email marketing for small businesses is so important. With email marketing, you have the opportunity to have your own personalized, branded messaging delivered straight to your customers’ and leads’ inboxes to quickly remind them of your brand.

As a Dallas email marketing agency, we’ve helped several small businesses just like yours create email campaigns and automated email messages. Here is our list of the top 5 automated email campaigns that every small business needs to be running.

• Welcome Emails to New Customers and Leads

When a customer or lead gives you their email address, you need to thank them by sending them an automated welcome email. This email marketing best practice allows you to introduce your new lead or customer to your brand, provide links to valuable information such as your customer support contact information and social media profiles, and more.

Welcome emails make your new leads and customers feel like they’re a part of your brand and help them understand your brand messaging even better. And if you carefully curate sharable content and your welcome emails include a discount code to share with friends, these types of emails are a fantastic opportunity to give an enthusiastic new customer something to talk about on their social media profiles.

• Onboarding Emails to New Subscribers

For some small businesses, their sales funnel is either long or never-ending. This is the case for companies that offer a free trial (for any length of time, thus delaying a purchase), or offer a subscription-based product or service that is renewed on a monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual basis.

An onboarding email goes beyond a welcome email because it provides specific information related to the trial or subscription for which the customer or lead has signed up.

Content to include in your onboarding emails include:

• Links to videos and web articles explaining how to use your product or service.
• Any relevant scheduling information or upcoming milestones associated with your lead or customer’s trial or subscription.
• Customer service contact information.
• Case studies or other customer support materials
• White papers, which are often a must for B2B small businesses.

• Follow Up Emails Based on Opens and Clicks of Previous Email Messages and Website Activity

One of the most effective ways you can use automated emails is to set up email campaigns based on how a specific lead or customer has interacted with the content with which you’ve already presented to him or her.

Called email marketing automation or drip campaigns, these email campaigns send carefully curated content to your customers and leads based on:

• Your previously sent emails that they’ve actually opened.
• Any links in marketing emails that they’ve clicked, such as a link to a YouTube video or a product page.
• Pages on your website that he or she has visited.
• Products or services that your lead or customer has already purchased from you (drip email campaigns are a great way to suggest complementary products).
• And more.

Creating email marketing automation campaigns is a highly-technical process. If you’re interested in rolling out drip campaigns, you need a Dallas email marketing agency like ours to help you with your efforts.

• Emails to Customers Who Abandoned Their Shopping Carts

An important best practice for email marketing for small businesses is to follow up with leads and customers who abandoned their shopping carts without making a purchase. Never assume that just because a shopping cart was abandoned, that a lead or customer isn’t still interested in what you have to offer.

Shopping carts are abandoned for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with product disinterest, including customers:

• Realizing they need to hold off on a purchase until a future date, such as after their next pay day.
• Quickly closing browsers as they realize they are running late to their next meeting, school pickup, or other activity.
• Not having immediate access to a credit card or debit card to make a payment in your online store.

As you can see, in all of the above listed examples, customers are still interested in your product, but they have encountered a barrier to purchasing, thus resulting in an abandoned cart. By sending automated messages to this group of customers, you can trigger their memories about your product – and why they want it so much – so they can purchase it at a time that’s more convenient for them. 

• Special Event Emails

People love hearing about special events, and with all the Coronavirus shutdowns in 2020, there’s never been a better time for you to schedule a series of virtual events for your customers and leads.
As a small business, your special events don’t need to be huge productions. Your special events email marketing campaigns can announce:

• Your Facebook Live schedule for the next week.
• A flash sale, complete with a coupon code to redeem the discount. This is especially effective if you combine your flash sale with a social media campaign or social media contest, which will gain even more exposure for your brand amongst people likely to purchase your products based on their relationship to and shared interests with your existing lead or customer. 
• For B2B brands, a webinar hosted by your sales team, a happy customer, or an industry partner.
• In-person, socially distanced events that your customers can attend (many people are craving personal interactions during this pandemic). Just make sure to list any state or local restrictions that may apply to your event attendees.

We Can Help You with Your Small Business Email Marketing Needs

As a local email marketing agency, we’ve helped several small businesses just like yours implement highly successful versions of these types of email marketing campaigns. With our internal designers, email marketing experts, and wordsmiths, we can help you create email marketing messages that will resonate wherever your lead or customer is currently located in your sales funnel.

For help with creating these types of small business email marketing campaigns, contact our email marketing agency today. We can be reached at (877) 682-2012.

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “ECommerce Marketing in 2020” instead.

Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!