5 Tricks Savvy Entrepreneurs Use to Automate Email Marketing

Since you’re reading this post, you most likely have some experience with email marketing automation. If not, though, that’s okay too.

We’re guessing you’d like to take your game to the next level. Perfect. You’ve come to the right place. We’re here to help.

Did you know that B2B marketers can boost email revenue by 10% with email marketing automation?

That’s a great thing. Why do something manually when you don’t have to?

There are only so many hours in the day. As an entrepreneur, you know all too well how hectic your days can get. You might set aside time on a Wednesday to work on an important project only to be blindsided by several different tasks that require your immediate attention.

Suddenly, what’s supposed to be a routine day becomes a crisis.

The good news is that by using modern tools, including email marketing automation, you can reclaim several hours every day. And you can use that time to put out fires when you need to but, more importantly, focus on the bigger picture.

With that in mind, here are five tricks that savvy entrepreneurs are using to automate email marketing and, in turn, strengthen customer engagement and generate more revenue.

1. Resend welcome emails to new subscribers (or customers) who don’t initially open them

The people who sign up for your service or download your app are obviously interested in what you have to offer.

Not only is everyone incredibly busy these days, our attention spans are approaching embarrassing levels (to be fair, they’re probably there already).

Suffice it to say that even your most enthusiastic new customers might gloss over the first email you send them. In addition to our hectic schedules and our terrible attention spans, we’re all suffering from email overload. It’s easy to miss a message when you’re flooded with hundreds of them every day.

Good news: Email marketing automation can help you reach your new customers who, for whatever reason, might not have heard you the first time.

The most basic trick in the email marketing automation book is sending a welcome email to new subscribers. A big chunk of your users will engage with your initial email. But for several reasons, a number of them will not. Maybe they miss it. Perhaps they see it when they’re busy and forget to get back to it. Maybe they accidentally delete it.

Whatever the case may be, subscribers indicated their interest in what you have to offer by signing up in the first place. Since welcome emails are are 9x more likely to encourage a transaction compared to bulk email sends, you can’t risk the chance newcomers don’t see your initial outreach. Keep in mind the fact that your revenue per welcome email is also likely to be about 8x higher than bulk sends.

As an entrepreneur with a seemingly endless amount of tasks on your plate, you simply don’t have the time to manually study analytics to see who opened what and when.

This is where email marketing automation enters the equation. Instead of abandoning the folks who don’t engage with your initial outreach email, you can use a tool like Robly’s OpenGen to automatically resend welcome emails to the people who might have missed them, using a different subject line than what was originally sent. We think it’s worth highlighting that OpenGen has proven to boost open rates and ROI by 50%!

Think of it as a gentle nudge. A second chance to engage your customers who are already interested in what you have to offer but didn’t see what you had to say the first time.

2. Send each email at the perfect time

No two people have the same email habits.

Someone in sales might constantly refresh their inbox. A marketer might check their email every 10 minutes. As for a developer? Good luck.

Everyone treats email differently. The banker taking the train to New York City every morning might check his email at 6:45 a.m. The CEO might not get a chance to check her email until everyone’s gone home for the day.

You don’t have time to figure out when the best time is to send emails to all of your subscribers. Even trying to do it would be a nightmare.

This is exactly why we created Robly AI.

There’s no sense in sending emails to people who are unlikely to read them. Not based on chance, based on the way they actually interact with their inbox.

RoblyAI knows when each of your subscribers is most likely to engage with messages. Our patented technology ensures your emails are sent at the perfect times for each customer.

3. Use A/B testing to optimize click-through and open rates 

There’s no sense in simply guessing that a subject line or call to action will work the way you want it to work before sending out an email and crossing your fingers.

Thanks to A/B testing, you don’t have to.

If you’re unfamiliar with A/B testing, here’s a primer: Essentially, it’s a way to compare two different versions of something (in this case, emails) to figure out which one performs better across a number of metrics.

Let’s say that you have 1,000 subscribers to your email list. You might decide to A/B test the same email marketing message with two different subject lines, sending 5% of your subscribers a message with Subject A and another 5% of your subscribers a message with Subject B. After running the variant test for a predetermined set of time—maybe four hours—the message that performed better along the metric you’re testing (click-through rates, most likely) would automatically get sent to the remaining 90% of your subscribers.

A/B testing doesn’t have to be limited to just subject lines. You can also test images, calls to action, colors, fonts, and more.

A/B testing is more than just a nice-to-have. At least some of your competitors are almost certainly conducting variant tests on most if not all of the email marketing messages they send out. If you’re just relying on gut instinct, you’re losing ground to your more data-savvy rivals.

That said, only 44% of companies are currently using A/B testing to optimize their email marketing outreach. The sooner you get in the game, the faster you’ll gain an edge.

To learn more, check out our awesome video about A/B variant testing!

4. Automatically send an email stream to subscribers who’ve stopped engaging with your messages

What do you do when someone who starts out as an enthusiastic supporter or customer just suddenly stops engaging with your emails? Do you write that person off? Or do you have a strategy for trying to lure the individual back on board?

Email automation can be used to automatically re-engage folks who’ve stopped reading your emails for whatever reason.

For example, you can set a trigger that will automatically send a predetermined email stream to customers who haven’t engaged with your emails in three months, let’s say.

Here’s how such an email stream might begin for an e-commerce company:

Hey! We haven’t heard from you in awhile. We miss you and we’d love for you to come back. Because we value you as a customer, please enjoy 15% off your next order by using the coupon code XJ4HM. We look forward to seeing you soon!

The point is that you don’t have to write off your disengaged customers for good. Thanks to email automation, you don’t even have to think about which subscribers have engaged and which have not. The technology takes care of all of that for you automatically, freeing you to focus on more important tasks with the peace of mind that comes with knowing your disengaged subscribers are still being nurtured automatically.

For more information on how you can re-engage “sleepy” subscribers, check out this Hubspot post.

5. Grow your email subscriber list while you sleep

How do you get more and more people to sign up for your newsletter? Do you even have a plan or do you just hope for the best?

With the right tools, you can grow your subscribers list 24 hours a day without having to lift a finger. For example, you can use Robly’s Exit-Intent popup widget to incentivize website visitors who are leaving your site to join your mailing list. That way, you can continue growing your email list even when you’re sleeping!

According to our data, the Exit-Intent widget can help you grow your email list 5x faster. What’s not to like? More subscribers should translate into more revenue.

Here are some other tricks you can use to automatically grow your email list:

• Encourage your subscribers to share or forward your emails. You can either use social sharing buttons or be more explicit (e.g., Like what you’ve read and know someone you think would like it, too? Pass it along!). The right approach should help you grow your email list with each message you send out.
• Create premium content — like ebooks, case studies and whitepapers — and publish it as gated assets. That way, those curious about reading what you have to say will have to exchange their email information in order to access the content.
• Use Facebook’s call to action button on the top of your business page to encourage folks to sign up for your newsletter when they stumble across your page. It’s just another easy hack you can use to expand your email list while you’re focusing on other important tasks.
• Leverage a social media managing app like Buffer so you can schedule posts ahead of time. Spend an hour creating messages that direct your fans to sign up for your marketing newsletter and schedule them to be published once or twice a week for the next several months. You’re bound to get more subscribers this way and it won’t take that much of your time.

Master each of these marketing automation tactics and you should have an easy time growing your email list substantially while you tackle other mission-critical tasks.

Are you an entrepreneur who always wishes there were more hours in the day? Robly can help. Sign up for a free trial to see for yourself why more than 4 million marketers rely on Robly to take their email marketing game to the next level.