However, while your audience engages best with personalised messaging, it can be time-consuming. You could easily spend every minute of every day writing personalised emails but you’d have very little time for anything else. 

This is where email marketing automation comes in. Email automation helps you grow your business effectively while maintaining that personal touch. In this article we will be sharing how you can grow your startup with email marketing automation. 

What is Email Marketing Automation? 

Email marketing is where you send emails to customers, clients, and potential leads in order to create connections through a personalised touchpoint and help move your audience further along the sales funnel. According to Neil Patel, “automated email marketing allows you to create email series that are perfectly tailored to your audience’s needs and send them out at a specific time.” 

The automation aspect is self-explanatory. When you automate emails, they are sent automatically. This is a huge time saver and ensures you can make contact with your audience on a regular basis without having to manually send hundreds of emails yourself. It’s one of the best ways to connect with the people you want to without losing time out of your day. 

Let’s take a look at how you can grow your startup with email marketing automation. 

1. Choose an Email Marketing Automation Tool 

Of course, the first step in successful email marketing automation is choosing the right tool for your business. There are so many email automation tools out there, so to help narrow down your choices, it’s helpful to choose the tool that offers the features important to you. A few of the key features we think any email marketing automation tool should have include: 

Personalisation: there isn’t much point in sending out automated emails to your contact list if they’re all exactly the same. Where’s the personal touch in that? If you want your email marketing campaign to succeed, you should prioritise personalisation. The ability to personalise each email to the individual can go a long way towards ensuring the success of your startup. 

Analytics/Reporting: if you’re going to invest in an email marketing automation tool, you want to know that it’s working. So, an important feature to consider is analytics or reporting capabilities. This allows you to see things like, how often your emails are being opened, when links or buttons are clicked, and how many emails go straight into the bin. Understanding the effectiveness of the emails you’re sending is essential as it allows you to make informed changes that support, rather than hinder, your business growth. 

Templates: you know what you want to say better than anyone - even an intelligent email marketing tool. That’s why an important feature to consider when searching for the right tool for your business is email templates. You want to have access to email templates that are fully customisable and easy to use. This will save you time, help you connect with people effectively, and ensure your emails always look personalised but professional. 

2. Humanise Your Marketing Efforts 

Your customers and clients want to know that when they receive an email from your business, it’s being sent by a person. Nobody likes generic sales emails or advertisements. It’s like getting junk mail through your letterbox - it feels impersonal and irrelevant. 

If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to take your marketing efforts a step further than personalisation with humanisation. It sounds like a big word, but essentially humanisation means that you prioritise communication that is less about the data and more about the individual. 

Ryan Welmans, CEO at Sopro, explains this phenomenon well: “Humanisation goes beyond data and requires you to get to know your customers on an individual level by interacting with them one-on-one and taking the time and energy to understand their pain points and goals.” By humanising your marketing efforts, through knowing your customers, gathering feedback, and interacting on social media, you can deliver a customised experience that is 60% more profitable for your startup. 

3. Stand Out from the Crowd 

There is a tactic in email marketing called ‘surprise and delight’ and its main objective is to create moments within the customer experience that help your brand stand out from the crowd. Whatever industry your startup is in, it’s fair to say that the competition is pretty fierce. Without a doubt, it is becoming more difficult for entrepreneurs to stand out from the competition and launch startups that offer something new and exciting. 

Prioritising the surprise and delight idea helps you offer those personal touches that show how much you care. You will have experienced this in your own life. Take going on holiday, for example. When you rock up to the hotel and they offer you a gift basket on the bed with all your favourite snacks and a bottle of complimentary champagne, you feel happy. Sometimes, when it comes to effective marketing strategies, it’s all about the little details that make for an unforgettable customer experience. 

You can introduce the ‘surprise and delight’ concept into your email marketing by sending a thank you email after they subscribe to your newsletter, offering a special discount on their birthday, or sending them a voucher when they submit feedback on your services or products. These “just because” moments make your startup stand out from the crowd and help you retain customers, develop personal connections, and increase your business growth. 

4. Understand the Data and Optimise 

The only way to succeed with email marketing automation is to gather data (as we mentioned above) and use your findings to optimise your campaign strategies. Once you have run a couple of email campaigns, over a number of weeks or months, you will have a good idea of what your customers respond to and you should be able to identify trends. 

By leaning into this data and taking the time to understand it, you can optimise your future email campaigns to improve your email success rate. Take, for example, your welcome emails. You might find that customers are more receptive to these emails when they receive a personalised welcome shortly after signing up to your newsletter. What’s more, this welcome email might encourage them to click through and explore your website and engage with your brand. But you can’t know this without analysing the data. 

When it comes to effectively marketing your startup, you need to know what your customers want and what they respond to. When you know this information, you can optimise your email campaigns to more effectively meet their needs - helping your brand to flourish in the process. 

Final Words 

As you can see, email marketing automation can be a hugely effective strategy for launching your startup, engaging your customers, and growing your business. We hope our points above help you get the most out of your email marketing campaigns now and in the future.