THATBlog

With the advent of marketing automation, email marketing has never been more efficient at delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.  Almost all email service provides give you the option to build out automations (also known as workflows) to make email an essential part of your marketing strategy.  Regardless of whether you hire an agency for their email marketing services or if you’re looking for ideas to send emails that convert, here are a list of emails that need to be a part of your 2017 email marketing strategy.

The Welcome Email

This is a message that is fired off the second someone signs up for your services or joins your community of active users.  These emails are expected nowadays and it’s a little off putting if you don’t get one.  Not only does it show that you’re happy to meet them, but if you fail to establish this initial contact they might be confused as to whether their request has gone through.  Start the conversation off strong and welcome them promptly.

The Follow-up Email

Follow-up emails should be sent when a user takes a certain action on your website such as filling out a form or requesting more information.  It acts as a courtesy to let them know you received their request.  If the form was to download a piece of content on your site, this email might serve as the medium by which you give them the content.

The Thank You Email

Often confused with the follow-up email because of their similarity, a thank you email can go a long way for your subscribers.  They can be sent after users do pretty much anything, and depending on the culture of your brand, you could send these for the sole purpose of telling your contacts that they’re the coolest subscribers ever.  People enjoy being appreciated, and these emails will give your brand personality.

The Disengaged User Email

Unfortunately, not all your subscribers will eat up every piece of content you send them.  In fact, some of them might even forget they’ve signed up to receive updates in their inbox.  It’s important to set up a system that identifies disengaged users so you can maintain a clean contact list.  The disengaged email serves as an attempt to real these users back into your content and engage them one last time before you purge them from your list.  Just remember to keep it personal.

The Nurturing Email

Quite the opposite of the disengaged user email, the nurturing email is essential to providing the roi your strategy is looking for.  They’re highly targeted emails sent to people with the purpose of moving them through your marketing and sales funnels to pull (not push….very important) them closer to a sale.  A successful inbound email marketing strategy will have multiple nurturing campaigns to cater to the different personas your company targets. 

Even though the emails are automated, it’s important that you do your research and focus on providing them with opportunities to solve their problems instead of trying to push a sale.  Meet them where they are in their buying journey, not where you want them to be.

The Reminder Email

If you operate in the travel industry or your company is big on event marketing, these emails a crucial to your email marketing strategy.  People are busy and have other things to worry about than the webinar they randomly signed up for a few weeks ago.  Send a friendly reminder and you’ll get a much better turnout.  These emails are also great for sales events as they can create a sense of urgency or FOMO (fear of missing out) and boost engagement.

The Update Email

The update email can serve a lot of purposes.  It can be an announcement of a new product or service.  It could be a message that outlines updates to user agreements or terms and services.  If you’ve embraced the content or inbound marketing movement these emails look more like newsletters than anything.  However, if it is a newsletter type email, it’s incredibly important that you don’t blast your entire contact list with the same generic content.  Your message needs to relevant.  You can achieve this by using dynamic emails.

These are just a few of the automated emails you should be sending as a business operating in the year 2017.  Depending on your business and how advanced your CRM is, there are a handful of other ones that might make sense to incorporate into your email strategy.  These are just the basics, and ones that have become somewhat expected from businesses.

If you need help setting up these emails, you might consider reaching out to an email marketing agency.  They’ll explore your goals and audience to create a relevant message your contacts won’t be able to resist.