Clear Imaging

When to Automate

You should use automation for the following:

• Transactional emails (order notification, shipping notices). There is NO reason not to automate these. They are a terrific waste of your time to not automate, and there is no benefit to doing them manually. But they DON’T have to sound robotic. You can make them sound human.
• Flash sale emails (special discount offers to your subscribers). A flash sale does not need to be a personal custom message to every subscriber. The idea of a flash sale email is a fast, time-sensitive offer, sent out to your list, in order to give you a quick bit of revenue. Ideally you have your list divided into segments by the product/service they are interested in. For instance, customers who have bought ‘x’ from you, are all in their own segment in your email marketing platform; and customers who bought ‘y’, are in their own group. By doing that you can offer the ‘x’ people things related to ‘x’, and the ‘y’ people, things that are related to ‘y’.
• Welcome emails. Whenever someone signs up to your list, newsletter, they need to get an automatic welcome email. In this message, you welcome them to your group and tell them a bit about yourself, and what to expect, and what is in it for them.
• Download emails. Basically, this is also a transactional email but deserves special mention. Whenever someone gives you their email in exchange for your ‘free e-book’, or whatever your offer is, you should have the link to their download emailed to them automatically. You should also send them a ‘welcome to our email list’ email as well.

When not to Automate

Email used to be between humans. In the past, people would love receiving emails, even if it was a sales email, because it was not bulk-email or spam, or some computer-generated message. Therefore, open rates use to be MUCH higher. And then marketers got involved and ruined everything. People started getting pummeled with sales email, spam, bulk email etc, etc. And now the open rates are MUCH lower and continue to drop. Many people don’t even check all the mail in their inbox anymore.

But it doesn’t stop there! Savvy netizens even create a ‘bulk-email’ address which they use any time a website or company requires them to give up their email. And they NEVER check this email. They have their own personal one which they never give out. This is their response to the enfilade of spam.

There was too much non-human automatic garbage email, and people started ignoring it.

Is all hopeless? Will people even read your hand-typed personal email?

Yes, there is hope, you should not use automation for:

• Customer relations emails. Writing to your subscribers to find out how they are doing and if there is anything your company can do for them. This improves customer retention, helps handle PR situations, and boosts loyalty to your brand.
• Sales emails. These will require SEVERAL follow up emails, and it is not simply a $5 offer from a flash sale. A flash sale is a one-time email, and you’re done. A Sales email is a series of messages, to move the subscriber down the sales funnel. It should definitely be done manually. It is the same conversation that a sales person would have with a prospect in person, but done via email instead. It can’t be automated. This is for higher ticket items. For anything under $10, use flash sale emails. For anything more, you need to email the person manually. You can of course use blocks of pre-written text when appropriate, on things you find yourself repeating over and over again.

Automated Emails don’t have to sound robotic

Just because there are automatic does not mean they have to be devoid of warmth and human touch.

You can inject personality, charm, care and humanity into your automated emails. It is companies that do this which differentiate themselves from the rest and get higher open rates.

Practicality

Sending transactional emails to a list of 10,000 is no problem. 100,000 emails? Piece of cake.

But, sending personally crafted sales emails (which all require manual & custom replies by you) may be a challenge. It could probably take enough time to be a full-time position in your company.

But is the time invested worth the revenue it would produce?

How many hours would it take for one of your staff to personally email and respond to 10,000 subscribers/customers?

How much revenue would it generate?

Would it be more efficient to do it in an automated sales email series instead?

Do what any smart marketer would do: try it, test it, find out, and get certainty.

Is your automated email campaign not giving you the amount of engagement you hoped for?

Do you want more of your subscribers answering your emails?

Have you created an ‘email marketing machine’ only to be disappointed at the results?

We’re going to take a very critical look at the subject of automation, communication and emails.

An Email Marketing Utopia

There is no denying that automated email campaigns are a wonder and save marketers hours upon hours of tedious manual emailing.

Email platforms like Mailchimp, Mailjet, Sendgrid and others offer fantastic features. A-B split testing, segmentation (organizing your email recipients into particular groups), analytics, and more. With a click of a button you can blast out ‘flash sales’ to your lists, or have every new subscriber receive a series of carefully crafted emails. Absolute perfection. It almost seems too good to be true. You can just set your entire email marketing campaign on ‘automatic’ and move on.

But can you? Is there any catch? Is this the best way to handle your email marketing?

Is the time we are saving by having such automation in place giving us back the amount of revenue that we would have made if we had NOT had the automation in place.

In other words, does the amount of time saved and revenue created by automation best the amount of time spent and revenue created by MANUAL email marketing?

Are we saving time with automation, but actually losing money by removing the human factor?

But before we dive in, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page.

Purpose

To make sure we’re all on the same page, we will assume we are all doing email marketing for the simple reason of exchanging a quality product/service with our subscriber, giving them useful information, and then getting revenue back in return.

Therefore, when doing marketing we are expecting results, in the form of opens, clicks, buys and responses. And by that we can measure the viability of our email marketing campaign.

We need to measure when the subscriber:

• Opens the message
• Clicks on the CTA
• Arrives on the landing page and buys
• Responds back to us

Now that we are all clear on what we want when we email our subscribers let’s examine the type of communication which is best suited to achieve those results.

The Human Factor

The human factor is absolutely essential in sales. Sales is a conversation between human beings. It is completely empirical that if someone looks at your billboard and reads the message, they are less likely to buy, than if someone had a conversation with one of your sales associates.

You can argue that ‘billboards, fliers and other media like that are to generate awareness and not close people’, but this does not change the fact that direct communication from two human beings is the most effective way to sell.

And as we agreed in the last section, we are doing email marketing to SELL; not to simply raise awareness and let people know we exist. You CAN do email marketing for just an awareness campaign, but you must knowingly be using it for that, and not expect revenue directly from it.

With that said, is email the same as a billboard or flier? Something that you just send out to thousands of people, generally, with no personal, human touch?

Or is email purely a human-only medium, crafted on a person by person basis and something you should never email out to the ‘masses’ with automated messages?

The Confusion

So, what do we do? ONLY send personally crafted messages to our list? Or ONLY send automated flash sale emails?

The answer is neither!

Email Marketing can be used for both.

The question is: When do we automate, and when do we not automate? And we cover that in our next article.