Successful sales teams can spend countless hours emailing, reaching out via social media, and making phone calls. If you’re in sales, you know how critical email marketing is to your bottom line if you’re in sales and marketing.
The daily activities you undertake require perseverance and determination to land a vital in-person conversation to nurture the deal. Whether it is a cold call or a qualified lead, the effort expended on these activities can be overwhelming, frustrating, and still might not yield the results you want.
To make sales and keep customers, it takes many touchpoints from initial contact to closing the sale. Busy sales and marketing professionals are often buried by the sheer volume of outreach attempts while still trying to have focused conversations tailored to the person they’re speaking to.
However, when you develop a sales funnel email sequence, you can cut down on your time emailing and reaching out. To create this funnel, the action word is automation — and we’re going to show you how to get started!
Why Is Email Automation So Important?
Well, the first answer is time savings. But there are many more benefits that email automation provides to sales and marketing professionals.
Even though setting up email automation can be a little time-consuming at first, you can duplicate the emails and tailor them to a specific customer base once you have them created.
1. Time Savings
Sending individual emails to individual customers takes a lot of time and effort. Even if you’re using a premade email template, you still have to create the email, personalize it, and send it.
Then you have to spend time combing through the email address you directed them to and send out another.
Even if you have a CMS that helps you organize and provide a way of verifying emails are received and opened by a customer, you’re still spending a lot of time emailing.
When you automate your emails using an email sequence, you take a little time in the beginning to create the sequence and emails that it contains, but once it’s up and running, you just set it and let it go.
Automated email sequencing runs all on its own. Then all you have to do is check your metrics at a predetermined time and make sure the sequence is performing as intended, allowing you to focus on contacting interested leads, working with your existing clients, and other sales and marketing tasks at hand.
2. Automation Nurtures Leads
Most businesses want sales reps to contact new leads immediately and reach out before they go cold. However, these leads may not be ready to be contacted just yet. Even if the potential customer downloads a pdf, fills out an email form, or takes some other action from your website, it doesn’t mean they’re ready to talk to someone.
When you automate your email marketing, you can follow up with helpful information, resources, and other relevant information.
This allows leads to learn more about your business and solutions and be more willing to approach your sales team down the line.
3. Increase Brand Awareness
You’ve spent a lot of time developing your brand, but all that work goes nowhere unless you find a way to keep your brand in the minds of potential customers.
By automating your emails, you provide multiple ways to keep customers interacting with your brand. Email automation makes you look organized and responsive. It shows you care.
This awareness makes them more interested in what you have to say when it’s time for a sales rep to make contact.
4. Keeps Customers Interested
Email campaigns aren’t only for reaching new customers. You want existing customers to stay with you and continue spending money on your products and services.
Email automation increases retention and loyalty, increasing the lifetime value of a customer. You can get to know your customers better by asking for feedback, offering exclusive offers, and re-engage your customers if they’re not actively communicating with you.
These efforts strengthen your relationship with your customers and help encourage referrals and good reviews about your company and its services.
What Is Email Sequencing?
Just like the phrase indicates, email sequencing is a series of emails sent to specific segments of people from an email list.
You can create the sequence to be trigger-based or time-based. A trigger-based email sequence sends an email based on a specific action. These actions can be:
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Browsing behavior
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Subscribing to an email list
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Abandoning a shopping cart
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Downloading content
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Making a purchase
A time-based email sequence sends emails at specific time intervals. Time-based emails are also called auto response emails. These emails are sent immediately after an individual opts into a mailing or newsletter list, signs up for a special deal, 30 days after purchase, and on the anniversary of subscribing to your list.
Once you set up your email sequence, you can rest assured they’re being sent and are working for you. The top five types of email sequences are:
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Welcome emails
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Onboarding emails
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Abandoned shopping cart emails
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Repeat customer emails
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Re-engagement emails
Whether trigger or time-based, every email sent creates a touchpoint with your customers or potential customers and keeps your company and brand at the forefront of their minds.
How Do I Know That My Sequence Is Working?
It can be easy to just “set and forget” your email marketing campaigns, but that’s assuming that everyone you send an email to is interacting with the content.
Once you start seeing contacts are enrolling in your mailing list, providing contact information for downloads, or taking advantage of a special offer, you need to learn more about their interactions and the performance of specific campaigns you’re using.
Most marketers have multiple campaigns running at any time, but not all are as successful as others. It’s critical to monitor the performance of your emails and sequences of emails.
What Analytics Should I Be Tracking?
The easiest and most common data that is tracked is opening, clicking, or unsubscribing. However, there are many more metrics to consider when judging how effective an email sequence provides the results you want.
HubSpot provides robust metrics and analytics to help you manage your email sequences and create more effective campaigns.
1. Sequence Engagement and Top Enrollment
As soon as contacts enroll in your sequences, you begin capturing analytics to learn and improve the sequences. Some essential metrics come from this data. A few of the metrics to collect and analyze are:
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Total enrollments
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Email opened
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Link Clicks
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Replies
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Meetings Scheduled
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Bounced Email
These metrics help you understand which email communications are performing best and which may benefit from additional customization and personalization. You also learn more about your sales efforts.
You can see if your emails are reaching the right leads, industries, and inbound marketing content. It’s crucial to be responsive and revise your emails and share the knowledge you gain from the data with marketing and creative teams to help improve content that provides value, builds trust, and gets people into your sales funnel.
2. Individual Email Performance Data
The same data as engagement and performance can be used to analyze individual email performance.
Additionally, evaluating the unsubscribe rate on an individual email helps you pinpoint when people are leaving and no longer receiving content that they find helpful in your section. Once you know where people begin to fall off the contact list, you can revise your email to provide more relevant information and keep them interacting with your sequences.
Ready To Get Started?
This article contains a LOT of information. It’s ok if you feel overwhelmed thinking about implementing email sequencing into your sales and marketing efforts.
Selworthy is a HubSpot Gold Certified Agency Partner. We have the expertise and ability to help you create and implement email sequences that work.
Our goal is to help businesses like yours build a strong brand, craft effective strategies, and drive revenue to your business. It’s our mission to help you create your success story. Schedule a call today and let one of our team members show you how we do what we do.
