Basics Of Email Automation For Your
Sales Funnels

by Matt Astifan
Updated February 15th, 2021

Email automation is considered to be the most important and cost-effective digital marketing strategies for increasing conversions of sales funnels. It's a reliable form of communication between a brand and its customers. Emails are incredibly easy to create and relatively inexpensive to manage.


When email marketing meets email automation the conversions of your sales funnels skyrocket 🚀. Automation increases email engagement rates by making sure that every single contact gets the right campaigns sent at the right times. It improves ongoing communication with your audience, keeps your brand top of mind and provides you with the insights you need to optimize your email campaigns over time. 


If you're curious how email automation can help your business here's a guide to help you get started.

Types of Email Automations

Email automation campaigns come in many shapes and sizes. The perfect balance is achieved when your customers get the right information about the products and services you offer at the right time. 


A good email automation:


  • Indoctrinates new subscribers to your brand's story

  • Introduces your products, services and special offers

  • Caters campaigns based on user-behaviour

  • Increases customer lifetime value

  • Moves new leads through your marketing funnel

  • And most importantly, engages your subscribers to open, click and reply to your emails 


Here's how you can create effective email campaigns for your business. 

Scheduled Campaigns


A scheduled campaign is an email marketing campaign that you send out at a particular time in the future, not necessary immediately after creating it. It could either be an email, or an entire series. 


The benefits of scheduled campaigns:


  • First of all, scheduling emails is more convenient, especially if you have to manage several campaigns within a short time period. What's more overwhelming than sending each email manually at a specific time?

  • Secondly, there's always the right time for an email to be delivered, and that time might be when you're available to write and deliver an email.

  • Lastly, it helps with error prevention. It is well known that performing repetitive tasks typically results in unwanted, and often avoidable mistakes. All of this can be addressed by putting a more efficient strategy in place.


Scheduling email campaigns is best for sending newsletters with new content or time/date sensitive news and offers.  

Email Automations


Similar to scheduled email campaigns, automated campaigns include a series of emails that go out based on a time delay. However, email automation is a more complex process, because it also allows you to trigger your marketing emails based on the actions of your subscribers.


Let's say a user clicks a link in an email, visits a page on your website, or simply opts-in to your newsletter for the first time. Each completed action can be recognized as a unique behaviour and trigger the corresponding email campaign. 


Moreover, we are not talking about one single lead, but many. After your campaign launch, each of your subscribers can be at a different step in your marketing process and inside different automations. 


How can you even keep track of all your subscribers actions? The answer is: you don't have to. Email automation tools do that for you.


The beauty of email automation campaigns lies in the fact that they're incredibly easy to track. So each action a user takes along the funnel will act as a trigger for another email from the sequence to be sent. Everything can happen at the appropriate time, increasing efficiency and conversion rates.  


Automation Controllers


An automation controller identifies which email automations a subscriber has been sent and which campaign to send next. It will ensure subscribers move through multiple email automation campaigns and avoids sending the same campaigns more than once.


While email automations allow you to deliver the right emails based on actions, automation controllers go even further and let you set up different campaigns based on the user’s funnel entry point, buying or learning modality, or stage in the customer’s journey. 


Your automaton controllers cater campaigns based on your subscribers behaviour.


  • If a user subscribes by downloading your ebook but doesn’t buy, you can trigger the next campaign to send users to your automated webinar.

  • If they don’t take action after the webinar you can trigger a campaign to have them schedule a call with your sales team.


Stacking these campaigns will appeal to multiple learning modalities from visual to kinesthetic and auditory. 


Automation controllers are a very efficient way of guiding your leads through various campaigns for the same product, or multiple products. Ensuring your campaigns appeal to a wider variety of personalities and preferences for learning about your products and services.

Best Emails to Send

There are several types of content that can be used in an email marketing campaign. They’re all different in length, structure, and message, and essentially aim for different goals.


Email Newsletters


A newsletter email is typically scheduled every week, bi-weekly or monthly with the intention to inform your audience about industry latest news, new blog posts, podcasts, videos or social media posts. They can also be used to promote new features or services, integrations, or updates. 


While they’re mainly informational, newsletters focus on sending traffic to new content and resources. Newsletters are usually formatted with HTML to build visually appealing email with lots of images. The downside to using a lot of graphics in emails is that it's easily recognized by email filters as a “newsletter” and added to promotions tab or spam.  


That being said, consistently sending email newsletters to an engaged audience will help with increasing brand awareness and traffic.


Long Form Emails


Two popular types of long-form content are known in the email marketing industry as Soap Opera Sequences (SOS) and Seinfeld Emails. This type of content is generally used to build trust and introduce new subscribers to your brand through story before introducing an offer to buy a product or service. 


While similar, each of them takes a rather different approach to storytelling. Soap Opera Sequences consist of a story arch of emails meant to gradually introduce your offer. Popularized by Andrew Chaperon, they're part of an emotionally driven marketing strategy that focuses on showing people the value of products and services. 


On the other hand, Ben Settle's idea of Seinfeld Emails is more like a standalone episode that tells a story and introduces an offer. Its main goal is to wrap an offer in an entertaining story.


These types of emails typically fall into the category of Direct Response Marketing. Unfortunately this writing style has been templated and misused by poor copywriters over the years. Long form emails are often seen as a dated strategy however, many influencers still use long form emails as a top source of revenue for their brand. 


Short Form Emails


The primary goal of short emails is getting users to click on a link in order to get more information about a product or service offer. 


A simple yet efficient strategy for short-form email usage is sending a curiosity focused email with a special offer link. If the subscriber wants to know more about the offer they must click the link. The action of clicking the link tells your system the prospect is interested in the offer and triggers an urgency focused email campaign. 


In order to efficiently deliver these types of campaigns, you will need a deadline, a reason for the sale, and a bonus for taking action. Each email in the sequence includes a call to action and an increasing sense of urgency, as the time for the limited offer runs up. The idea behind this system is to boost sales in a limited amount of time by invoking a sense of urgency only to users who expressed interest.


Reply Emails


A highly efficient strategy to improve your open rates and engagement is to get subscribers to reply to your emails. 


I’ll always trigger the first email a subscriber gets to request the reply to the email with answers to a few questions about themselves. I do my best to read and respond to the majority of these emails. Why? When a contact sends you an email your email address is white-listed by their email service (such as Gmail or Outlook). This means your future emails will get to their inbox. Plus, you strike up a one on one conversation that can often lead to a sale. 


I also end every automation with the use of Dean Jackson’s 9 Word Email or simply asking why they didn’t buy. 


Dean recommends sending emails as simple as “Are you still looking for [reference whatever they inquired about]?” It might seem too simple, but the mystery behind a short, yet highly personal question will drive people to answer it.


You will encounter several subscribers who are not ready to buy or whose objections haven’t been answered by your email campaigns. In this case, following up with a question might open the doors to the sale “I sent you several emails about [product/service] and you didn’t buy. Could you tell me why?” At minimum you’ll get important feedback to improve your email campaign.

How Many Emails To Send

How often should you send emails to your subscribers? It may surprise you however, in most cases the more emails you send the more revenue you’ll earn through email. 


If you are sending daily emails that are valuable to your readers, they’ll love it. However, if you are flooding their inbox with uninteresting or disengaging content, you’ll likely unsubscribe or worse you’ll end up in their spam box. 


Typically, I will schedule email campaigns that send emails at a higher frequency (daily or every other day) at the beginning and taper off the frequency to once or twice a week near the end. The beauty of email automations is that you can review your data and insights to learn which emails are getting the highest engagements and which are causing unsubscribes, and adjust accordingly. 


Sending emails at a low frequency (such as once per month) is bad because subscribers often forget how they got on your list and submit complaints. This can hurt your deliverability and ultimately hurt your email deliverability.

Optimize Email Deliverability

Without emails being delivered, there is no email marketing. In order to make sure all the time and effort invested in content creation and automation do not go to waste, it’s best to be familiar with the factors that impact email deliverability.


DKIM & SPF Records 


Each time you send an email, mailbox providers such as Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo check whether the message is truly sent by the owner of the email address or domain name. 


In order to verify a sender's identity, the message must first pass DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance). In order to do so every email must pass SPF (Sender Policy Framework) authentication and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) authentication. 


These processes protect email recipients from phishing and scams, however, they also allow senders to protect their domain and reputation.


These records are placed in the DNS settings of your domain that tell the various mailbox providers that the emails are in fact coming from you. This also prevents “email spoofing” and will protect your subscribers from scammers pretending to be you. 

Blacklists & Domain Health


If an email server does not pass authentication and email service providers suspect it of sending out spam, its IP address or domain will become blacklisted. 


Once on this list, every single email delivered from that certain address will get to the spam folder. If you ever suspect that your email domain has been blacklisted, it would be best to check your domain health, then take all the necessary steps to undo the process.

Subject Lines


More than 50% of recipients open an email based on the subject line. It's a crucial part of your email that requires lots of thought and optimization. 


The best email subject lines are short and simple. Using a person's first name in the subject line is considered to be highly effective. Personal touches in email automation works. Every one of us would answer better to an individual call-out than a mass message. 


It’s a good idea to do research to find effective subject lines you can use for your email campaigns.  

Banned Words & Punctuation


Bad practices related to wording and punctuation might not get you at the top of your prospect's mailing list. They might not get you at the bottom either. 


When composing your email it is very important to avoid spam trigger keywords at all times. You might also want to remove any periods from your subject line. Other best practices include keeping a good text to link ratio, limiting the use of images, and never starting an email with ‘dear’.

Litmus Test & Inbox Test


In case you’ve ever wondered where your marketing emails ended up, then you’ll be happy to hear that you can actually check it out by using the litmus test and inbox test


These two resources are easy to use and extremely valuable because they allow you to actually see where your emails will be landing in your prospect's inbox.

Email Verification & List Clean Hygiene


When running email marketing campaigns, undelivered and bounced emails are unavoidable. While there's nothing much you can do about a misspelled address, keep in mind that not cleaning up your email list will end up hurting your sender score. 


Not very unlike a credit score, a sender score is a measure of your reputation. A high score will contribute to your efforts by improving your deliverability rates. There are several tools out there that can help you to clean up your list and verify your emails.

Conclusion


When used the right way, email automation becomes a powerful strategy to grow your brand and increase revenue. Creating personalized experiences, telling stories, and inviting leads to a conversation are proven methods to get more results from your email campaigns. 


Through email automation, all these campaigns can be personalized and optimized based on your subscribers interests and behaviours. 


If you need help planning or deploying your email automations, writing copy or improving your deliverability rate, get in touch with us. Email automation is one of our most popular services at Matt Astifan Digital.

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