What Is Email Automation and How to Use It?

What is Email Automation?

By definition, email automation is a process that enables you to send emails automatically to a massive list of recipients, based on triggers and sequences.

Depending on where your leads are in your sales funnel, you won’t be sending the same types of emails.

There are two different types of email automation processes:

• email automation for marketing purposes;
• email automation for sales purposes.

Email Automation for Marketing

Email automation for marketing is mainly used to nurture your leads. Once you’ve identified and qualified your leads thanks to other marketing actions – through inbound or outbound channels – your goal as a marketing person will be to get the leads ready for a salesperson so they can further down the funnel.

To do so, you can set up automated email campaigns pushing educational content such as blog posts, industry reports, webinars, and more. This will help you to warm them up and to increase your conversion rate.

Depending on the tool you’re using, these automated emails can be sent out in response to a specific action taken by the recipient, such as signing up for a newsletter, reading a blog post, or clicking through from an email link.

Email Automation for Sales

In B2B, when using email automation for sales purposes, you want to establish a personal and direct connection with your prospects. As a result, there are subcategories of sales automated emails:

• Automated cold emails (for leads that didn’t come from marketing);
• Automated sales introduction emails (for leads that did come from marketing);
• Automated follow-up emails;
• Automated closing emails.

About this last one: at LaGrowthMachine, we strongly believe in automated sales as it’s a great way to generate more leads while saving a lot of time.

However, it should be used only to create a conversation with a lot of people, and not so much for the end of your funnel: as the closing part is maybe the most important of all of it, you should take the time to do it manually for each one of your leads to optimize your conversion rate.

How does it work?

You can set up email automation sequences by using a sales automation tool such as LaGrowthMachine – we’ll go through it later in this post.

It allows businesses like yours to create automated campaigns that target their lead wherever they’re located in the sales funnel, pushing various types of content, and intending to close them at the very end of the process.

With this type of tool, you’re able to pre-program emails suitable for a myriad of B2B leads that possess a considerable degree of customization.

What are the main benefits of automated emails?

That’s a fact: no matter the size of your company, it is always important to stay in touch with those who use or could potentially use your product. Whether you are just beginning to try and interest them or have already succeeded in converting them, you must remind them of your presence and offer content that will maintain their attention.

When you know that 64% of small and medium-sized businesses use email marketing (and email marketing tool) to communicate with their users, you become fully aware of how much time you could save if all processes were automated!

Save time for your teams

At LaGrowthMachine, we believe that using a marketing automation tool can save 40% of the time on work routines.

Automating most of the time-consuming tasks permits your teams to focus on more lucrative projects that are integral to your business.

Imagine the time you would save if you’d no longer have to deal with email lists, manual mailings, reminders, etc… With automated emails, once your workflows are set up, all you have to do is to optimize them!

Personalization at the service of your business

Welcome to the era of ultra-personalization!

As mass mailing does not work anymore, it is now necessary to address an individual by understanding his problems and by targeting his needs.

According to a SalesForce study, 53% of customers expect the offers they receive to be systematically personalized.

When we talk about personalization, we are talking about much more than incorporating a {NAME} tag in the object.

For example, you can use email automation to program sending scenarios based on:

• User behavior on your website: Did Michael read the article on brand content? Send him a free downloadable white paper to deepen his knowledge.
• Contextual milestones: Sabrina has been a subscriber to your newsletter for a year now. It’s time to thank her by offering her a promotion on one of your services.
• Thank you for participating in an event: Anwar signed up for your webinar? Thank him warmly and take the opportunity to get his feedback on the event.

More accurate data about your leads

Email automation is one of the best allies of a lead nurturing strategy. The more you interact with your customers, the more information you gather about them.

This data can be stored directly in your CRM, your customer relationship management software, without any manual action from you.

The more your CRM software is enriched, the easier it becomes for your sales teams to use the data collected to sell your services or products.

Customers are more easily retained

This point is related to the previous argument. Logically, a customer who receives personalized emails has a good chance to stay close to your services

The more attention you give them and the more care you give to their user experience, the better their retention will be.

Thanks to email automation, you can set up :

• Send an automatic email to check up on them;
• Understand why he has been inactive for a few weeks;
• Send him recent content;
• Invite them to an event specially reserved for customers;
• Follow-up with an exclusive promotional offer…;
• Access to accurate statistics;

Since all the emails sent are concentrated within the marketing solution you have chosen, you can consult their statistics at a glance.

Here are the stats you need to monitor:

• Your deliverability;
• Your opening rates;
• Your click rate;
• Your response rate.

Once your stats are satisfactory, you can then replicate your processes over and over again.

The best way to make your business scalable

As your business grows, so does your database. Managing everything manually becomes impossible after a certain growth rate.

By automating the whole part of your processes, you reduce manual actions and friction points.

It doesn’t matter if your growth is in tens or thousands of leads. With email automation, you will always be able to bring useful content to the right person, without any effort on your part.

How to do email automation well?

Before considering the different marketing or sales tools that allow you to automate your campaign scenarios, let’s look at some use cases both for marketing and sales.

Use Case 1: Welcome emails (Marketing)

These days, the welcome email has become a must.

According to MailChimp:

• 74% of Internet users expect to receive a welcome email when they sign up for a mailing list;
• Welcome messages are read four times more and receive five times more clicks than standard marketing emails;
• They generate up to 320% more revenue per email than other promotional messages.

The best way to do this is to set up a Welcome Pack – a series of automated emails.

The idea is to gently welcome the lead before moving them smoothly through your sales cycle.

Here is an example of the different stages that your workflow can follow, from the moment your lead fills out a registration form on your site:

• D+0: within 5 minutes, he receives an email thanking him for his registration and inviting him to discover other content thanks to a CTA redirecting him to your blog.
• D+2: you send him an email highlighting the benefits of subscribing to your emails. “Why your subscription will save you 10 months of training”.
• D+5: a third email presents the advantages of using the paid version of your email automation tool.

Use Case 2: Send a Lead Magnet on a specific content (Marketing)

The basis of a company’s development lies in its ability to continually generate leads.

The lead magnet is a great way to achieve this. It simply consists of sending qualitative content to people who need it… in exchange for their data.

Here’s what it could look like:

• You set up a landing page dedicated to your content (you should check our post on email copywriting);
• This landing page includes a registration form;
• Using various channels (LinkedIn, your website, webinars…), you target people who need to build their skills on the domain and encourage them to download the content in exchange for their data;
• For each completed form, you automate the sending of guides and specific content emails on copywriting (expert interviews, case studies, exercises…). It is also an excellent way to establish your expertise and develop your relationship with a prospect;
• Follow up with your users with email automation: This time, you don’t need to go looking for email addresses since you already have them.

Unfortunately, after analyzing your email statistics or user behavior, you realize that Michel hasn’t opened your emails for a month. Heresy!

But don’t panic:

You had thought of programming a reminder email for all inactive recipients at + 30 days. A month later, Michel receives a specific email asking about him. In a few lines, you encourage him to discover adapted content (based on his previous experiences). You can also offer him to test a new product with an exclusive offer, to participate in an event…

This scenario can be duplicated for many events. For example, in B2C, it can be adapted for a shopping cart abandonment:

Michel, it seems that you had a power failure when you purchased our growth marketing training. Electrify your knowledge with an exclusive 20% discount, valid until tonight”.

Use Case 3: Celebrate a special date (Marketing)

Thanks to the data collected during your lead nurturing strategy, you know when your prospect was born. Or when he first signed up for your newsletter. Or when he finished his training with you.

Take advantage of this data to strengthen your professional relationship:

• Set up an automatic email to celebrate his birthday with an exclusive gift (a goodie, a free tool, or a specific promotion, etc.)
• Schedule an automated email to be sent at the end of each training + 1 month to check up on your customers and offer them new and even more advanced training.
• Automatically send an email containing a free guide to all your users who have subscribed to your newsletter for 3 months and whose opening rate is higher than 40%.

Use Case 4: Send promotional offers (Marketing)

Every year, there are special events for BtoB or e-commerce.

They can be festive dates (Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s Day), events dedicated to your sector of activity (a trade show), or unavoidable moments of the sale (Black Friday, Cyber Monday…).

Set up workflows in advance to make sure you don’t miss any dates. You can :

• Automate countdowns;
• Create teasers;
• Highlight promotions;
• Segment your contacts according to your retargeting criteria;
• Create specific tags based on behavior (shopping cart abandonment, purchases, quote requests, etc.);
• Collect user reviews.

The more positive reviews you get about your brand, the more likely you are to generate more leads.

A good satisfaction score gives credibility to your brand and makes people want to learn more about your services.

It is even an essential asset for the development of a business: 88% of consumers check reviews online before making a purchase and 75% of consumers say they trust the ratings given by other users.

Some specific platforms (like TrustPilot or SurveyMonkey) allow you to automate customer feedback requests.

You can also automate it from your CRM or your dedicated marketing solutions by submitting satisfaction questionnaires to your users, according to their progress in your purchase path.

Use Case 5: Send mass cold email (Sales)

Automated emails are a very effective method to contact a lot of leads in a very short amount of time as it allows you to:

• Create one or several types of messages depending on your leads segments;
• Use the same templates, with variables to personalized your emails (so it doesn’t look like it’s been automated)
• Engage conversation with many leads, expecting the same conversion rate as if you were doing it manually (this depends on your copywriting skills).

In very short steps, LaGrowthMachine allows you to:

• simply import your leads list (from LinkedIn or with a CSV file)
• we will enrich the leads data automatically;
• drag and drop your emails sequence and set up the copywriting of each one of your emails
• observe the live result!

And with that, two major benefits:

1. We can review your campaign from the setup to the copywriting of your messages, to ensure it will be well-optimized.
2. You can set up multichannel sequences, using not only email but also messages on LinkedIn and Twitter, thanks to the data we’ve been collecting at the beginning of the process!

Use Case 6: Follow up with your sales leads (Sales)

This last use case shows another great benefit of using email automation tools.

Instead of being lost in your Gmail account through many emails, these tools allow you to program in advance your follow-ups, so you don’t need to take care of them.

The only thing you should do is just wait for your leads to reply and continue the conversation manually until you close your deal.

If you’re using LaGrowthMachine, you can visualize all of your sales messages (through Email, LinkedIn, and Twitter) including sales email follow-ups. You can even answer them directly through LaGrowthMachine, using your connected Gmail or LinkedIn account!

We’ve seen many use cases for automated emails. Unfortunately, without the right tool, it won’t be very useful.

We’re going to present some tools with their pros and cons so you can choose the one that fits you the most.

Which software to use for email automation?

With the explosion of the use of marketing automation tools, many dedicated platforms have emerged.

More or less complete, more or less expensive, here is the list of email automation marketing solutions that will bring you good results.

LaGrowthMachine, the best solution for email automation – From 80 € per month

Hi, it’s us!

Once you’ve set up your prospecting workflows, all you have to do is automate.

LaGrowthMachine is particularly adapted to outbound sales with the possibility to detail each step of your scenario. The more you segment your contact lists, the more you will be able to send the right content to the right contact.

1. Import lead lists from your CRM, Sales Navigator
2. Automatically enrich data thanks to the possible integration with more than 40 marketing software (Zapier, Calendly, PipeDrive, Typeform, HubSpot, CaptainData…)
3. Create your own workflow or use one of our many templates
4. Use our intuitive email editor to create effective emails
5. A/B test your contents to estimate which ones are the most efficient on which segment
6. Analyze your results with an advanced dashboard, easily understandable at a glance
7. Watch your response rate increase by a factor of 3.5 (with a multi-channel approach)
8. Benefit from the support of growth marketing and copywriting experts

Hubspot – Pro Package at $800/month for 2000 contacts

In addition to offering many sales and marketing tools, Hubspot integrates a CRM and the ability to automate many features (sales emails, online appointments, transfer of leads from marketing to sales).

You can configure all your scenarios from A to Z or choose one of the proposed templates. Moreover, you will also have access to AB/Testing allowing you to optimize the performance of your campaigns.

Its direct integration with a CRM allows you to enrich the data in real time and to accurately segment your contact lists.

Efficiency comes at a cost: the more emails you target, the more expensive the marketing solution. Count 3200$ per month to address 10 000 contacts.

MailChimp – freemium package, up to 300€ per month for advanced personalization

MailChimp is another great choice for your Inbound Marketing campaigns.

You can use the software to create your landing pages and forms and integrate the collected data within their native CRM.

On the email automation side, the platform offers many features including:

• Sending emails based on user behavior (email or website)
• Reminder messages for abandoned carts, order notifications…
• Retargeting emails
• You can choose to fully customize your messages or use predefined templates.

SendInBlue – From 49 € per month for 20 000 emails

CRM, email automation, templates, landing pages… SendInBlue masters all the subjects related to email automation.

You can choose to design complete email automation scenarios, such as a welcome pack, or automate the sending of an email during specific actions (shopping cart abandonment, birthday).

To make the tool even more intuitive, most of these modalities are accessible via preconfigured sequences.

Lemlist – From $59 per month

Lemlist is a rather recent solution, specializing in outreach email automation. Using the platform allows you to, among other things:

• Improve your deliverability;
• Personalize your emails;
• Create automated sequences;
• Program reminder emails;
• Use numerous customizable emojis;
• Integrate numerous complementary marketing tools (CRM and others).

Lemlist offers a very easy-to-use interface, complete with video tutorials.

MailerLite – free, up to 1000 contacts

Very suitable for beginners, MailerLite offers classic email automation features. It is particularly adapted to solopreneurs or small businesses.

In addition to being very accessible from a budgetary point of view, it is easy to learn. You will also have access to basic additional resources to train yourself in emailing.

However, it offers few advanced statistics on your campaigns. As for the prospecting scenarios (fully operational for the free version!), they remain rather limited for the moment.

However, it makes up for it with the segmentation of contact lists and their listening support.

MailJet – From 23 €/month, for 15 000 emails

MailJet is a great MailerLite alternative, but as you can see, the first big argument of it is its price. For less than 30 euros per month, you can :

• Define automated scenarios
• Optimize your deliverability
• Create emails thanks to an easy-to-use editor
• Access the performance of your campaigns
• Integrate the tool with over 80 third-party marketing solutions
• The reason why the price is so low is that the platform does not yet offer an integrated CRM, nor the ability to build integrated landing pages.

Example of an email sequence using LaGrowthMachine

To finish this post, here is an example of an email sequence that can be implemented using LaGrowthMachine:

Email 1: Introduction Email / Day 1

Email 2: Follow up 1 / D+3

Email 3: Follow up 2 / D+6

Email 4: End of sequence (fail) / D+9