Little known fact about email marketing: it can easily grow your online business 2-4x – with an average ROI of $40 per dollar spent!
Not getting such results from your automated flows and campaigns? Here are the top 3 mistakes that our agency has discovered when auditing email accounts.
1. Technical foundations are set up incorrectly
You may have the best-converting abandoned cart email sequence. But what’s the use of it if your email marketing platform doesn’t capture those abandoned carts?
Brainstorming the templates and copy is great. But first, double check if your account, integration and all the tracking are set up properly.
In case you skip this part, the results are going to be quite deplorable:
– not working triggers
– underperforming flows
– or potential leads that you don’t capture!
To sum up, your marketing team will hear that emails *do not convert*. But technically, tons of money is simply being left on the table.
And I bet it’s the last thing you as a business owner want.
2. The main flows are not set up
Did you know that 7 out of 10 carts are left abandoned? Or that a welcome email is one of the most successful emails you can ever send?
You don’t need dozens of flows to generate consistent revenue from email automation.
The truth is that it’s exactly the case of the “small steps lead to big changes”.
Here are the must-have flows every business needs to avoid losing hot leads & sales:
Abandoned Cart
Nothing fancy here: 3-4 emails are more than enough to do their job. Don’t rush with discounts, don’t forget about urgency triggers but don’t overwhelm as well. Test out the below sequence for greatest results:
– Gentle reminder – sent in 1 hour
– Reviews or more details about the product *awaiting* – sent in 1 day
– Limited-time discount to incentivise the sale – sent in 1-2 days
– Last chance to use a discount and grab products from the cart – sent in 1-2 days
Welcome for non-buyers
If emails had an open rate race, the first email from this flow would be an all-time legend.
The magic about welcome email is that it’s one of those rare ones your subscribers are actually expecting it to land in their inboxes. I.e. they have straightforwardly shown interest in you by engaging with your sign up form and sharing their email.
Use this flow to deepen that relationship and nurture nurture nurture. Good practice is to:
– introduce your brand
– share the core values
– give a feeling of community
– and share a sweet incentive for the first sale.
You can also use this flow to grow your social media following – simply ask to follow you there in a separate email! Sometimes it’s as easy as that.
Post-Purchase
Okay, the sale finally took place. But the work doesn’t end here.
Post-purchase flow is where you:
– show your customers how you take care about them with sending shipping info on time
– further educate them on the product with handy tutorials and FAQs
– get more reviews and user-generated content
– and build out foundations for customer retention
PRO tip: customize this flow for first-time and returning customers.
At the end of the day, your returning customers are those who make your revenue. Thank them for their loyalty with a personalised email.
3. Companies set and forget their email marketing
As every good performance marketer will know, creative assets die out. Thus regular optimisation and tracking is key to maintain high results.
Don’t forget to regularly check your email marketing performance.
For example, a drop in open rates over the last month from 30% to 15% may be a red flag that something is wrong with:
– deliverability
– and/or email list health
Clicks are lower than expected?
It may be wise to test out different copies for your call-to-action buttons as well as their placement.
Noticed that open rates in a flow are high for 4 out of 5 its emails, but suddenly the 5th one underperforms?
Don’t forget to review your flow filters, triggers and A/B test your subject lines.
Finally, in the light of the iOS 15 update, it has become even harder to track key metrics like open rate, engaged users and revenue attribution. Thus, this further exaggerates the aforementioned problems.
Action plan after reading this post:
– examine your technical foundations: check if all triggers are working properly
– make sure you set up all basic automation flows: Welcome, Abandoned Cart, Post-Purchase
– don’t forget to check your email marketing performance, at least bi-weekly
If you liked this post and would like to improve your email marketing even more, reach out to Enflow Digital.
Check out our other posts like “How to calculate engagement rate on social media” to get more out of your content, and make sure to free up some time for other importing things with our Ads automation tool – BOOSTERBERG.
This blogpost was made in cooperation with KAROLINA UVARKINA. Focus on ideas and content, not on manual ad management. Try BOOSTERBERG for a hassle-free way to get ahead in marketing automation!
