Automating Your Mailing Lists for Precision Targeting
Nobody ever said running an online e-commerce store was going to be easy. With orders to create and send, a website and store to maintain, a blog to run, customer queries to deal with, payments to track, social media accounts to manage and so on and so forth, it’s easy to feel like your list of jobs is never ending.
It’s easy to see why so many people get stressed by it all! This is essentially the case if you’re running a full-on store yourself or even with just a small team and it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.
However, it’s worth remembering that the key to success isn’t in working hard, it’s in working smart which is exactly what we’re going to explore today. Marketing automation has been about for a long time now, but there are still businesses and e-commerce stores out there, like yours, that is not taking full advantage of these opportunities.
By investing time in marketing automation processes, such as the ones that services such as HubSpot and Pica9 allow you to do, you can cut back time in your schedule and save yourself countless hours where you’ll be able to invest your time more wisely into other projects, such as expanding your business or trying out new ideas for your store.
Today, we’re going to explore four of the best ways you can automate certain processes in your business so you can build better relationships with your customers, grow your business or even just give yourself a well-deserved break!
The Importance of a Welcome Email
“Never underestimate just how important a welcome email is in your business. Briefly, a welcome email is the email a customer will receive when they first sign up to your newsletter or mailing list, either while they’re making a purchase or visiting your website” – explains Roberta Stiltner, an Ecommerce Marketer at Paper Fellows.
However, if you do not include an automated welcome email into your marketing campaign, you’re missing out on some serious opportunities and your customers will not be happy. After all, there’s a huge percentage of customers out there that expect a business to send them a welcome email after they sign up.
The main benefit that these welcome emails provide is the fact that you’re immediately creating and building a relationship with each and every customer that you have. You’ll also be creating a tonne of opportunities for customers to really engage with your business for the first time.
This is because, within these emails, you can include all kinds of information such as links to different pages of your e-commerce store, sale items or events you may currently be running or even direct links to products. For more ideas on what content to include in your welcome emails, check out sites like Easy Word Count or Essayroo.
In some cases, you might even want to thank your customers for signing up to your mailing list by including a discount code they can use on their next order. All of this email content needs to be written up and designed prior to launch where you can automatically set the trigger to send to customers as and when they sign up which can be setup using programs like Salesforce.
Nurturing a Better Relationship with Your Customers
One of the most time-consuming activities you can have as an e-commerce store manager is building and maintaining relationships with your customers. If you’re doing everything by hand, such as writing and sending emails to single addresses, you simply won’t have time for anything else, yet you’ll risk losing customers.
However, using email marketing automation, you can set up an email campaign where you can reward and entertain your customers with only the effort of creating the emails in the first 
place. Commonly, this kind of campaign is known as a loyalty program.
This is where you’ll reward customers who shop with you multiple times further and more exclusive discounts on their next purchases (which keep their loyal and keep them coming back to your store) as well as the ability to build up VIP customers who are the most loyal to your store.
Promoting this fact that loyal customers can earn exclusive discounts is a great way to boost and expand your customer base rapidly as well as
generating large amounts of revenue since it’s easier to retain an old customer than it is to recruit a new one. When looking for ways to create creative content, be sure to use SEO content producing services such as State of Writing or Boomessays, as recommended at Huffingtonpost, so you can guarantee quality.
Automating Your Mailing Lists for Precision Targeting
This is one of the most effective ways to make the most of your email marketing campaign and automation platforms. More commonly referred to as email segmentation, this is the process in which you divide up the contacts in your mailing lists into their different contact groups.
This could be however you like, whether it’s the date they signed up to your lists, their age, gender, physical location, shopping habits, browsing habits, mobile device, computer operating system or whatever you can think of.
By automatically using your automation platform, such as Lead Squared, to segment your lists, you can easily create more custom content for your customers that is much more personalised and effective to the people that you’re sending them to, rather than just sending out generic emails which will target all the demographics in your mailing lists broadly.
Some ideas of what you can include in these personalised emails is more information on events and sale activities that you’re running throughout your store (which are relevant to the demographic that you’re emailing), related articles or blog content to the posts the subscribers have already been reading, updates on certain products (depending on browsing history) and even just simple product recommendations.
Don’t forget to use tools like Cite It In and Ukwritings to deliver high-quality email content that guarantees to make an impact on your customers and subscribers.
This helps to create a tailored and much more effective email marketing strategy and therefore a much more fluid and more enjoyable customer experience overall.
Re-Engaging with Disconnected Customers
One of the best aspects of marketing automation is the fact that you can effortlessly target and message
customers that have engaged and been a part of your business in the past and now have gone quiet but either not interact with your content or make a purchase.
Using some of the leading automation platforms, you can easily design, create and setup re-engagement program where you’ll be able to remind customers that your store exists or more information about your business, such as recent news or an updated product inventory.
One of the best ways you can proactively draw these customers back into your business is by offering them an exclusive discount voucher or coupon for money off their next purchase.
You may feel intrusive doing this since there must have been a reason that the customer stopped interacting in the first place, but you’ll need to remember that there’s a reason that they first got involved with your store.
By creating an automated workflow, you can effortlessly, even over the course of several emails, re-engage with your customers and bring them back to your store’s community.
Within these emails, you may want to recommend products based on their previous browsing history, you can offer insight into some of your newer products that they might not know about or, towards the end, simply offer to remove them from your mailing list since they aren’t coming back, and it shows that you respect them as a customer.
It’s a really good idea to join and link to your social media profiles in your automated email content, especially when it comes to re-engaging with customers. This is because of social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, give you a much better platform to communicate and interact with your customers so you can give them a personal experience that will bring them back to your store.
For more ideas, thoughts and content ideas for your social media profiles, simply head over to My Writing Way or Academadvisor. You can even automate your social media posts so you can save time trying to figure out when to post at the best times of the day, you can simply set the computer to do it for you.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a tonne of automation ideas out there that can help you to grow and expand your business while simultaneously helping you to develop better relationships with your customers which all come together to help drive your e-commerce store to new levels of success.
Don’t forget to constantly tweak your emails and update them with new and exciting content that your customers will love and can’t get enough of.
Gloria Kopp
Gloria Kopp is a Marketing Automation Manager at Academized. She is a guest writer at The Tab, Semrush and Australian Help blogs. Gloria is an author of Studydemic blog for tutors and writers.