Breaking Down Email Workflows for Your Business
When it comes to gaining leads for your business, it’s almost impossible to reach out to every single lead personally. While you may want to use a personalised approach, there are still ways to come across as a personable business without putting unnecessary time and effort into your tactics.
With marketing automation, you are able to automate specific tasks through your customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing platforms to reach leads at the best time. To learn more about how CRMs and marketing automation work together, be sure to check out our blog “How CRMs and Marketing Automations Work Hand In Hand”.
With the blog you’re reading now, we’re going to focus on email workflows, including why email workflows are important and how they are a part of marketing automation. Before we get started, let’s break down the basics for those of you who are unfamiliar with email workflows and marketing automation.
What Are Email Workflows?
An email workflow is a set of created emails sent to your subscribers or business leads. The type of emails your subscriber or lead receives will depend on a variety of factors, including contact info, email preferences, lead score and behaviour. Ultimately, these emails will help you reach a goal for your business while nurturing the lead or subscriber in the process.
Having a hard time imagining an email workflow? Think of it as a flow chart. Each lead will begin at the top of the chart (AKA workflow) and work its way down the chart in hopes of finishing the goal you have in place.
Most times, emails in a workflow are triggered based on certain actions that a consumer takes. For example, if a consumer visits a services page, you could have a workflow in place that tells them more about the service. If they’re a brand new lead, you could start the workflow with a welcome email explaining more about the company before diving into the service information. If they’re a returning lead, you could have a different workflow set up with more personalised info and verbiage, including phrases like “welcome back” or “it has been a while since we talked.”
Often, leads are more likely to continue opening emails or make a purchase if the information you send is customised to them. When certain emails are triggered based on activity, it allows you as a business to send info at the perfect time to seal the deal. Personalisation is a huge factor in email marketing and email workflows, so don’t forget to make your emails as unique to your readers as possible. Of course, this does NOT mean sending each email out manually. This would take too much time and manpower to complete. Work smarter, not harder, by using marketing automation.
But, wait, how do you know which workflow to add leads to? Or how to determine who is a brand new lead compared to a returning lead? We’re glad you asked! This is where marketing automation, lead scores and email marketing come into play.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation takes the tedious tasks that your employees need to do and automates them through software. Email sends and social media posts are a couple of examples that are easy to understand marketing tasks that can be automated. Not only does marketing automation save you time, but it also allows you to reach consumers throughout the customer journey and nurture them through every step of their journey.
You know how every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square? That same concept goes hand in hand with marketing automation and email workflows. Marketing automation is the big picture (square) while email workflows are a component or tactic within marketing automation. Marketing automation can occur without email workflows, but email workflows can’t happen without marketing automation.
This can be a lot to take in all at once. If you need to be brought up to speed on email newsletters and how they work with marketing automation, we recommend checking out our blog “What You Should Know About Email Newsletters and Marketing Automation”. If you’re really stumped, we’re here to help. Visit our services page to learn more about the email marketing automation service we offer at Zeidan.
Why Email Workflows Are Important
How do you feel when you get a very bland email that doesn’t give you relevant information? Most likely, you probably feel like reading that email was a waste of time. As a reader, you want the most personalised emails you can receive. And as a business, you need to step into your reader’s shoes and think about what they want. Keep in mind that you do need to reach your goals, so don’t throw everything out the window to appease your readers.
With email workflows, you can create customised emails that allow you to nurture leads so they make it through the marketing funnel. If you’re not seeing much success with your email marketing, take the time to identify the problem. Here are some common problems that businesses encounter with their emails and that signify you need email workflows:
- Your entire lead/subscription list is receiving the same email
- Your emails are being sent manually
- You disregard leads who aren’t ready to make a purchase
- Your conversion rates are low or aren’t performing as they should
If you are experiencing any of the problems listed in the bullet points above, take a step back and re-evaluate your email marketing strategy. There are many reasons to re-evaluate, and optimising your strategy should be done on an ongoing basis. Don’t feel like you’ve done anything wrong if you need to restructure your email strategy. It takes time to figure out what’s right for your business and your subscribers.
Types of Email Workflows
Do you want your emails to be linear or dynamic? When it comes down to it, there are two basic types of email workflows you can consider using for your business: drip campaigns and nurture campaigns.
Drip campaigns are linear and allow you to send content to a specific group of subscribers. Often, drip campaigns are great for new subscribers or leads in your system. If you need to ease readers into your services, a drip campaign can go at a slower pace or on a set schedule. We’ll be blogging about drip campaigns here soon, so be sure to come back to learn more!
On the other hand, nurture campaigns are dynamic and allow you more personalisation and to set a more unique schedule. An email workflow can be triggered by a content download, form submission or another specific action that you set. What’s unique about this workflow type is that it allows the reader to determine the path (which is what makes it a dynamic workflow).
For example, if you have a goal of a CTA to be clicked, you could have two outcomes: click or no click. If the CTA is clicked, you can send out a follow-up email regarding that CTA. If they didn’t click the CTA, you will want to send a different type of email as a follow-up. It’s kind of like those “create your own story” books. You won’t know how the flow will end until the reader makes a decision.
Bonus Tip
You never want to overwhelm your readers with too many emails. If they feel bombarded, it’s likely they will unsubscribe or take their interest to one of your competitors. Allow your readers enough time to read the emails before sending another one. Drip campaigns allow you to have more space between sends while nurture campaigns rely on a reader’s response or action. Depending on your goals, consider these two workflow types when creating your strategy.
Also, keep in mind certain holidays or big events. You never want to send emails on days when consumers are distracted. And, as much as we don’t want it to happen, natural disasters can occur, and you need to be sympathetic to certain situations. Show your readers compassion by pausing any marketing automation or email sends. The last thing they want is to see your business pop up in their inbox during an unstable or unsure time. When in doubt, pause your marketing automation in emails.
7 Basic Steps to Creating an Email Workflow
When it comes to creating a workflow from scratch, there are 7 basic steps you need to know.
1. Create Campaign Workflow
Whether you draw it out or use a computer program, you need to map out your email workflow campaign. If you jump in without a plan, it’s likely emails will be missed.
2. Gather Resources
Emails aren’t just content. After your workflow is mapped out, be sure to obtain any resources that you need, including landing pages, forms and graphics.
3. Create Triggers
Do you want certain emails sent when someone clicks on a CTA? During this step, you need to determine what next steps will occur when specific actions are taken.
4. Determine Conditions
Are there certain rules created based on actions taken? This is the step to implement them! Create conditions within your email workflow to filter readers based on their action.
5. Set Frequency
Remember how we mentioned not bombarding readers with too many emails? Keep that in your head when setting up your email and workflow frequency. Do your research to see what frequency is best for businesses in your industry.
6. Launch Workflow
Now’s the time for you to kick back and relax…kind of. When launching your email workflow, you’ll want to check for errors throughout the launch and optimise any issues that you encounter.
7. Measure Performance
After your workflow has been live for a while you’ll want to check in on how it’s performing. A few KPI’s to check include email open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, subscribe/unsubscribe rate and number of people who completed the workflow.
Seems simple, right? Setting up workflows from scratch can take time, but they will ultimately save you time in the long run and provide more qualified leads for your business. Investing in your business is the best way to find improvement!
Final Thoughts
There are many components to email marketing and marketing automation. Remember, marketing automation is the big picture and email workflows make up parts of the automation. However, marketing automation can’t work without the smaller components. Every workflow plays a part regardless of how big or small it is. If your business is ready to improve your email marketing and workflow efforts, our team at Zeidan is here for all your marketing needs.
From lead generation to SEO to email marketing automation, our team has the experience you need to help you find success in the digital world. Contact us today to learn more about the services we offer or to sign up with us! You know you don’t want to wait any longer.