Email automation is the “too good to be true” outreach campaign tool. Automated emails take less time to create, send, and analyze, making your outreach faster and more effective. Email outreach itself has the highest ROI of any form of marketing, bringing in $42 for every $1 spent. Add in automation, and you can see up to a 300% higher click-through rate for your drip campaigns.
With so many benefits, it’s a no-brainer for organizations to use email automation to drive engagement and increase their reach. One of the best ways to use automated emails is through specific constituent journeys. These journeys are paths that different individuals can go on depending on how they came to you, where they are in their constituent lifecycle, and where you want them to go.
Let’s take a look at some top email journeys below.
Welcome Emails
The Welcome Journey is one of the earliest email automation journeys you need as an organization. This journey introduces new constituents to you, thanks them for being a part of your community, and provides any vital information they need to access resources (i.e., how to log into their unique account).
Depending on how individuals interact with your first welcome message, you can funnel them into different paths. Those who immediately log in to their online account can get an email detailing what they’ll find on their account page. Constitutes who click through to your blog could get an invitation to sign up for your newsletter. Those who don’t open the first message should get a follow-up within the next two weeks, reminding them to engage.
The Welcome Journey is one of the most essential to your organization. It sets the stage for what your audience can expect and obtains valuable information on each individual, which is used to further personalize their future outreach.
Renewal Reminders
Whether you’re a membership-based organization, donation-driven, or sales-oriented, you need to set up automated Renewal Reminders for your audience. These journeys do precisely what the name implies: remind individuals to re-up their financial contributions.
Member-based organizations can use Renewal Reminder journeys to give a heads-up before an automatic payment is made and offer opportunities to increase membership levels based on an individual’s interactions with the organization over the past months or years. Donation-driven organizations can use Renewal Reminders to remind individuals when they donated in the past, highlight what their donation provided, and allow them to contribute again at the same or higher level. Sales-oriented businesses use Renewal Reminders to let customers know about an upgrade or parallel product or service they may be interested in based on past purchases.
Once an audience member gets the first message in a Renewal Reminder journey, what they receive next is based on their interaction with the first message. If they click on a donation or product link but don’t take additional action, they can get a reminder email about the items they clicked on. If they make a purchase or donation, they can get a Thank You email. If they don’t interact, a second email can be sent, re-iterating the first’s message in a new way.
Recapture
Recapture journeys are designed for individuals who have not interacted with your organization or business in a certain number of days, weeks, months, etc. The idea is to re-engage the individual with your organization before it’s “too late.” The “when” of reaching out varies based on your organization or business. It could be you send messaging after the individual missed a certain number of events, didn’t engage with a certain number of emails, or hasn’t interacted with any of your content within a certain number of weeks or months. Your team can use past marketing data to determine when to trigger a Recapture journey.
Your Recapture messaging should include something unique to prompt re-engagement. This could be a particular promotional offering, discount, or exclusive access to an upcoming event. The idea is to personalize it for the individual, showing them they’re valued. With your offering, solicit feedback to find out why they haven’t engaged and use that data to improve your current outreach.
Getting Started with Email Automation
These are just a few of the top email automation journeys to include in your outreach campaigns. Others include Nurture campaigns, Web Inquiry journeys, Data Update Requests, and Appreciation journeys. Each organization has its unique needs, and it’s up to your team to determine how to customize your email automation experiences best.
You can see more about automated email journeys in our latest eGuide, Email Automation Journeys: The Top Journeys You Need to Improve Engagement. It’s one of our many resources targeted at equipping you with the right tools to build your audience, increase engagement, and help your organization grow.
See all of our resources here. And get in touch with our team to get started with your email automation campaigns. In as little as two years, we’ve helped clients reach an over 97% delivery rate, deploy over 2,500 campaigns, and get more than 100 million emails delivered in the market. Contact our expert team to start building your campaigns today.
Sarah Deak is a veteran copywriter and content strategist with NuGrowth Solutions. She likes to look for the unexpected angle and uses her background in education, business development, and marketing to create interesting and informative pieces to equip readers with actionable data