Some companies automate everything to the maximum in order to reduce the number of staff and salary costs, while others have a personal approach that goes off scale, and almost every letter is sent manually. In the first case, they often forget that in some situations it is impossible to do without live human communication, in the second - that as the business grows, costs and workload on employees will increase.

The secret is balance and proper combination of two approaches. Let's figure it out.

How automation works

Email automation is the use of technology to perform repetitive, routine tasks that require little or no human involvement. For example, sending trigger or educational mailings, congratulations, etc.

Sending each letter by email and/or messenger manually works well:

when you are just starting a business;

if you have few customers;

in case you do not have an established customer base;

if you don’t already know about the habits and preferences of your users.

As soon as the business starts to gain momentum, it is worth considering the possibility of automating mailings.

Automation frees up resources and helps you avoid mistakes associated with repetitive tasks.

Automation capabilities

1

Save time. The marketer will only need to set up a chain of messages/a separate letter once, and everything will work without his participation. It is enough to occasionally check that the chain is working correctly and that the messages contain up-to-date information.

2

Keep in touch with the client. Automatic newsletters arrive instantly, even if the marketer is on vacation or sick leave. This helps maintain constant contact with the user and increase loyalty.

3

Free support managers from the load. Messages with answers to frequently asked questions, training materials, letters about successful registration or order confirmation solve most of the customer questions and make the work of your employees easier.

4

Increase company income. Automatic mailing can be used as one of the stages of the sales funnel. For example, send an offer to renew a subscription 2-3 days before the end of the current one, inform about promotions in beauty salons, restaurants or discounts on products from your favorites, remind about collected but not paid carts on the site.

What should not be automated

The introduction of a CRM system, chat bots, and automatic mailings relieves managers and marketers. Instead, they can communicate with customers in situations where automation does not work, for example:

If necessary, help the client make a difficult decision to purchase an expensive item or service.

In solving controversial problems and complex tasks, for example, when there are problems with the system or when a client has a problem with a purchased product.

When dealing with objections: the ability to read the emotions and mood of your interlocutor is important here.

What are the disadvantages of automation?

1

Lack of customization:
Despite improvements in technology, automated systems cannot yet fully adapt to the unique needs and situations of each customer.

2

Potential reduction in engagement:
The user may stop communicating if he feels like a robot is talking to him.

3

Risk of irrelevant messages:
Systems may automatically send messages that are not relevant to the customer's current needs or interests.

Which mailings to automate and why

Welcome message after registration.

Personalized welcome message from Zapier

Product onboarding The newsletter can tell you how to use the product or service that the client purchased. It’s better to set up a chatbot that will tell you how everything works.

Missed call. If the manager has not reached the client, you can automatically send a message in instant messenger or by mail with an offer to contact him in a convenient way.

Notifications about the status of the purchase (waiting for payment, the order has been placed, the product is on the way).

Ulta Beauty Order Status Email

NPS surveys. They can show how loyal customers are to the company and whether they are willing to recommend its products or services. NPS surveys help retain current customers - it’s more profitable than attracting new ones.

Survey template from Net Promoter Score

An example NPS follow-up question with multiple-choice from Masterclass

Online shopping cart abandonment is a scenario of customer behavior in an online store. When a person visits a website, adds items to their cart, and then leaves without placing an order. This is a big problem for online stores, as about 70% of customers leave their cart abandoned. You can automatically remind about such products by email or messenger and reduce the percentage of unfilled carts.

Abandoned cart on WhatsApp - message from KFC in South Africa

Automatic birthday congratulations.

Reminders about webinars/broadcasts.

Free webinars and open lessons are great for selling. But there's a problem: without reminders, most people who register for the event end up not showing up. You can solve this with the help of reminders in email messengers. We recommend sending messages 24 hours in advance, 15 minutes in advance, 10 minutes after the start of the webinar.

Digests, lead magnets, useful materials about products.

Example of an OptinMonster campaign offering a lead magnet

The main thing to remember is that for any automation you need:

Developer time and resources to set up automated messages. Not everyone is ready to allocate these resources right away at the start, and sometimes you need justification to get a specialist’s time.
Proper planning of automatic chains. It is necessary to ensure that messages do not overlap each other, irritate customers or mislead.
Tests and testing of hypotheses. Automation does not always occur right at the start of a project. It may be worth testing different hypotheses and automating what brought results in several manual submissions. This will allow you to select both a segment and a relevant offer, and evaluate effectiveness in order to justify the need for automation.

Mailing personalization

Personalization in marketing is the use of user data (name, gender, location, purchase and browsing history) to create messages, chains and campaigns taking into account the individual characteristics of the target audience, and sometimes each specific client.

Personalized mailings use:

for additional sales (increasing the receipt) after purchase;

to optimize advertising letters for specific segments - for example, to use advantages and benefits that are important for a group of clients;

to increase open and click-through rates;

to build customer trust in the company;

to remind the customer about an abandoned cart.

Pros of personalization

Personalization helps the company send only what is interesting and necessary to the client. This improves user experience and brand trust:

1

Increases customer loyalty;

2

Improves mailing open rates;

3

Increases sales and profitability of the company;

4

Reduces the number of negativity and unsubscribes.

There is growing demand for AI and ML models that can not only produce results, but also explain the process behind them, which is important for regulatory compliance and building trust.

Personalization effectiveness

Personalization is a fairly labor-intensive process that requires development skills and knowledge of how to collect and analyze data. It is important to correctly calculate the ratio of resources spent on personalization. This can be solved with the help of special services, but additional investments will be required.
In addition, ethics and the quality and relevance of the data collected must be kept in mind.

The effectiveness of personalization is usually considered through some kind of conversion: into orders or micro conversions in terms of, for example, loyalty or through NPS, which is rarely measured.

In fact, we must clearly understand how much effort we put into creating personalized communications: how we maintain data, how we clean it, set up variables and dynamic content - what results all these actions bring.

It's easy to make mistakes during the personalization process:

If the user changes preferences or moves, previously relevant messages may begin to irritate.

If you put your last name and then your first name in phrases like “Hello, Smith John.” This may be the last message before the client unsubscribes from your mailings forever. Many will consider this disrespectful, which will lead to an unfollow or anger the person.

You should also be wary of hyper-personalized messages. The client may have a logical question: “Where did you get this information about me? Is she safe?” It is important to consider this when collecting data, do not forget about disclaimers, data security policies, and collecting consent to the processing of personal data.

Disadvantages and nuances of personalization

Violate privacy
Excessive data collection to create personalized offers sometimes raises privacy concerns.

Place high demands on data
Effective personalization requires high-quality and relevant customer information, which is not easy to provide.

Be difficult to implement
Creating truly personalized communications requires high-tech solutions and analytics, which increases costs and requires appropriate specialist skills.

Which emails need personalization

1

Segmented and dynamic
Segmented is when the database is divided according to a certain criterion, for example, those who abandoned the cart or have not made purchases for a long time.

Dynamic - when the content in a template letter changes depending on the user’s characteristics (name, gender, city).

2

Messages based on name, age, gender
This is the simplest level at which you can start personalizing your emails. Take care of the relationship between first name, last name and gender. Personalization by gender and age is needed not only to use verbs in the correct gender. It will also be useful for companies that have a clear division of their product line. For example, for men's and women's, teenage or age. Using a name at the beginning of each message statistically increases the open rate of messages by 20%.

We recommend that your mailings take into account not only the substitution of personal data, but also the interests and needs of the recipients.

Automation of personalized mailings should be configured based on what stage of the customer journey the user is at.

First of all, this is an onboarding chain, which includes mailings for those who made the first order, and for those who have just subscribed but have not yet ordered. At this stage, it is important to work hard on conversion and make sure that the communications of the next stages are not layered on top, otherwise the user will lose the feeling that you are leading him along the customer journey.

Another way is trigger mailings. Ideally, they should be built into CJM, but this does not always work out. Newsletters for subscription products can be super personalized: how much and where you spent the most time, the most frequent requests, the most frequently used functionality, and so on.

An underrated channel is transactional mailings: canceled or repeat orders, abandoned carts. We believe that such personalization is what the client needs first and foremost.

Why automation and personalization must work together

With over-automation, many customers are annoyed by impersonal messages with the sole obvious purpose of getting them to spend money on a product. Or communicating with a soulless chatbot instead of a real person.
In such cases, it doesn’t hurt to add personalization to increase the level of customer care.

But manual personalization only works at the inception of a brand. When the company begins to grow, and managers write each letter themselves, automation saves them from unnecessary work, saving the company time and money.

As a result, we conclude that we need to find a middle ground where automation and personalization will complement each other.

Each campaign needs to be customized taking into account the target audience, business vertical, price segment and current user data. And then test all of this.