Mapping the buyer’s journey helps businesses stay relevant and personalize the campaigns
For most businesses, the buyer’s journey is an important aspect of planning marketing campaigns. Why? Because that’s how you can send a relevant message at the right time to the right person and increase your conversions. Sending personalized messages manually to the hundreds of subscribers on your list can be quite a daunting task, which is why you need to automate your campaigns.
Here are the different automation emails that every business should send to their prospects based on their buying stage and their action.
Welcome or onboarding emails
This is your first ever contact with the prospect, which happens when they share their email address with you. You will need to make them feel welcome, set the expectations for the future and motivate them to provide their personal information that would let you send better and more relevant emails. The email series will include the welcome email, followed by an email that informs them about the products or services and ending with an email seeking their content preferences.
Lead nurturing emails
This is the second stage, where the leads are nurtured via emails. This is when you begin creating awareness of your business among the prospects and convincing them to purchase from you. You will keep sharing the latest and upcoming updates about your offerings with them via newsletters. You can also share new blog posts with the prospects. At this point, you need to see which users are interested in receiving emails from you.
Sales/promotional emails
The third stage is when the leads are well-versed with your business to the extent that they are ready to make up their mind. The idea is to build trust at this stage. Use promotional emails such as limited time offers, discount coupons etc. to get customers to buy from you. Some of the best email activities that you can conduct at this stage include sales announcements, event invites, and holiday offers to name a few.
Post-purchase emails
The job does not end at purchase; you need to ensure that the customer will return to you after the sales have been made. To build customer loyalty, you need to ask them for feedback, send loyalty emails or even opt for cross-selling opportunities. You need to observe the engagement rate at this point and redefine your email marketing strategy accordingly.
Re-engagement emails
If you find some of the people in your subscriber list dormant, before removing them from the list, send them re-engagement emails. You can motivate them to open your emails by sending content they would have missed out on. A follow-up email after the first re-engagement email will tell you whether they are interested or not.
Apart from these five automation emails, you have certain e-commerce industry-specific emails and behavior-triggered emails that you should send to keep the subscriber list active.
Wrapping up
It is no longer enough to send an email; you need to make sure your message is relevant and reaches the correct audience. This is why you need to adopt email automation for your campaigns so that the relevant message reaches the customer.
Learn about email automation in more detail and its relevance in current times with EmailMonks’ latest infographic: Email Automation in Different Buyer Stages.
Source: How to Plan Email Automation at Every Stage of the Buyers Journey
Kevin George is the Head of Marketing at
EmailMonks – one of the fastest growing Email design and coding companies, specializes in crafting email newsletter design templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free mailchimp templates. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and breathes ‘email marketing’. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing tips and best practices on his
email marketing blog.