What You Should Look For In An Email Automation Tool: Top 10 Things

Automating email marketing campaigns is becoming the choice of almost every marketer or marketing owner to save their time and effort. It helps in sending triggered-based emails based on the behavior and journey stages of their prospects. Automation makes maintaining email marketing strategies more accessible.

Different types of email automation tools or platforms are available with a varying range of features and functionalities. With so many choices, it can be a big challenge to decide which software will help you with effective outcomes. In this article, you will discover some important features that you must prioritize when finding or selecting your email automation tools.

Benefits Of Email Automation Tool

Automating email marketing strategies and tactics helps grow your business with a reduced investment of time and effort. You can develop and schedule campaigns in advance based on the particular triggers, recipient actions, or rules. This not only saves time but improves productivity and conversion rate.

Automated software enables advanced segmentation and proper prospect targeting. By using an email automation tool such as Mailchimp, you can rest assured that no lead will go untouched as you will get constant follow-ups. It facilitates scalability and data-driven decisions.

However, you can always consider exploring alternatives to Mailchimp based on your business needs. Let’s discover 10 important features that you must consider when choosing an email automation tool to make your tasks manageable.

Email List Management

Just like all other marketing campaigns, managing an email list is crucial to email marketing success. You will require gathering a huge amount of data regarding existing and new customers. Moreover, you will need to organize, label, optimize, and keep your recipients’ emails clean. Skipping these tasks can mess up things resulting in outdated contacts and loss of files.

So, when you shop for an email automation tool, consider if it has sophisticated email list management abilities. Make sure it simply imports and exports contacts to CRM. This way, you can rest assured that your tool and CRM will work in harmony and keep all data updated. You can categorize your contacts based on the industry, prospect activities, lead source, time zone, and the funnel stage.

Segmentation And Customization

The real customization is not limited to composing one email for the whole group of people and modifying just certain details. For example, changing the title, industry, or name. Thus, to change the robotic emails closest to spam into pertinent messages that sound with several audiences, segmentation is important.

Performing this task manually on a large level is virtually impossible. Subscription points, engagement levels, and activity triggers are some segmentation factors that can be applied to email campaigns. Using this criterion, you can send customized emails that show the requirements and preferences of the audience. Automated campaigns develop strong customer relationships and loyalty.

Personalized Templates

Creating compelling subject lines and emails every time you send a message will take a lot of time. The problem is that salespeople don’t have much time for this work. This is where using a customizable template library comes in handy as it consumes less time in creating emails while providing more time for selling.

The pre-designed templates can be easily customized according to the required goal. Email automation tools have a variety of templates for various purposes, use cases, and events. You can create a proven email copy that can be easily customized based on your preferences and needs. You can save highly preferred emails or compose your template from scratch.

Dynamic Email Campaigns

Dynamic email marketing campaigns are highly flexible. These types of campaigns don’t need to end after the reply of the prospect, purchase, e-book downloading, or webinar registrations. These campaigns will take your communication with potential customers to the next level and convert them into engaging conversations.

Conventional campaign builders require manually including prospects in a new campaign after the completion of an existing one. Through dynamic email campaigns, you can refer to the previous actions of each prospect in a successive follow-up. The software will automatically redirect them to the campaign’s other branch or the whole new campaign.

Decent Sending Limits

The sending limits of emails can highly impact the level, speed, and success of email marketing campaigns. A decent sending limit helps in reaching the target audience without being confined. You can enhance your campaigns based on the growth of your audience and business.

A generous sending limit can also help with optimized engagement. The low sending caps will not allow you to benefit from optimal sending windows. This may decrease your campaign’s impact. Proper limits allow businesses to create email marketing campaigns that perfectly suit their unique strategies. There will be no compromise on the number of recipients.

Follow Anti-Spam Laws

Never underestimate the value of complying with anti-spam laws when examining sales outreach or email marketing. Complying with GDPR, CAN-SPAM Act, and CASL protects from possible legal outcomes. Adherence to anti-spam laws also helps in ensuring that your recipients consider your brand reliable and legitimate.

The unsubscribe button and a spam checker are important for the effectiveness of your email campaigns. Violating these laws can badly affect your brand’s reputation. So, to reduce the associated risks, ensure the selected email automation tool has a spam checker. It helps to scam a copy and subject line to determine if it has any spammy phrases or words.

Integrations

Seamless integration with sales intelligence, marketing, productivity tools, and other sales help in making the most of an email automation tool. You will ensure email strategy pulls from a synchronized and integrated data pool. A sales email platform when merged with analytics tools or CRMs can confirm data continuity.

No manual importing saves time by synching everything and reducing error possibilities. You will interact based on actionable insights and customer preferences rather than generic blasts. Straight access to website interactions or buy history can enhance the relevancy of emails and make them more targeted.

Email Editor

When choosing an email automation software or tool, always look for a feature-loaded and powerful email editor. This is because an enticing and high-converting email must deliver the content impactfully and appealingly. Make sure the tool has a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) option.

This option helps to see changes in real-time without stressing what will happen after clicking the send button. Confirm the availability of customization capabilities and a user-friendly interface. If you don’t have any HTML skills, you can use customization features. For example, adding videos, changing background colors, adjusting the layout, adding emojis, and other elements.

Comprehensive Reporting

The significance of data-driven insights for informing and improving email marketing efforts cannot be emphasized sufficiently. This is a reason why there is a need for software that provides complete analytics and described reporting. The reliable email automation tool provides all pertinent details and reflects real-time stats.

Alongside open rate, click rate, bounce rate, response, and unsubscribe, ensure the selected platform provides detailed insights into the campaign and team members’ performance. Through the reporting option, you can filter reports by campaigns, team members, date ranges, and campaign statuses.

Good Deliverability

This is the most important thing to consider in an email automation tool. Make sure it assures a good deliverability rate. Deliverability can affect the open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. This may eventually impact your business revenue. You may be unable to send emails to the target audience if you are sending a large number of emails as things can turn wrong.

The deliverability is based on different factors like an email list quality and design and content of emails. It is also influenced by the reliability of a sender domain, IP addresses, timing of email sends, frequency of email sends, and authentication protocols. A reliable email automation tool helps to monitor and enhance the deliverability rate over time.

Which Email Automation Tool Is Right?

Well, there is no definitive answer about which email automation tool you must use. The reason is that the selection depends on various factors. It includes your business type and industry, what you expect from a tool, and what special features you need to make monotonous marketing work more manageable.

Before using any new email marketing automation software or tool, ask all important questions. Do you require a new email marketing automation tool? Can you develop the required experiences? Can software perform various types of email campaigns and improve deliverability?

Conclusion

An effective email marketing automation tool helps in optimizing several crucial factors. It will provide you with the ability to measure and enhance the delivery of your emails. To have meaningful and valuable conversations with the target audience and forge deeper, you will require an innovative email automation tool.

Choosing the right email automation software or tool will provide you with the ability to customize your outreach and deliver comprehensive analytics. It will help you work smarter and ensure effective outcomes for your email marketing campaign. Thus, consider the crucial features mentioned above while purchasing your email automation tool.

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