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We’ve all heard the saying “your website is your hardest working employee”, but what if I told you that “hardest working employee” needs an assistant? Email marketing automation is easily the most important tool besides your website that you can use for online engagement. Think about this, automated welcome messages have a 50% open rate, making them 86% more effective than email newsletters. If you are still using the spray and pray method, you might be working harder to get the results you want.

You might think email automation is too complicated and it won’t work for you and your needs. But with today’s powerful email platforms, automating emails has never been easier.  Sure you need to develop content for each message and create a strategy to keep users moving through the automation process. But once created and the messages are sending, everyone benefits from it. You can deliver new product and service emails to users while you’re asleep. People that opened accounts with you can be put into an automation while you’re on vacation. The power and capabilities of automating emails is endless.

Setting up email automation is a very simple process.

Determine a series of goals, maybe you have three separate goals; auto loan growth, estatement enrollment, and new account welcome messages. Each of these goals should have its own track. Based on the data you have about your current account holders you can drop them into a track. Each track can be as many or few emails as you want. For example, if you have an account holder that is close to paying off their auto loan, they could be dropped into the auto loan growth track. They could get an email every week or month to remind them that you are ready to help them if they are in the market for an auto loan. Maybe some of those emails even have an offer to entice them to get a new auto loan with you.

Email automation is a great tool that can provide fantastic results.

But adding personalization to automated emails can take that one step further.  Adding personalization to the perfectly timed email can having amazing results. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. Adding personalization is one the most simple things you can do. Even if you don’t start automating some emails, you should have some form of personalization in your email messages.

The key is to start small, develop some clear goals, and test.

You constantly change content, images and other information on your website, email marketing messages should be no different. Try wording things different, add emojis in the subject line, add as much personalization as you can without it seeming like too much. Then check open rates, clicks and any other information you can get your hands on. Once you find that perfect balance of automation and personalization, sit back and let the work happen on its own.