A common misconception about email automation is that it is solely meant to save time by sending bulk emails. Marketers believe that it can save them from the tedious manual work they associate with email marketing.
In reality, the benefits of email automations go beyond mere efficiency. It can streamline communication through triggered, personalized email campaigns.
Automated email campaigns reach customers at precisely the right moment based on their actions and preferences. Our latest research found that in 2023, automated emails generated 42% of all email orders while accounting for only 2% of emails sent.
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In this article, we’ll show you what email automation is, why it’s beneficial for your business, and how to automate email marketing for outstanding ROI.
What is email automation?
Email automation is an effective way to communicate with potential customers because it allows you to send emails at specific times. Most email platforms have pre-made automated workflows, which send a sequence of emails over a specified period of time, instead of just a single email.
The biggest value of email automation is the ability to send relevant emails to the right people at the right time.
Automated emails include:
Order confirmations
Shipping confirmations
Birthday greetings
Abandoned cart notifications
Welcome messages for new subscribers
Product abandonment messages
Cross-sell and upsell messages
What is the difference between automated emails, bulk emails and drip campaigns?
Email automation sends emails based on specific triggers or actions, like signing up for a newsletter or abandoning a shopping cart. Bulk email campaigns involve sending the same message to a large group of people at once, like a promotional offer to all your subscribers.
Drip campaigns send a series of pre-written emails to subscribers over time, often used to nurture leads or onboard new users.
The main difference is in timing and targeting: automation is triggered by actions, bulk is sent to everyone at once, and drip is scheduled over time.
This illustration explains an email automation workflow where an abandoned cart triggers a sequence that checks cart value, then sends either an SMS with a discount or an email reminder, leading to a purchase.
Automated emailing is a godsend to time-strapped marketers and business owners. Here are several great reasons to automate your emails:
Save time
That’s a no-brainer — you can save time by sending automated emails to many subscribers at once. So, there’s no need to do the same tasks for every individual subscriber. And the best thing is that you can still personalize your content.
Make the most of email marketing
You can create automated email workflows to communicate with as many subscribers as you want, at any time you prefer. This way, you can get sales from the top to the bottom of your funnel even with a one-person marketing team.
Increase customer retention
Email automation is a great way to rejuvenate the bond with subscribers who haven’t opened your emails or bought from you in a while. This is done with automated win-back emails, messages designed to entice passive recipients to re-engage.
Build great relationships with customers
“Hey, we remember you — here’s a discount for an upcoming sale!”
Businesses have data about their subscribers in CRMs, so they can make automated emails super relevant. Many businesses do that well: automated emails get 300% more clicks than promotional messages.
While social media platforms excel at engagement and brand awareness, they generally lag behind email marketing in direct conversion metrics. The ROI difference alone is not the only metric that proves how email marketing outperforms social media:
The clickthrough rate (CTR) for social media platforms is 0.2% – 0.5%. Compare this to the 1.7% for scheduled emails and 5.7% for behavior-based (automated) emails
The conversion rate for social media is 0.02% – 0.04% while email is 0.07% for scheduled campaigns and 1.99% for automated messages
They generate nearly 4x better conversions than campaigns. While only 1 in 20 campaign email clicks lead to purchases, automated emails convert 1 in 3 clicks, increasing to 1 in 2 for welcome and cart abandonment emails.
Now, to summarize the benefits: if email marketing is your best bet for growth, then sending automated emails accelerates this process.
Automating email sending is easy thanks to email marketing platforms. The idea is simple: create a campaign and set up a trigger (a predefined event) that’ll activate automated sending when the event happens.
Let’s consider a welcome email automation. It’s a campaign where the trigger is an act such as signing up for a newsletter — a must-have email automation for ecommerce stores.
Here’s how to automate email sending with a welcome email automation flow:
An IP pool is a collection of IP addresses used by multiple senders to distribute email traffic, ensuring high deliverability and maintaining a strong sender reputation.
You’ll need a list of subscribers to send automated emails to — it can be built organically with signup forms. Segmenting your list is crucial for sending targeted, relevant emails. Some key ways to segment include:
Behavioral segmentation: Group subscribers based on their actions, such as past purchases, browsing history, email engagement, etc.
Psychographic segmentation: Segment by interests, values, attitudes, and lifestyle
Occasion-based segmentation: Group subscribers who buy during certain holidays, seasons or events
4. Set up an automation trigger
A trigger is an event or condition that will activate the automated campaign (this includes a newsletter signup, an abandoned cart, a subscriber’s birthday, a lack of engagement for X days, etc.)
Make sure to regularly review your email performance metrics and make any necessary adjustments to your automations in order to optimize them.
7. Avoid over-automation
Start by creating one automation and gradually add more as you gain experience.
8. Leverage email automation features
Platforms like Omnisend offer a wide range of powerful features to improve your email automations:
Omnichannel workflows: Combine multiple channels like email, SMS, and web push notifications in a single workflow
Pre-built workflows: Get up and running quickly with pre-built messages, subject lines, and workflow settings
Automation splits: Tailor special offers and incentives for multiple personalized messaging paths within a single workflow
A/B split testing: Test different channels, incentives, or subject lines to see what drives the most conversions
Built-in message reports: Track sales and engagement data to optimize workflows without leaving the Automation Editor
Automation reports: Deep-dive into each workflow’s performance to compare different channels and track customer conversions
Advanced reporting: Analyze aggregate workflow revenue and engagement data to see your best performing automations
Leverage 3rd party data: Easily build custom workflows using custom events and data from 130+ integrations
Conditional content blocks: Add and show certain email content blocks to only selected audience segments
Personalized recommendations: Cross-sell with dynamic product recommendations tailored to each customer
Setting up email automations might sound complicated, but using the right tool makes it simple even for beginners. Automate your emails! Start free!
Tutorial on how to automate emails like a PRO
Here’s a quick overview of a welcome email automation setup if you prefer to learn with videos:
As the video shows, the most time-consuming task is to create the content for the automation email. Still, you can do that fairly easily thanks to our drag-and-drop email builder. Most email automation platforms have this feature.
Having learned how to automate sending emails, let’s look at the most popular email automation tools.
Email automation tools
In this section, you’ll find five tools for automated emailing that could be used to sell, nurture, and inform your subscribers.
Omnisend is an easy-to-use email automation app for ecommerce stores that’s highly rated across platforms. It allows you to take care of the five automation steps — from building an email list to creating email automation workflows — thanks to a simple interface and a drag-and-drop flow editor.
With Omnisend, you can automate all ecommerce email flows that online stores send to customers:
Omnisend has a free-forever plan with unrestricted features and 500 monthly emails.
Paid subscriptions start from $16/mo for the Standard plan and $59/mo for the pro plan. Automation is available in all plans, so Omnisend is the most affordable and powerful tool for automating emails, considering all the features.
Save time with automated emails and boost your revenue
HubSpot is a top marketing automation platform that focuses on customer journey management and conversions, so it’s a good option to automate repetitive marketing tasks. The platform includes a built-in email marketing automation app that collects subscribers’ info from the CRM.
Pricing
HubSpot is a package deal, so you get the CRM and lots of additional marketing features. The plan with omnichannel automation starts at $890/mo, while the simple marketing automation starts at $20/mo per seat.
Salesmate is a powerful yet easy-to-use CRM with email marketing software. It lets you set up automated emails based on certain triggers, such as, when contacts enter a specific stage in the sales pipeline or when deals reach a certain milestone. You can also use Salesmate to segment contacts into groups and send out personalized messages based on their interests. With its drag-and-drop email builder, you can easily create stunning emails and campaigns tailored to your target audience.
Pricing
Salesmate pricing starts at $23/month per user for the Basic package.
Automation Journeys are available as an add-on, starting from $30 for 1,000 contacts.
Constant Contact is a beginner-friendly, complete emailing automation platform. You can build your email list from scratch thanks to website signup forms, manage subscribers easily, and create email flows with drag-and-drop tools. An integration with Facebook and Instagram ads is available in case you need to find clients on social media.
Pricing
Pre-built automations are available in the Standard plan, which starts at $35/mo for up to 500 subscribers.
The Premium plan, which starts at $80/mo for 500 subscribers, has a custom automation feature.
The Lite plan, starting at $12/mo, only offers automated welcome emails. However, the final cost depends on the number of contacts.
ConvertKit is a powerful email automation tool that focuses on solutions for content publishers like bloggers and course creators. Thanks to advanced targeting features, you’ll be able to send the right content that feels personalized to every subscriber. Premade automation email marketing flows for creators like online course subscriptions are also a great feature.
Pricing
Creator and Pro plans cost $15/mo and $29/mo, respectively, and they both enable email automation. The pricing is for 300 subscribers, and it increases as your email list grows.
Campaign Monitor is a great tool to create automated email flows for marketing agencies. The platform has multiple users, role permissions, branded email templates, and great signup forms. All the essentials like a drag-and-drop builder and reporting are great as well.
Pricing
The Lite plan starts from $12/mo. It allows email marketing automation to 500 subscribers. However, the Lite plan limits you to 2,500 total email sends.
The Essentials and Premier plans, which start from $29/mo and $159/mo for 500 subscribers, respectively, offer unlimited email automation flows.
Email automation examples
Here are seven automation email examples that real businesses sent to their subscribers.
1. Welcome email
Automation trigger: Subscription to a newsletter
Also called a welcome series, a welcome email is a message sent to greet new subscribers or customers. It’s a great chance to introduce your company and score sales, as 48% of welcome emails get conversions.
“All of our automated emails have proven to be beneficial. Once you set them up and let them run, we’re generating income from them with minimal effort.”
Jason Slattery, Director of Marketing at B-Wear
Here’s an automated email example showing this marketing flow in action from B-Wear, a clothing store. The email gets new subscribers started with a code for a free graphic tee and invites to explore the latest collection (a good idea to encourage buying).
Email automation success story
B-Wear’s welcome email offering a 15% discount helped increase revenue per email by 390%. In total, all of their email automations garnered a 43% conversion rate.
This email automation workflow is activated when a registered customer adds a product to their shopping cart but leaves without buying. The goal is simple: remind them about the abandoned product and motivate them to complete their order.
Automation trigger: Being an unengaged subscriber for X days
Automated re-engagement emails (also called win-back emails) are sent to subscribers who haven’t interacted with their messages within a predetermined period of time. Some subscribers become unengaged at some point, so engaging them is a way to retain them.
H&M has a good re-engagement automation email example. The brand makes the value proposition clear with a large headline, which is an effective way to attract attention.
4. Product abandonment email
Automation trigger: Visiting a product page without buying
The product abandonment workflow is sent to registered visitors who viewed products and left without buying. It’s one of the best email automation ideas you could use to offer a second look at products that customers might be interested in.
This example from Rael was sent to a visitor who checked out a face sheet mask kit:
This email automation workflow is basically a receipt because it summarizes order details for customers. A typical confirmation includes product info, shipping and billing details, and a link to tracking pages if available.
Crocs gives us a good illustration. Not only does this automated email example summarize the order, but it also gives the recipient links to customer support. This way, the brand shows that a customer can easily get in touch, which builds their confidence.
Automation trigger: X days passed after a customer placed an order
The final email in your automation series could be a product review email. This message should be sent when customers already had some time to try your product — a few days to a week after the purchase, for example.
Sundays presents a solid example of a product review email. It’s got a quick intro, a link to the review page, and a product image.
7. Product recommendation email
Automation trigger: Browsing or purchasing a related product
Product recommendation emails can potentially increase sales and engagement by suggesting items based on customer behavior. These emails highlight relevant products consumers might have missed, making them effective for cross-selling and upselling.
For instance, Columbia’s email creates excitement with a price reduction headline. The “you may also like” section cross-sells four shirt alternatives, with three discounted options creating urgency and value.
Besides the seven examples of automated emails in this article, you can set up more campaigns.
Email automation offers more than just time-saving bulk emails. It also helps to nurture relationships with tailored, timely messages.
By leveraging automated email campaigns, businesses can engage customers effectively, from welcome messages to abandoned cart reminders. With these tailored experiences, you’ll boost sales in no time.
Unlock the power of email automation and elevate your marketing with Omnisend
Email automation helps you send targeted, personalized emails to subscribers based on triggers or schedules. By automating repetitive tasks, you can nurture leads, engage customers, and save time.
Most email software allows basic automation, but tools like Omnisend offer advanced features and pre-built workflows for easier, more effective automation.
How to automate emails in Outlook?
Outlook offers basic automation through rules for sorting, forwarding, or replying to emails based on specific criteria. However, third-party plugins such as Omnisend offer advanced automation capabilities. This Omnisend plugin integrates with email providers, offering omnichannel workflows, pre-built templates, and advanced segmentation, which facilitate automated campaign management.
How to plan an email automation?
To plan an email automation, define your goals, triggers, and customer segments. Then, map out your workflow, including messages, timing, and channels. Omnisend’s pre-built workflows may already have an automation that suits your needs, which you can then customize further with drag-and-drop builder, saving you both time and effort.
How to trigger email automation?
You can trigger email automation with events like subscriber signups, purchases, cart abandonment, or website interactions. Start by defining conditions to initiate workflows. Software like Omnisend enables easy setup of triggers based on customer behaviors and advanced segmentation, allowing multiple triggers and conditions in a single workflow.
Bernard is the Sr. Director of Communications & Creative at Omnisend, with a passion for good research, helping ecommerce businesses with their marketing automation needs, and beating absolutely everyone in Mario Kart 64.
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