Article Featured in David Beard’s Weekly Sage CRM Blog – May 26th, 2021
Email Marketing Automation – Customer Lifecycles (Part 1)
Q: What is the most important objective for email marketing in the coming year and why?
A: Timing emails with content that is relevant to where the prospect or lead is in the sales cycle.*
Every business has a unique customer and sales lifecycle. Before considering automation, the first step is to map out this lifecycle using your preferred email automation tool or software. You need to understand both your sales process and, more importantly, how your customers make purchasing decisions. This allows you to plan your email timing around a typical customer engagement or sales process and determine the best opportunities to send emails—such as newsletters, promotional communications or post-purchase transactional emails—that align with your overall marketing strategy.
In figure 1 below, a hypothetical campaign to 2,000 customers maps an engagement lifecycle over an 18-month period. For illustration, four typical touchpoints or “phases” are highlighted as opportunities for manual or automated intervention. These phases could include welcome emails, real-time cart abandonment reminders or targeted campaigns with product recommendations to drive business growth. Leveraging marketing emails in a carefully timed series can enhance customer relationships and nurture prospects into loyal buyers.
It is important to note the two lines in the illustration: the green line represents the natural cycle of user response when an email is sent to an unqualified list—typically trending downward. The objective is to identify the orange line—those who are genuine prospects. An effective email marketing campaign narrows the gap between the green and orange lines using techniques such as list growth, management and segmentation. This is where automation tools, email marketing workflows and automated emails help you deliver content at precisely the right time.
Fig 1:
To highlight the potential role of automation in a lifecycle (sales or customer engagement), fig 2 below explains each of the 4 phases from fig 1 in more detail. You can see that there is an opportunity to automate during each phase – from the initial newsletter/welcome programme introduction, through to promotions during the reactivation phase, through to upsell or cross-sell
To further illustrate automation’s role in the lifecycle, figure 2 explains each of the four phases from figure 1 in more detail. Each phase presents an opportunity for automation—from the initial newsletter or welcome program, through reactivation promotions, to upsell or cross-sell offers as the customer relationship develops. Automation workflows allow you to streamline these phases using prebuilt or easily customized email templates with drag-and-drop editors, delivering them alongside relevant marketing emails or SMS updates.
The key is to identify these phases before generating automated content. Whether you are sending emails focused on cart abandonment or timely post-purchase follow-ups, defining your email list and segmentation rules in advance ensures each email is impactful and increases engagement.
A final point: figure 2 also highlights the necessary support activities that accompany an automated process. There will always be a need for manual, human oversight, regardless of whether your campaign is automated. While marketing automation tools are powerful, real-time monitoring and adjustments help optimize open rates and conversions, especially when integrating social media activities or other marketing tools. This blend of manual oversight and automation ensures a seamless and authentic customer experience.
In the second part of this section on lifecycles, we will highlight the complexity of combining automation with basic segmentation techniques.
Email Marketing Automation – Customer Lifecycles (Part 2)
In a previous post, we explored a hypothetical customer lifecycle and mapped four stages that a customer might move through. However, for email marketers, the customer journey is rarely that linear.
Your automation campaigns must be able to handle varying levels of complexity and match diverging customer engagement paths with the right content. By tailoring your automated email marketing program to adapt to these variations—such as abandoned cart reminders, special post-purchase communications or unique marketing campaigns—you can strengthen customer relationships and address prospects’ distinct needs.
Let’s take an example.
Suppose you have one email subscriber base. These addresses may originate from prospects who signed up via your subscription page or from customers who registered after a purchase. Both groups receive the same welcome emails. However, subsequent messaging must change:
- Prospects want information that guides them toward a purchase, so you need a conversion-focused email with relevant content and messaging.
- Customers want information that reinforces their decision to buy and highlights the benefits of related products. In this case, a retention-focused email with further information on the benefits of additional purchases is appropriate.
Below is an example* of how an automation campaign can become increasingly complex when including both customers and prospects, using basic segmentation. This diagram also demonstrates how marketing software—such as email marketing software combined with automation tools—can help you organize a wide variety of automated emails. You might include content like product recommendations or cross-sell offers, nurturing your email list in different directions.
The key takeaway is this: the pre-planning phase is the most critical and time-consuming aspect of email marketing automation. Even if you choose not to implement an automated program, simply going through the process of defining “who are my customers and who are my prospects” will significantly increase the ROI of your email marketing. Whether you use drag-and-drop email templates or more advanced automation tools, clarifying the segments within your email series ensures every email resonates with the right recipient.
*Source: eCircle
