Using email automation, but not for your customers.
The automation of email’s to our customers is becoming more and more common across local small businesses, but have you thought about how you can apply this principle to other areas of your business?
Whilst you may not say ‘mastered’, you have a grasp on how to use programs such as Mailchimp or Active Campaign to send emails to your customer list. You may even have automated some of these. (If you haven’t, touch base and we can talk about setting this up.)
If you look at all the emails you send in a day, you may start to see some patterns that you could also automate, and this might not necessarily be to your customers.
Email automation can be used for so much more than just customer communications.
Some examples:
You may work in a publishing environment, and every week or month you send a similar email to contractors asking for submissions or perhaps even for invoices. This could be automated.
Perhaps you are a HR professional that has a similar set of emails you send to new employees. The first could be a welcome and introduction email, followed up by a FAQ email, followed up by a ‘first day’ email, and even a ‘how was your first week’ email including a quick survey. This can be set up to run on it’s own, based on the number of day delay you input.
For example, set FAQ email to send 4 days after welcome email, then set first day email to send 1 day prior to employee start day. By putting in time and effort on that automated sequence, employees are likely to get a higher quality email interaction with you, and yet you have actually decreased your work load.
Have you automated your first customer purchase follow up? Whether they buy in store or online, you could have a lovely thank you email that introduces them to you, your philosophy, complimentary products (for that sneaky extra sale) and your social platforms for further engagement.
Employee satisfaction surveys. We all get busy, and usually the first thing to fall off the plate are employee related, such as performance reviews and satisfaction surveys. If this was automated (perhaps once a month, once a quarter or even twice a year) it removes the risk of it not being done. Without any further work from you, the responses just start flowing in. (If you would like to talk about how you could manage those responses confidentially and outside of your inbox, send me a message.)
Meeting agenda submissions. That monthly management meeting requires early submissions to make it valuable, and you usually send out a similar sounding email every month, so why not get a program to take some of the load off. Management meetings set for the first Monday of every month? Automate the email to go on the last Monday of every month to give you time to collate responses and draft the agenda.
Event participation requirements. If you run similar events regularly, set up a robust event onboarding email flow that gives participants timely information. Again, spend the time setting this up once and then just let the program do it’s thing for every event after that.
Let’s get a bit trickier. Expand your abilities.
There are programs (such as Zapier) that can link programs to your email program. So perhaps you are a real estate that would like to send an email wrap up to your team once a week about what listings are still available. You could set up an automation that sends the data to your email platform, which then automatically sends an email once a week to the team containing this data. Think about the amount of time this could save!
Another nice one that uses linking programs is a social post wrap up. Most people would assume this is something you send to your customers, but I would actually advise against that in most cases. Instead, think about all the people that work with you/for you. Once a week, automate an email that sends out a list of the social posts that were published that week on your platforms, and ask your employees (often your biggest brand ambassadors) to share ones that resonate with them on their own social media. This is a great way to get a large reach organically - (i.e. free), and to keep them engaged with what the marketing team is doing as a whole. If you have actual brand ambassadors, either paid or otherwise, I would also include them in this email. You can’t assume that every post you publish is reaching every one of your audience members.
in small business you wear many hats. COmmit to using programs that streamline repetitive processes and give you back time.
In summary, a virtual high five to you for taking the time to learn how to use an email program for your customers, you are likely getting much better open rates than you would using Outlook and bcc’ing all your customers. (Spam filter red flag).
Now it’s time to maximise those learnings and save yourself some serious time and resources by seeing what else you can use that program for.
If this sounds exciting, but you don’t have the time to set up something new, let’s chat!