8 benefits of email automation you should definitely know

What’s email automation?

The robots are coming! Well, we won’t say they aren’t, but this isn’t exactly what we mean by email automation.

Email automation is pretty much what it sounds like – automating message sending for your email programs. However, it’s important to note that while email automation is similar to one of our favorite concepts – transactional emailing – there’s a difference between them.

Transactional emails (or triggered emails) are prompted by a specific user action at a point in the customer journey, like a purchase. Automated emails aren’t triggered by users and are instead automated based on meeting predefined criteria (like being sent at a certain time or date). Automated messages can be a part of a marketing strategy to engage customers. We’ll go into greater depth for examples later in the post, but some quick ones include automated onboarding emails, email newsletters, monthly surveys or feedback requests, emails celebrating subscriber birthdays, and account payment reminders.

Now that we’ve covered what it is, let’s review how email automation tools can help your email program processes.

The top 8 benefits of email automation

There are many benefits of email automation. To describe them, let’s say you’re building an app and want to automate email communications and create a better user experience. How does email automation help achieve your goal? What’s beneficial about it?

1. Make your workflow more efficient

Efficiency – along with optimization, this is probably one of your favorite buzzwords for development. When building your app, you want to reach as many people as you can, that too with consistency, but you want to spend all your time sending emails to every subscriber.

Email automation keeps your sending workflow consistent and simple. If you automate an email to be sent to all your potential customers, you’re saving time by creating and sending one email instead of 10, 100, or 1,000 individual ones. Because of that, you have more time to focus on other aspects of your email program and keep your users happy via effective email messages.

2. Create a better customer experience

Everyone loves positivity – and now that you have more time on your hands, you can focus on creating automated emails that give your users a positive experience.

Many automated emails come in the form of payment reminders and deadline warnings, but you can also create emails that create a better user experience, like onboarding series, incentives, and reminders.

Find what fits your product, and program your app to respond accordingly. You’ll be able to build better relationships, attract new subscribers and customers, and get more click-through traffic and higher conversion rates. This will also help in customer retention.

3. “Save” individuals who are losing interest

A third big benefit of email automation ties into the first two benefits and also into the concept of email marketing. Imagine, while running your email program, you had to reach out to every person who abandoned their cart, didn’t complete an action, or otherwise didn’t behave as expected. Would you want to individually find and email all these people? Of course, you wouldn’t.

Email automation in your app or product allows you to create one-size-fits-all messages to send to disengaged users who’ll probably unsubscribe or have lost – or are about to lose – interest in your brand. This way, if you want to send a re-engagement email, you have an automated email ready. Instead of wasting time tracking down disengaged users and tailoring an email for them, you can use re-engagement email as a form of marketing automation to interface with your customer relationship management (CRM) software and get right down to analyzing their feedback, solving their problems, and retaining their business or traffic.

4. Promote product awareness

Use email automation to optimize when and how often your email campaigns are sent. You don’t want to overwhelm your users, nor do you want them to forget about you. Strike the perfect balance by automating sends. This way, you promote your product awareness without being too extra.

5. Optimize costs

Emails take time and resources, from starting the email design to creating email content to actually coding the HTML email templates. Optimize your costs by automating your sends. This way, you can populate existing templates and send various emails when you want without having to monitor them at each step.

6. Improve email list segmentation

If you’re wondering what mailing list segmentation has to do with email automation, it works in a way that email automation provides the ability to segment your users based on their behavior patterns, attributes, and engagement level. This allows you to then send out automated emails based on these characteristics.

That’s right, divide your list to send emails to your target audience. This will increase your engagement rate, conversion rate, click-through rate (CTR), and open rate. What’s not to like?

7. Reduce errors

We know you’re probably not scripting individual emails to each of your users, but  there’s room for error, even if you’re copy-pasting or reusing templates. Use email automation to take the guesswork out of sending, map individual user variables onto relevant portions of your templates, and send right away.

8. Enable detailed reporting

Email automation services, like Mailgun, provide detailed logs and analytics that you can use to get on top of your email sending. How’s your email program performing? Do certain emails work better for your audience than others? How’s your deliverability? Stay on top of all these marketing metrics and more with email automation services.

How can I send automated emails via Mailgun’s API?

So, that’s all great, but how do you start sending emails like these? Hang tight, let’s dig into how to harness email automation to power your email marketing program.

The good news is that you can easily send automated emails through Mailgun’s API; the better news is it’s easy! Just follow the steps below:

1. Sign up for an account and add your domain. your domain!

2. Verify your domain by configuring the provided Mailgun DNS records.

3. Integrate Mailgun into your app with our powerful APIs (or SMTP, if preferred).

Learn more about Mailgun’s API. We’ve provided examples for sending messages with text and HTML, as well as setting a message delivery time below.

Sending a message with text and HTML parts:

Setting a message delivery time:

The above examples are simple processes to get you started. There are many ways you can customize your use of Mailgun’s API to create the email automation process you want. In no time, you’ll be sending automated messages with ease and precision.

Wrapping up

Email automation is a useful tool for senders to simplify the messaging process and create the best emails.

Once you’ve embraced email automation tools, you can easily begin to tailor them to your needs and make them work for you. It’s a winning situation that you can use however you need, whether you’re sending better email marketing campaigns or keeping your users up to date on your product – without any evil robots.

Ready to get sending? Let Mailgun superpower your email program for free today!