5 Essential Reasons to Deliver Results with Email Marketing Automation

Email marketing is evolving and still remains one of the most effective channels for running campaigns. Today’s customers want their email communications to be unique, tailored to their needs and behavior. There should be a mechanism for a marketer to be able to decide which email variant they want to send, at what time, and to whom without having to lose precious time and energy in repeating the same task time and again. That, In a nutshell, is Marketing Automation.

Why is Email Marketing crucial in any digital communications strategy?

There are countless statistics out there that underline the importance of digital marketing in modern business, good old email has a particularly rich vein of statistics to mine. For instance, globally, there are about 5.6 billion active email accounts (Statista, 2019), of which 3.9 are used daily (Statista, 2020). Marketers that use segmentation and targeting note as much as a 760% increase in revenue. (Campaign Monitor, 2019), making email not only cost-effective but also highly profitable. 

Whilst email has largely stayed the same from a technology perspective, the devices we use to open and read emails have shifted dramatically. Mobile opens account for 46% of opens (Litmus.com 2018). This means that for a significant percentage of us, we are still checking and reading emails on the go and on a scale that beggars belief.

Understandably, the most opened emails relate to hobbies (MailChimp, 2018), this indicates that we are still happy to take time to look into areas that interest or engage us. What’s more, relevant communication is welcomed by recipients. GDPR in Europe has forced senders to raise their games and make sure that what they are sending to their customers is engaging, relevant, and most importantly of all, explicitly wanted by their customers.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing allows marketers to create personalized content and target it at relevant audiences. Effective email marketing tools enable users to:

	Build cost-effective customer journeys.
	Optimize time and budget.
	Reduce IT dependency and drive higher ROI.
	Automate repetitive tasks.
	Easily merge data with creative content.
	Reach a global audience.
	Generate website traffic.
	Collect feedback through surveys.
	Establish authority, drive high customer engagement, and build strong customer relationships.
	Increase brand awareness.
	Utilize high conversion rates.
	Work within the law (for example, GDPR)

Underestimate the power of email marketing at your peril. It is still and looks to stay the most cost-effective channel available to marketers. This is why buying the right platform for your marketing operations is still one of the most important business decisions to be taken.

What is Marketing Automation?

Apart from the weekly newsletters or the email campaigns you create and send to a whole list of people in a go, manually sending emails after every action a user takes is an inefficient and tedious process. Marketing automation is the solution. It lets you execute, prioritise, and efficiently streamline your tasks. As a marketer, you need to formulate strategies around the entire buying process of a customer, and what offer or messaging resonates with them and gets them to purchase. 

And, marketers rely on email marketing to generate results. Automating your email campaigns will help in sending timely, personalised, and hyper-relevant to the reader. Let’s look around the reasons to leverage marketing automation in your Email Campaigns.

5  Reasons to Leverage Automation Features in your Email Campaigns

• Lower the cost of marketing operations. Repetitive tasks cost money. Investing in a marketing automation platform gives your organisation a chance to all but eliminate tasks that marketers find themselves doing over and over regularly. If you’re doing something often, it is a candidate for automation through using templates, clever content connectors, and hyper-personalization.
• Improving customer experience through consistency. Time is a precious commodity in this day and age. If you provide a regular piece of information to your customer, for instance, a loyalty card balance, employing automation methods will create a consistent, reliable method of conveying that information. Automation allows communication throughout your customer journeys and goal-based marketing activities to be implemented quickly and easily. This means that when you introduce a new touchpoint with your customers, you can make their lives simpler by providing them with consistent experience while also introducing a new service.
• Improved data quality through consistent targeting and tracking- Data is a marketer’s currency, and good data-quality is essential for better reach and providing an enhanced customer experience. With automation, you can send a series of automated email variants of the same communication to various customer segments based on specific behavior, making the marketing strategy scalable. With the improved data collection, the system can be developed to specifically know what message to send next without additional demands on marketing resources.
• Enrich jobs by reducing the number of repetitive tasks- Repetition isn’t necessarily the enemy of creativity. Playing a musical instrument, for example, relies on practice and repetition to engage muscle memory and free the mind to focus on what you want to play rather than how to play it. However, it is clear to anyone that fulfillment is not born of monotony. If you make it easier for your marketers to avoid monotony and reduce the number of obstacles to fulfilling their objectives, they will feel more productive and ultimately more successful. Teams less burdened by technical obstacles are happier and much more likely to shine.
• Free up your marketing team to pursue innovation- At its core, marketing should be about innovation. It is about putting yourself in the customer’s shoes, understanding consumer behaviour, and adapting to new technology. With automation comes more time for your marketers to focus their attention on these core points and drive a deeper understanding of your customer and how your relationship can grow.

What is Unica Deliver?

So far, we have shown that email marketing automation is about creating a personalized customer journey with the least amount of manual intervention. To make this happen, you need a product that lets you seamlessly work with data and content in the same single UI and is easily integrated with many different channels.

Unica Deliver is a digital marketing solution that helps you provide seamless, personalized, and timely communication across channels, like email, SMS, and others. You can easily design your branded email templates, segment and manage your email list, nurture leads, and re-engage with your dormant clients. It is seamlessly integrated with other tools from Unica Suite like Campaign, Interact, and Journey.

Introducing Unica Deliver, Digital Marketing Automation @ Scale

Unica Deliver is a reliable, scalable, and seamlessly integrated digital messaging solution, providing timely and personalized communications across channels, including Email, SMS, and more.

If we drill into the statement in more detail, we begin to understand that the platform is:

• Reliable and scalable – the platform is comfortably capable of sending tens of billions of emails per year 
• Seamlessly integrated with the rest of the suite… there are no middleware components to confuse customers or consultants. It just works – automatically and without any fuss, as you’d expect
• Channels. We’re building an ecosystem with more and more digital channels being added as quickly as we can make that happen.

You can learn more about the scalability and the multichannel integrations features that Deliver ecosystem offers in this introduction video on Unica Deliver.

How does it work in Deliver?

We start off by creating our Campaigns and Offers in Unica Campaign and think through the content and personalization needed. Next, we define marketing data by building a Campaign flowchart to create a Deliver output list.

Next, we import the content we need into Unica Deliver.

The next process is creating a simple Deliver communication where we drag the imported content into zones and build rules to define what is displayed to whom.

The next part of the workflow is to create a mailing to tie the output list table to the communication and then execute the mailing. Mailing schedules can be linked-to campaign flowcharts, so messages are sent as soon as the data is ready.

And finally, the responses are fed back into the system tables, which allows reports to run, allowing you to analyze your campaign results.

So to simplify the picture,

•  A Campaign flowchart creates an output list table or OLT
•  An email designer creates a communication
•  A mailing is created to link the OLT to the communication 
•  and is sent out to recipients 
•  And finally, contact and responses data are fed back into Reports to show campaign results

Once this basic setup has been completed, automation opportunities should be explored for repeating communications. There are a number of ways of working in Deliver to suit different user types.

Drag and drop rule builder functionality allows users to get moving quickly with the tool. As users become more confident, they can utilise advanced scripting, which allows users to build more complex rulesets such as nested conditional rulesets. All of this is seamlessly integrated with the Unica Platform in a single Unica Interface.

Why is Deliver a game-changer for the Unica Suite?

Unica Campaign and Unica Deliver work together in single-step, seamless integration. Everything you need is contained within a single UI. There are no data extractions or transfers to worry about. Responses are collected directly in the platform, so there are no middleware components to create additional points of failure or complicate technical support processes. This means that marketers have more time doing the things that matter and not fighting battles with technology.

• Free Onboarding and Deliverability Services:

Unica provides access to an email industry-recognised team that collaborates across the industry to understand ISPs, email clients, and how to get your emails into the inbox and stay out of the junk folder. Many other providers charge for this service, but we provide it for free. The importance of your inbox placement should be taken as a given, and when you work with us, we expect to guide you wherever we can.

• Email overages

Unica Deliver does not charge overages to our customers, allowing them to budget effectively with no hidden surprises. If you go over your entitlement, our account managers will work with you to help you budget effectively next year not to blow the budget unexpectedly.

• Volumes

Unica Deliver was designed from the ground up with high volume sending in mind with many of our competitors struggling to get close to the numbers we can send.

• Flexible Emails Length

Unica Deliver is capable of creating templates that can quickly and easily represent one to many relationships. Do you need multiple email templates to handle different numbers of rows? With Unica Deliver, you can consolidate all of these templates into a single template that will vary the number of rows depending on the number of records you need to display.

• Stability

Unica Deliver is designed for dependability. With a 99.9% target uptime target, Deliver is there whenever you need to send that critical communication out.

If you take the time to automate, you will be more profitable from the efficiencies realised through lower marketing operations costs. Your subscriber base will be happy with a consistent look and feel to your communications. Your data quality will be enriched and standardised, allowing for a greater breadth of analytics. And most importantly, your team will be happier and more innovative.

In a nutshell, here are five reasons to leverage marketing automation features:

• Lower cost of marketing operations
• Provide a consistent service to your subscriber base
• Improved data quality through consistent targeting and tracking
• Free up your marketing team pursue innovation
• Enrich jobs by reducing the number of repetitive tasks

Now you can Deliver More 4 Less, contact Unica for more information on how we can take your digital marketing strategy to the next level. You can deep dive into the Webinar on Unica Deliver to gain more insights into the product.