What is Email Automation?

First, let's consider the conditions where there is no email automation in the company;

•       You have a form on your site for your customers to contact you, and your potential customer fills that form and sends it to you. However, it is possible for your employee to reply to the email after submitting the customer form, ignoring it, or forgetting to respond. Meanwhile, your potential customer is waiting for an answer, and besides, he is uneasy between his e-mail or not.
•       Accounting firms are required to request sales and purchase invoices from their customers every month. Sending mail to hundreds of customers every month in line with this request creates a great waste of time and consequently, problems and errors occur.
•       In a business system where reminder emails need to be sent several times, sometimes weekly and sometimes monthly, employees are unlikely to reach them manually and cost the company.
•       Regular reminders of important issues on the agenda are physically and psychologically tiring and disturbing for employees.
•       Forgotten, incorrectly prepared, sent to the wrong person, or sent on the wrong date can damage the company as well as reduce the motivation of the employees and indirectly damage the company as a result of human error.
•       The objections or requests of customers and potential customers to the people who send emails can sometimes be a distraction for the company.

• When someone signs up for your newsletter or completes a contact form, a confirmation or welcome email is sent. The confirmation e-mail reassures your customers or prospects that you have received their registration, and the welcome email helps to develop the newly established relationship.
•       If you want your emails to open, you can access your contacts' time zone and analytics data to determine the best time to send emails.
•       By targeting specific customers, you can only send mail to them and get healthier returns. For example; For a seminar to be held in Ankara, you can target your customers in Ankara and set the dates as information and reminders, and send emails.
•       As a result of minimizing the time allocated for sending emails in your company, you can direct your potential work volume to other areas and get maximum efficiency in other areas.
•       By minimizing the error rate in your standard emails sent every week and every month, you can make your communication with your existing customers more robust by increasing the probability of gaining customers.
•       By sending regular mail to your customers and potential customers, you can make them feel valued and make them come to you first when they need it.
•       By enabling users to unsubscribe from their email subscriptions at any time, you provide the feeling that they are not subjected to forced emails, but that they are informed according to their wishes and this increases respect for your company. Therefore, while your company and people who are interested in your business remain in your system, people who are not interested will unsubscribe and this will direct you to your real customers and take away from the waste of time.

• Email automation is mostly used in digital marketing. According to the marketing plan, customers and potential customers can be informed by sending emails that may include a promotion, update, campaign, reminder, and many other issues to the designated people in the marketing department. You can take a look at Marketing Mix to understand marketing deeply. The biggest benefit of doing these transactions with email automation is that you can see the analysis of how many people open emails and are interested in those emails. This enables you to define your target customers in your next email and increase your business potential with more accurate rates. It is very difficult to analyze emails sent without using email automation and to determine the accuracy of these analyzes. All of these make email automation an important part of marketing strategy implementation.
• If we consider the use of email automation in sales processes; There are various stages in the sales process. These processes are: The first meeting, proposal, and conclusion of the proposal. There are different titles in all of these processes. Email automation supports you here as a huge force. You can easily access the customer lists, mails, contact information or offers you want by separating them by date, customer type or many other filters.
• The accounting department deals with issued invoices and various payments and is a very busy department. Thanks to email automation, you can reach customers in the fastest way and get results by minimizing this density. A collection is made at the end of each month and the information of this collection is presented to the customers. When these processes are done manually, they can get confused, make mistakes, or overlook a customer. With email automation, the expected payment from the customer can be automatically reminded by e-mail at the end of each month and the works can be carried out properly without being victimized on both sides.
• In addition to customer relations, email automation strengthens communication in internal relations. For example, you can adjust the information that your employees care about, such as celebrating employees' birthdays and sending congratulatory emails on the system and make them feel that you have not forgotten them. It is easy to remember this information in companies with 5-10 people, but in companies with 50, 100, 500 or more employees, it is not possible to remember the birthday of every employee. By sending these congratulatory emails, you can increase the motivation of your employees and remind them once again that they are valuable. This will strengthen both the sincerity in the value the company gives to its employees and the communication within the company.
• Another usage area of ​​email automation is project management. Project managers can have many customers at the same time and can be involved in many projects at the same time. In direct proportion to this, many knowledge and research documents emerge. Project researches, project tests, and project deliveries of every client are not carried out in the same way and are not maintained on the same date. When project managers do these responsibilities manually, they may fail due to not being able to concentrate enough. Thanks to email automation, the information of each customer is kept on the dates set in separate places, and it is aimed to carry out the work faster by providing information, reminders, and updates without the need for project managers to do anything.

Your business needs email automation for many reasons. Ultimately, you can use email automation to nurture your customer relationships, gain new customer sales and turn your new customers into repeat buyers. Keeping in touch with your customers means they will think of you more often.

Email automation is an assistant and communication tool. We can record and manage all communications in the customer relationship life cycle. If we consider some items from this life cycle, these are;

•       Marketing
•       Sending to customers or potential customers emails
•       Analysis of emails
•       Sales
•       Projects
•       Surveys
•       Announcement of new product services and approach of customers

Email automation enables you to create corporate memory in relation to customers. It enables you to establish a strong bond between you and customers by offering activities that can range from activities for the masses to the individual.

According to a study, it was found that existing customers spend 69% more than new customers. Therefore, curbing your communication with your customer after the primary sale would definitely be a costly mistake. So after you make a sale, you can start an automated email campaign with your customers. You can lay the foundations of your next business deal and build loyal customers to your company by keeping your customers in the loop with the upcoming offers on your new and other products and services.

Here are a few points you should pay attention to in the emails you can send in order to keep your customers;

1.     You can thank you for the work they do with your company. 
2.     You can let your customers know when the products they purchase will arrive or how they can activate your services.
3.     You can check how satisfied they are with the products they have purchased with surveys.
4.     You can test if they need more help with your products and services.
5.     By sending a questionnaire prepared according to your customer's interests, you can request a review and shape your next service according to the results of this survey.
6.     You can attract your customers' attention by offering interesting and informative content as a "gift" without mentioning your company or services.