10 Ways Media Companies Can Use Email Automation to Generate Engagement

Transactional emails and marketing emails or promotional emails (like flash sales or coupons) are already quite popular with businesses as means of reaching their audiences with offers, keeping in touch, and providing updates (like an invoice) to their businesses.

However, they are grossly underutilized by companies around the world to add value to their organizations and complement their email campaigns.

This is because these businesses don’t use automated emails, or because they don’t do them right.

An automated email is an email sent from an organization’s or individual’s email service provider as a result of specific actions a particular user makes (or does not make) on the organization’s website.

They are also called behavior-driven emails or trigger emails.

With automated emails, you can aggregate customer data, and create an automated process to send real-time, personal messages that can unify all your marketing channels and build a closer relationship with your audience that fortifies your engagement, your retention, and loyalty if you do it right.

Too many small businesses are missing out on opportunities to grow their businesses by ignoring email automation or doing it wrong.

You could have a simpler time-based email automation campaign with just a few emails for everyone who fills out a survey, or a more complex automated email series made up of complex workflow diagrams with decision matrices determined by the actions of your audience.

The workflow will be different say, when they subscribe to the email list from some particular blog post, or if they register to be a VIP member.

We’ll be looking at 10 ways that media companies can send automated emails to generate and boost engagement.

1. Segment your list and send targeted emails

Studies have shown that segmenting emails can increase the click-through rate for businesses by 50% and has delivered a whooping 10x higher engagement for media company, Haymarket.

So, it is wise to set up multiple email automation campaigns based on the different ways potential users may interact with your various Digital Marketing touchpoints.

This ensures that you can send out highly targeted messages to your demographics. Interests are one of the best ways to segment lists for sending automated emails.

2. Make sure your emails are relevant to the receiver

It’s expected that you’d open an email from a family member before a marketing email.

This is because you will be certain that the email from family is more relevant to you than a marketing email.

In the same way, the more relevant the email you send to your audience is to them, the greater the level of engagement you will receive from them.

You don’t send out emails the latest on football to your British demographic; or emails on the latest in K-pop to your male wall street traders.

3. Nurture your leads

As social media becomes more raucous. Email increasingly becomes one of the best means of nurturing leads.

With automated email campaigns, a business could send out highly applicable messages that connect with their leads and move them along the various stages of the marketing funnel, depending on how and where the users interact with the various touchpoints.

4. Use email verification

Email verification removes wrong or non-existent addresses from your subscribers’ list, leaving the active ones.

Because of this, the choices, interests and priorities indicated by your subscribers will give you an accurate picture of what they want.

Therefore, your emails will contain information that they are interested in, the things they really care about. And because your email contains stuff your audience can relate to, you are certain that you will have a higher engagement.

5. Employ engaging welcome flows

A well-crafted welcome flow could boost engagement among your audience, it includes a welcome email as well as other tailored emails that are sent to people that sign up to your list.

You could include a coupon code, an active discount, or an offer to sign up for your free trial in your welcome flow

6. Add a birthday flow

Subscribers want to feel special, not like they are being dragged along in a huge trawl net.

So, it feels really good when your email can interact with them one-on-one. It hardly gets more personalized than birthday emails.

According to Experian data, birthday emails with offers drive 481% higher conversion rates.

7. Use relevant subject lines

We all check our emails regularly, even if we don’t open them.

Even though you increase your consumer touchpoints every time your email subject line and first line are seen, and the more touchpoints you get, the more likely your audience will recognize your brand, remember your name, and engage with you, it is important to have relevant subject lines as these increase your open rates and could drive your engagement exponentially. 

8. Include a practical call to action

Including a call to action is a key means of leading your prospects carefully down the funnel and guiding them across your brand touchpoints.

Your prospects could be directed to your landing page, social media pages, affiliate pages, and more depending on what trigger activity they interact (or don’t interact) with.

9. Let your audience breathe

Because email marketing automation does not require you to be on hand at every point in time, there is a tendency to overdo it.

But when that impulse comes, it is important to remember that as much as automated emails could drive engagement, they could also stifle it if you bombard your audience with too many messages.

Remember: less is more and moderation is key.

10. Work with regulation

You’ll never get any engagement if your emails don’t get delivered, or if you get slapped with a huge fine because you ran foul of regulations.

Stay up to date with regulations such as the CAN-SPAM and CASL laws.

At Maropost we helped hundreds of companies with their email marketing strategies. Big media companies like the New York Post, Hard Rock, and Haymarket Media chose us to design and implement their email marketing automation, increasing their customer engagement and generating more revenue.

Looking for some help? Check out our website and contact us to know more!

This content was written by Maropost.

About the author

Jacopo is Head of Marketing at Maropost, where he oversees the global demand and pipeline generation strategy to support the company’s continuous growth and success. He has more than 10 years of experience in the B2B SaaS Marketing sector with a focus on strategic growth and scalable demand generation.