We've discussed the automations that form the main support of an email-based customer acquisition and conversion system. Automations depend on the constant, consistent, and pre-qualified acquisition of new names for the main list of the online business.

If everything goes OK with your acquisition program outside of email (your print, social, search engine, and digital campaigns), and you get a lot of names going through your automations, you may be satisfied with your results and that would be the end of your work with your email setup.

However, if you find yourself wishing that you could do more with email, then you open the door to email campaigns.

Automations are designed to be 'fire, optimize, and forget' types of things. There is no rule that states you cannot constantly tinker with your email automations. However, the main idea behind email automations is to generate 'free revenue' that comes into the store without you having to worry about it. Of course, reviewing the performance of automations every quarter (or every month) makes sense. You can catch problems as you find them and fix them. But overall, automations are meant to run year-long in the same state so you worry about other things.

Campaigns, on the other hand, are your 'email act of will.'  You send them when you want to, to as many or as few profiles in your list as you wish, and with whatever message you decide.

When you have an email automation properly setup, there are several cases where campaigns make sense:

1. To promote occasional (and I emphasize, occasional) sales on your site.
2. To highlight products in your catalog (for example, new additions)
3. To support new or existing print, social, or digital advertising campaigns
4. To reinforce and promote seasonal promotions (summer, holidays, Christmas, etc.)
5. To announce back-in-stock or soon-out-of-stock campaigns
6. To announce and correct errors in shipping, mislabeled pricing, etc.

These are very specific areas where campaigns can complement email automations and provide real value to an email marketing strategy. This approach also provides a structure for email cadence, which depends, in great part, on the number of SKUs and on the ability of the brand to have a story to tell about its products.

A store with a large number and variety of SKUs can maintain a cadence of weekly emails by highlighting individual areas of the catalog that are either in need of a boost or which have received new additions. If you are constantly adding new products to your catalog, then your weekly email is your communication to your customers of those additions. Depending on what you sell, your chances of getting sales from those communications is high.

If you have a small number of SKUs (less than 20 products) and your catalog does not increase on a regular basis, then a weekly newsletter would not make sense if it is focused only on the specifics of the product: if you highlight how your main product solves problem Y to the profile list that is already convinced, then you are wasting your effort.

If a segment of your list is simply not engaged with that problem or the solution you provide, then you need to be very creative about how to present the problem and its solution so the emails have value in their ingenuity and presentation as much as for the actual value of the product.

In other words, if the only message your brand can generate is related to the actual qualities of the product and nothing more, then weekly campaigns will be repetitive and will likely lead to unsubscribes. Unless you can come up with a story-based approach that builds on the product to be more than the product alone, then you are better off relying on automations than weekly newsletters and can use campaigns for the purposes outlined above when they suit your email calendar.

What's a story-based weekly campaign like? Ask yourself: is your product like a screwdriver, or a swiss army knife? If it is a Swiss army knife, you would have little difficulty showing all the situations where your product would come in handy. Each one of those situations would be the subject of an email, for example. You could even ask your customers to show you how they are using the product, and put their contributions in your weekly newsletter.

But what if the product is more like a screwdriver? Then the number of situations where a screwdriver could be used (these may be humorous or just plain silly) may allow you to tell more stories about the product and highlight its features. They may not be real situations, but the idea is to engage people in the act of purchasing your screwdriver (which has only one function).

It's easy to abuse email campaigns. The need to enhance revenue every quarter is a huge driver for sending repeated, unwanted emails. If you have a small number of SKUs, you may be tempted to hammer the same point over and over every week or every month and hope that customers will finally 'see the light' about your product.

Maintaining the email campaign stream within the guardrails outlined above provides a useful story to tell about each email you send, and depending on what you sell, they should carry value for your customers. And they will complement your email automation setup.

However, not everyone in your entire list will respond to these emails in the same way. This is where segmentation plays a part. Campaign strategy should involve incorporating purchasing behavior and email response behavior into your segmentation. This will improve your deliverability numbers (your open and click rate) and if your message resonates, it will also deliver more sales.

And of course, the emails should be sent with an awareness of each other, so they do not pile up in the customer's inbox. Smart Sending your campaigns helps keep the customer's inbox uncluttered and your messages top of mind when they arrive.

What is the role of automation in email marketing, and how (or if) should you use campaigns to reach out to our email audience? On this article, we discuss the uses of email marketing automation for an e-commerce business and how it can be complemented by weekly or monthly campaigns.

What is email automation and why should you use it?
The promise of automation in email marketing is 'free money.' By setting up a series of automations that catch your influx of customers as they come into your online store, you can, in theory, provide enough points of contact via email automation to manage the customer journey from 0 purchases to 2 or more purchases. Automations, as the name implies, are triggered when a subscriber meets a specific condition and is added to a pre-designed series of emails.

Pre-Purchase Automated Flows
The automations you can use to manage the customer journey usually are described below. These flows work together to turn customer interest into customer purchases. These are Pre-Purchase flows.

1. Welcome Flow: This is the flow that runs automatically when someone first signs up to receive marketing emails from the brand (a.k.a. a subscriber). Usually, it introduces a discount for a first purchase, talks about the brand to reinforce the special nature of the items in the store, and highlights a particular product as an example of how the principles behind the brand are applied.
2. Browse Abandonment: This flow runs if a subscriber looks through the products at the store but does not put anything in the cart or proceed to checkout. Usually, this is simply a reminder for a subscriber that a further action needs to be done.
3. Added To Cart: This flow activates if a subscriber places an item in the shopping cart but does not proceed to the checkout. This is a reminder that they found something of interest and that they need to act on it.
4. Abandoned Cart Flow: This flow activates if a subscriber places something in the cart and begins the process of checkout, but does not complete it. This is usually an invitation to take advantage of an offer (free shipping is the best tool for this), reminders of time-constraints for a purchase (taking advantage of an expiring offer, or the fact that popular items may go out of stock at any moment), and encouragement to take that last step.
   
   

Post Purchase Automation Flows
The flows described below tend to the relationship with the customer after a purchase. They are Post-Purchase flows.

1. Thank You Flow (First Purchaser Branch): This flow activates after the purchase is fulfilled. It thanks a first time purchaser, provides an incentive to return, and tries to make them feel special in some way (this is where branded graphics and copy play a part in delivering the promise of your brand by providing a context for the purchase). 
   
   Thank You Flow (Second time Purchaser Branch): You can take this opportunity to talk to someone who is on the brink of becoming a regular purchaser. What can you tell them about your store that will entice them to pay attention to your messages in the future? A lot of merchants simply add another discount as they do for the first time purchaser, but this may not give you a good chance to express your brand in what your email says and what it means to the customer.
   
   Both branches of the Thank You flow involve two messages: one that delivers the branded message and incentive, when needed, and another that asks about the subscriber's experience with the product. This is done as a quality control measure and should be focused on the customer's experience, not on the brand's need to find out whether they would like to buy more or not, or whether they found you via social media, or if they would be interested in buying some new product the brand is thinking about offering, or if they want to participate in a contest.
   
   The message of the Thank You Flow emails should focus on trying to understand the experience of the customer and nothing more. You can, however, use that interaction to request a review of the product, since that would allow the customer to express satisfaction or dissatisfaction. If the email is set properly, the customer will be directed to customer service if there is a problem, or redirected to a review-placement location if there is no issue.
2. Product-Specific Winback Flow: Say your company sells a 'star product'. When someone purchases a unit or more of the 'star product', this flow can activate and deliver a message that is specific to the use of the product. For example: how to use the product, how to take care of it, how other people use it (this is a good place for social proof). You can also encourage them to think that, because they bought one of your 'star products', they are now in a different category of customer: VIP, or Connoisseur, for example. The name of the customer category will be relevant to the type of product you sell and its function. Usually, this means they get some 'perks' that other customers do not receive.
   
   Your store can have many of these 'product specific' flows. However, you may find that it may lead to chaos in terms of managing them or keeping track of them. It is better, in our opinion, to have at most 3 of these flows, depending on the number of SKUs in your store. If you start with one and work with it, the results will guide you on how to add others if needed.
3. General Winback Flow: This is the flow for trying to bring back to the store those who have shown an interest in your emails and your website, but have not made a purchase at all, or have not made a purchase in a specific number of days (you can usually learn the average interval between purchases from your data - depending on what you sell and how long you've been in business). This is considered the 'last resort' flow in an automation setup.

The 7 flows outlined above would, in theory, take care of customers who are brought into the store via external advertising, SEO, word of mouth, social media, etc. To make the automation successful, the brand has to constantly provide a flow of new names into the system. Since the automations only work when someone becomes a subscriber, either via a purchase or via newsletter, the more emails are added to the system, consistently, the better chance of getting regular conversions from the collection of flows.

Naturally, there are standard automations like shipping and order confirmation emails, but those are assumed to exist separate from these 7.

Adding Campaigns To The Mix (for the win)
Once you have setup, and tested, your automations for an online store, you should be good to go. The next question is: what do you do with all the names that are accumulating in your database once they have gone through your automations? The automated flows can only activate if the customer does a specific action. Once they are used up, you will end up with profiles in your database that could be doing nothing if left on their own.

Targeted email campaigns are designed to solve this problem. They bring individuals from your database into action so they can be managed by the flows again, in the case of a purchase, or the Winback, in case they have fallen out with the brand.

What are good ideas for targeted campaigns? That depends on the number of SKUs in your store. If you sell 4 items, then constantly reminding your list to buy one or all of the four could be annoying. If you can realistically expect them to purchase more than once, then a monthly newsletter with anything new about the items, or selected social media driven stories about the use of the items, might make people purchase again.

If you have a large store with hundreds of SKUs, the newsletter's task is to offer a selection of SKUs to the people who are most likely to purchase them. Segmentation is the tools for selecting who is likely to purchase the items again. The success of these campaigns is heavily dependent on the correct assessment of how your customer views the product. If you sell items that are really meant to be purchased only once, then constantly asking people to buy them again will not work.

Repeat purchases are the result of need or desire on the part of customers, and using email campaigns to generate them and bring people back to the flows is one of the best uses of email campaigns that complements the 'free money' generated by the automated flows.

Establishing effective communication and nurturing a relationship with customers requires tact, respect, and a deep understanding of the value of the recipient's digital real estate. Here are 7 key things to keep in mind:
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1. The success of an email campaign significantly depends on how you manage your place in your recipient's inbox, which is a fiercely competitive space filled with numerous messages each day.
2. The process of managing a digital mailbox is compared to handling a physical one. While a physical mailbox gets cleared daily, digital mailboxes are attended to more frequently, with decisions being influenced by the sender's identity, the email's importance, and the recipient's mental state.
3. The digital mailbox, unlike the physical one, only allows for a single subject line to grab the recipient's attention. The inbox holder faces the decision-exhaustion similar to that of a physical mailbox owner, with unwanted emails ending up in the trash or being marked as spam.
4. Building a relationship with customers via email is a consensus-based process. The granting of consent to send emails does not automatically establish a relationship; instead, it signals consent to explore the possibility of a relationship.
5. Marketers often misuse consent by assuming it as an invitation to inundate the customer's inbox with emails. This mistake often leads to emails being ignored, deleted, or marked as spam, highlighting the fact that a relationship still needs to be built post-consent.
6. Building a relationship involves managing the frequency of messages and their content. The messages should be aimed at building a relationship, treating the recipient as a more evolved version of the sender, someone they are keen to learn about and understand better.
7. It's important to respect the recipient's inbox, modulating the frequency of messages to meet shared mutual importance. Treating the potential of a relationship as a test, rather than assuming that consent implies a direct trigger to sale, improves the odds of success.

Email marketing should be seen as an opportunity to create and nurture relationships with recipients. Consent is merely the starting point, not an excuse to flood inboxes. By respecting the recipient's space, and approaching them with the intent to understand and value them, businesses can make their emails stand out.

In the landscape of integrated digital marketing, email continues to serve as an instrumental component. However, to maximize the business value of email marketing, a context-sensitive approach to interpreting metrics is crucial. This discussion explores the premise of generating business-relevant insights from email metrics by focusing on two central questions, thereby enabling businesses to understand, evaluate, and enhance the effectiveness of their email campaigns.

1. Recognizing the Importance of Context: Email metrics, without a solid, business-oriented context, merely reflect the activities within the email channel and not their business implications. Hence, to make these metrics valuable, they should be viewed in a business-relevant context rather than stand-alone figures.
2. Beyond Internalized Reporting: Instead of focusing solely on email activities that serve departmental reporting, it's imperative to derive business-relevant meanings from email metrics. This shift in perspective enables a more robust evaluation of the business contribution of email marketing.
3. Defining Communication Efficiency: At its core, email marketing is a two-way communication tool with customers or potential customers. The effectiveness of the email channel can be assessed by determining how well it serves as a communication tool.
4. Asking the Right Questions: To establish a business-relevant context, email metrics should answer two crucial questions - "Is our message reaching customers?" and "What are our customers doing once they see our messages?" These inquiries help ascertain the reach and impact of your email communications.
5. The Power of Contextual Metrics: The answers to the aforementioned questions establish the value of the email channel as a communication tool within a business context, transcending the limitations of activity-centric interpretation.
6. Leveraging Metrics Systems: It's essential to have a well-integrated metrics system capable of delivering relevant data to support the responses to these critical questions. Email systems like MailChimp, Klaviyo, Aweber, and SendInBlue can provide this necessary data.
7. Translating Metrics to Business Language: This approach enables businesses to convert "email-speak" into "business-speak", facilitating better communication of results across various business groups and allowing for the continuous improvement of email marketing efforts.

Ultimately, the key to maximizing the business value of email marketing lies in framing metrics within a relevant business context. By addressing two fundamental questions about reach and customer actions, businesses can derive more meaningful insights from their email marketing data. This shift in perspective not only elevates the understanding of email effectiveness but also promotes clear, business-focused communication across different groups, making every email count.

Here are 6 checkpoints you can use to evaluate your current digital marketing strategy and establish whether it is still on track. Most of the time, Digital Strategies require adjustments over time. Messages may need to be refreshed. Images may need to be changed. New challenges may have appeared in the competitive landscape that need to be addressed. There are many changes in your business environment that require adjustments in your digital (and offline) strategy.

Here are 6 important signs you can track that will tell you what kinds of changes are needed:

1. Your lead numbers and their quality are going down.
   Monthly raw leads into your CRM or website acquisition forms are an important marker of the relevance of your messaging to your target audience. If your lead numbers used to be satisfying and now are not, you need to audit the elements on your digital strategy that connect you to your customers. These can include: your customer acquisition experience, messaging, imaging, and your offer. The proper course of action is to make a detailed audit of acquisition channels and set up a clear report showing their performance over time. With this information in hand, plus whatever anecdotal information your staff can provide, it is possible to build a picture of potential changes to your strategy to improve performance in terms of lead numbers and quality. (Numbers to track: Lead Numbers, Conversion Percentage)
   
   
2. The website or social media traffic is low quality. This means that the audience that you are getting through your web presence is not engaging with your content and is not connecting with your product/services offer. An engaged audience usually transforms into a purchasing audience over time (I can't emphasize enough the time factor involved). Proper content, refreshed regularly, and delivered clearly over both desktop and mobile platforms, helps create this engagement and helps deliver quality prospects over time. (Numbers to track: Bounce rates on website pages, low traffic from social media to conversion pages, time spent on the website, number of pages read on the website).
   
   
3. Paid advertising is not delivering results. This means that the click-through rate in the ads has diminshed, and/or that the individuals who do click through your ads are not converting. Taking a look at your spend vs. results when it comes to paid media is an important factor in establishing whether a digital strategy refresh is needed. (Numbers to track: paid ad click-through rate, paid ad click-to-conversion rate).
   
   
4. Email campaign does not exist or has stopped producing results. Email marketing is a test of the ability of your organization to engage with your customers: prospects, existing, returning, and even your ex-customers. If your email campaign hasn't been refreshed in a while, and you are not noticing its impact into your monthly sales, then a refresh is called for. Email, when executed correctly, is a form of 'soft power' for your company. It is able to sway and convince individuals over time without being overly pushy and it lets you deliver the proper 'personality' and customization that allows you to get past the simple transactional relationship with your customers at every stage of their life cycle with your product/service. (Numbers to track: number of new subscribers, ratio of open vs. read percentage, click-backs to your website for further engagement).
   
   
5. Your reviews have stopped arriving.
   The common review process applies to B2C organizations, where public reviews are a way to talk to customers using other customer's voices. B2B organizations usually provide case studies to showcase their abiity to solve customer problems or provide specific services successfully. B2C organizations, however, depend on individuals to provide reviews of their own free will. Lack of engagement means that your customers don't feel strong enough to say anything good about their experience with you. Or perhaps you have enforced the 'happiness' measurement, where your staff basically state that unless they get a glowing review they will be demoted, fired, or worse. In any of these cases, lack of customer reviews is a sympton that needs to be addressed by an audit of your digital and/or overall customer experience. (Numbers to track: B2C-number of reviews gathered via multiple channels, number of positive notes willingly provided by customers. B2B-number of case studies on the website, number of pageviews for said case studies on the site).
   
   
6. You have lost sight of the profitability of your digital marketing efforts.
   Many organizations, in their zeal for 'trying everything once', embark on multiple-pronged tactics that take on a life of their own without a proper review of their contribution to the profitability of the overall effort. Having a clear understanding of how your digital marketing spend is profitable as a part of your overall budget is important. This does not mean that you would immediately remove any and all parts of the strategy that are 'unprofitable.' That would be short-term transactional thinking. Instead, your understanding of how the digital marketing budget contributes profitably to your overall finances allows you to nuance your decisions and support your efforts as you see how each element interacts with the customer experience. Not all elements of a strategy will be profitable, but it is important to understand the overall picture, and the contribution that each section provides to the whole. (Number to track: easy to follow formula that states how many digital marketing dollars are needed to make a profitable sale).

An important thing to note is that, as you can probably tell from the descriptions above, each tactic of your digital marketing strategy supports the business and all have internal links to one another. Understanding these links, and learning how to manipulate them to improve results over time (via testing and changing tactics and elements within them for optimization), will lead to overall better results for your digital marketing spend. It will also lead you to make reasonable decisions about the future of your spend, and which channels really help you connect to your customers at every stage of your product/service life cycle.

A thorough, impartial Digital Marketing audit is a good place to begin so decisions can be based on data, balanced by the knowledge and experience of your staff and your customers.

Just replace the world 'pinball' with the words 'digital marketing' as you listen to the people describe their experience. I am sure you'll be able to relate to the discussion. I enjoy explaining digital  approaches to business challenges as clearly as this video talks about pinball. Enjoy.