Automating Emails: Dos and Don’ts

Automation is the technology by which a process or procedure is performed with minimal human assistance. It has become such an integral function in sales processes today for so many reasons, among them:

• It allows sales reps to spend their time and focus on selling, as opposed to performing redundant day-to-day tasks. They gain more time to work on their sales processes and connect with customers—building better relationships with them in the process and increasing their chances of closing deals.
• It allows sales managers to spend their time and focus on managing and strategizing, as opposed to overseeing the successful fulfillment of administrative tasks, reporting, and data analysis.
• It reduces the chances of human error. For a fast-paced environment and industry like sales, eliminating the occurrence of mistakes is important.
• It reduces paperwork which eats up sales reps' time and productivity. Manually completing paperwork, Excel files, and the like are greatly time- and energy-consuming.
• It organizes systems. Automation follows a clear and methodical system which helps organizes processes and activities within the salesforce. And this organization has a direct impact on workplace productivity and the bottom line.

Automation in sales can be done through the power of an intelligent, customizable CRM. One area in the sales process that has greatly benefited from automation is client communications. You can automate sending emails to clients, for one. But you can’t just do this haphazardly. Even with automation, you need to be thoughtful and strategic. So how do you effectively automate emails?

Best Practices for Automating Emails

Automation can be used for any kind of email, and the average sales rep sends out several different kinds, among them:

• Cold email to a cold prospect
• Initial email to a new prospect
• Welcome email to a new prospect that subscribes or opts-in to your brand’s assets (newsletter, blog, social media, etc.)
• Lead nurturing email
• Follow-up email (after discovery, meeting, demo, etc.)
• Email requesting for meeting or demo
• Reminder emails (for meetings, phone calls, etc.)
• Follow-up email to unresponsive clients
• Thank you email to new clients
• Post-sale email

Depending on your business model, the list can actually be longer. So imagine if you have to create the body copy or message and customize each one for each prospect, and then manually send these emails out one by one? One easy email can easily take up 5-10 minutes of your time. A more complicated one, say a lead nurturing one or an email addressing objections and other negotiation issues, will take more time, as these require strategy and highly personalized messaging. Now imagine doing that multiple times a day, every day of the work week. That would mean using a lot of precious hours that you can otherwise dedicate to selling and engaging clients.

Having a template for different kinds of emails saves you a lot of these valuable minutes. Create one template for a welcome email, for example, save it, and use it for next time.

Automation is great for emailing clients, but it’s especially efficient for your email marketing campaign where you’ll have to follow a sequence for successful conversion. You can fully automate that sequence to guarantee that you are able to successfully and consistently implement the campaign.

Create, automate, and track your campaigns. Use an email template, schedule the email's release, and track the response you get from the campaign. Did client click it open? Did they read it? Did they click on the links you sent?

DO:

1. Personalize the email. A great CRM feature is the ability to customize templates. Yes, you can still personalize an email template using custom variables.
2. Create a purposeful email signature. You can include more than just your contact details in your it. Include links to your website, to your brand’s social media accounts, or to a case study on your blog that’s relevant to the prospect.
3. Schedule the release of your emails. You can even schedule the release of emails to several prospects or recipients. Again, this helps you save time. You don’t need to keep logging in to just send the emails you’ve prepared. This also makes sure that you don’t forget to send any email, especially when things get busy and you lose track of time.
4. Schedule at the appropriate time, like when the prospect is active. This is a hyper-personalization strategy and it helps increase your open rate. How do you know what is the appropriate time? This is where contextual data like purchase history, browsing history, buying patterns and behavior, points of interaction or engagement (with brand), touch points and channels used, etc. come into play. These are usually gathered from cookies and tracking scripts.
5. Segment lists for creating templates and scheduling release. An ecommerce brand, for example, can segment lists based on purchase behavior.
6. Monitor clicks and open rates of every outbound mail of your campaign. Email campaigns are useless if you don’t track their performance.
7. Integrate your other email inbox (e.g. Gmail) for easier monitoring and organization of emails that are sent directly to you.
8. Optimize all emails for mobile. Everyone is mobile these days!
9. Test emails using A/B testing so you can identify which email is more effective. You can also automate this split test.

DON’T:

1. Template and automate every email. Reasons for this include:
   1. Every sales rep is at various levels of correspondence or discussion with their prospects, so you can’t always predict what needs to be said.
   2. Some emails need a higher level of personalization like the aforementioned emails during the negotiation and objection handling stages.
   3. Some clients prefer the use of email as the primary mode of communication, so the sales rep will be sending more emails—of various kinds—to these clients.
   4. A high-level executive from a high-value company may need more attention and extreme personalization. This prospect is usually the client that ticks all the boxes—and more—on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) or buyer persona.

Use your better judgment when deciding which emails to template and automate.

2. Disregard timing. Be mindful of when you send (or schedule) emails. Know prospect’s time zone. Avoid sending after work hours or on weekends (or just Sunday, if the prospect works Saturdays).
3. Spam. This is the easiest way to be ignored. Be mindful of frequency too, not just timing. For prospects that subscribe or opt-in, allow them to choose the number, the kind, and the frequency of emails they receive.

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