Distributing your commercial message via email is a powerful way to generate new leads, look after existing clients or simply generate some buzz for your product, your service or your cause. Organisations large and small have used email marketing in recent times to great effect. However, getting it right takes time.

For many SMBs, this can often mean email marketing gets put in the too-hard basket, especially if it's going to be a time killer. Thankfully, automated marketing software can help your emails become a great tool to drive traffic to your site, nurture leads and grow your business.

What is email marketing automation?

Like any form of automation, a dedicated email marketing software package makes your messaging look professional, sends your emails and tracks how your campaigns are performing.

What can email automation software do for your SMB?

The most obvious benefit of any form of automation is that it frees up time and allows you or your staff to work on other more important tasks. Email automation is also cheaper than human labour; it broadens your reach with customers; it maximises staff resources; it generates automated reports; and it demands little technical knowledge from users to set up.

Once you have created your email campaigns for the week or month and loaded them into your software package, they will be sent at the time and date you set. You can also use integrated tools to segment your customers by a range of criteria and send content that's relevant to them, based on where they are in your customer journey. You also have a wealth of data to work with, including open rates, deliverability and bounce rates – which can all help fine-tune your future email distributions.

Getting email automation right

Make no mistake, launching your email marketing campaign requires serious effort, especially in the early days. Be prepared to overcome the following challenges:

• Building a database of subscribers.
• Getting people to open and read your emails.
• Making sure your emails don’t end up in spam folders.
• Keeping your subscribers interested.
  
  

Email marketing no-noes

Great email marketing means avoiding anything that will alienate your audience with impersonal or irrelevant content. Also, don't bombard customers or prospects with too many emails, and don't send the wrong person the wrong message. If you do, your audience will probably click the 'unsubscribe' button without delay.

How easy is automation software to set up?

Most marketing automation software includes templates, editors that are easy to use, and step-by-step guides that make creating and distributing an email campaign a straightforward process. You certainly won’t need any experience in coding or design to launch your first mailshot.

There are many email marketing tools that are intuitive and easy to set up. If you are an SMB or just starting out, then MailChimp – one of the largest email marketing automation platforms – could be all you need. MailChimp is free if you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers and aren't planning on sending more than 12,000 emails a month.

Using dedicated email software to automate your campaigns can nurture prospects, generate valuable leads and help your business prosper.