Anyone with an email address has, at some point, received a promotional email from some company. You may have purchased some of their products in the past or just shared your contact info with them, but hardly could you avoid being targeted in at least one campaign as a potential buyer.
Automated outreach emails are a part of the marketing automation process, and various businesses or entrepreneurs frequently use them.
In most cases, the goal of these automated outreach messages is to broaden the reach of the campaign and improve the conversion rates.
These aims are achieved if the email automation is done correctly and professionally. Otherwise, it may harm the reputation and following of the business in question. We’ll take a closer look at both scenarios. But first some…
General Info on the Process
Email marketing, in general, works well as a way of funneling potential customers and leading them towards a purchase. Correctly done and effective outreach automation needs to distribute relevant content and information. Also, the filtration process here is the most efficient if it’s gradual. Besides, close monitoring of the prospectives’ reactions to the campaign is how you can make sure the potential customers finally become your active buyers.
Technicalities
Marketing automation software is at the core of these automated campaigns. But it can’t do it all by itself – it needs input from the marketing team which writes messages for different scenarios or occasions. Depending on the earlier actions of the customer, the software decides which message to forward. Some versions of the software allow sending out emails and using chatbots, as well as creating a contacts list depending on the people’s interactions with a site or business.
Who Uses It?
The majority of businesses and entrepreneurs today are using email automation as a means of time-efficient marketing.
Big firms that don’t have a telemarketing team that would call each potential buyer find automated outreach to be an excellent window for direct marketing.
They hold this opinion primarily because emails or private messages are among the most personal forms of communication with the users. Individual entrepreneurs, however, mostly use automation for sending out various announcements, such as holiday promotion adverts, and similar.
Who finds it effective?
Well, that’s a whole different thing. Namely, in the past, many companies have been misusing this form of outreach, which lead to the implementation of various laws in different countries that made sure this form of marketing is strictly regulated. Nowadays, regardless of your campaign and online behavior towards potential clients, you are obliged to provide them with an option to opt-out of your email or other types of notifications.
Benefits of Outreach Automation
The fact that this principle is so popular among the businesses as an advertising model certainly means that they find it convenient, and here’s why.
Affordability
It is quite cheap if nothing else. Namely, this form of advertising involves no printing or publishing costs or expensive airtime.
The only expenses it will require are the ones related to creating high-quality content or copy, as well as email management.
In case the company already has a marketing or content team, this form of advertising is practically free. Yes, the smaller businesses might still have to spend some money on hiring an experienced freelance marketing expert, but properly managed, the campaign might lead to a significant number of conversions.
Efficiency
Speed is another upside of this model – one mail reaches even millions of prospects at the same time. Now, that’s a pretty far reach right there. Not only opportunity, but former customers as well can be included in this form of a marketing campaign. The people who have already purchased a service or a product from you may consider coming back in case you make a good pitch in your email.
Improvement
Still, for this attempt to work immediately, you need to be confident in the quality of your service or product. Thinking about reaching out to your earlier buyers can nudge you towards re-evaluating and improving your product or service. Otherwise, you could produce an opposite outcome – have social media and review platforms teeming with bad reviews and dissatisfied customers. That would be some bad publicity.
Downsides of Outreach Automation
There are also some rather fair points against this sort of messaging automation.
Overgeneralization
Generalizing is often a mistake, and this can easily apply to the uniform outreach emails. In other words, creating a message which would hold information equally interesting for hundreds or thousands of your customers is impossible. Numerous people will find your copy irrelevant, others just won’t feel engaged, and a portion of them might even dislike its impersonal approach.
Distancing
Some message details might be added to make the message seem more personalized, such as the name of the person. However, even this approach has its flaws, including the possibility to misspell the client’s name, which some of your potential customers might find offensive. Also, it isn’t possible to tweak enough elements in an automated message to target the interests of an individual buyer accurately. This all goes to show that automated emails can quickly turn out to be more harmful than helpful.
Spam
Additionally, these messages are highly likely to be caught by spam filters due to some of their characteristics and end up in spam folder.
This means many of your prospects might not even see your email. Not only that, but you can also quickly lose track and overdo it with the number of messages. Hence, it is vital to verify emails, because sending emails to invalid addresses may lead to account suspension. This makes things even worse as you might inadvertently make the customer flag and remember you as a spammer, and a reputation like this is quite hard to change. Wrong.
Conclusion
There are two sides to this marketing method. It has its positive sides, and, if used wisely, it can bring some beneficial customer attention to your brand. This is especially the case with small companies that cannot fund elaborate marketing campaigns. Still, this sort of messaging should be kept on minimum to prevent the unfavorable effect – having people annoyed with your frequent and impersonal emails. The bigger the company – the more appropriate this advice is. Larger businesses – or those with enough resources to personalize their messages – should undoubtedly refrain from outreach automation as it might even do some harm to their reputation.
So, don’t buy in easily on that “the future of marketing” adverts of different automation tools. Think twice before you make your marketing moves, and do it wisely as they define how your prospects see you, and, consequently, how your company develops.
