As a small business owner, ongoing tasks need your attention constantly. There are new strategies you want to develop; you must plan your content, research product ideas, and much more. Naturally, it is always a welcome bonus if a tool helps you take care of repetitive tasks, freeing up much-needed time for other projects.  

That’s exactly what email marketing automation software does for you. It helps you keep the communication with your prospects and buyers ongoing without manually crafting the message or sending it each time you need to engage your subscribers.

Sounds like a dream, right? However, so many people that sign up for email marketing software aren’t actually using it correctly. They either forget to get started, get intimidated, and neglect it, or they use one or two features and call it a day. 

In order to see as many benefits from your email marketing as possible, it’s crucial that you utilize as much of your marketing software as possible. We’ll help you determine what aspects of your software you may be neglecting and why you should correct that as soon as possible. 

The Importance of Using Email Automation Software

Email marketing automation software does more than send emails to your subscribers using set triggers. Below are other benefits it offers:

• It allows you to utilize personalized email marketing. Using dynamic content, you can automate a different email series for different triggers (or “actions” that your subscribers take), improving the way you market to your subscribers and increasing efficiency.
• Automation so you can dedicate time to other important business tasks instead of manually sending tons of emails. According to Smartsheet, 59% of workers agreed that automation could save them up to six hours weekly.
• Meaningful and constant communication improves your conversion rates. Keeping in touch with your subscribers keeps you on their minds, and when you’re sending them the content they need, they’ll start to trust you and consider purchasing from you. 
• Automation that helps you scale without any issues. Manually contacting every new lead can become a chore once your list grows. Automation, on the other hand, only needs to be triggered to keep email communication ongoing.

All these benefits can only be possible if you use your marketing automation software correctly. Below are some mistakes to avoid that could hamper you as you seek to maximize your automation software.

Mistakes to Avoid With Your Marketing Automation Software

1. Uploading and Sending an Email to one Email Address at a Time

Your contact list is one of the important marketing tools you need to grow as a business owner. It can consist of buyers, cold and hot leads, or important contacts to network within your industry. Unlike your email clients, email marketing software can send emails to all your contacts in a few minutes.

Hence, stop sending one email at a time to single contacts. Upload your entire contact list to your marketing automation software and send your emails in a much more efficient and effective way. 

2. Using Email Templates Without Customizations

Branding may seem to be no more than your brand colors, logo, and other style elements, but their role within your business and marketing is very important. Consistent branding helps you build trust and credibility, makes your business identifiable, and fosters brand growth, helping you gain loyal customers.

Stop using email templates without customizing and personalizing them to your brand’s look and feel. Most email marketing automation software gives you the liberty to customize templates or build one solely for your business use. If you neglect to take this step, your subscribers could be confused about who they’re receiving an email from and may unsubscribe unexpectedly. 

3. Not Segmenting Your List

You may have a broad list of all the prospects that you are currently trying to convert to clients. Within this list, there should be sub-groups based on the different personas you have developed for your business, pain points, or where they are in their customer journey.

Sectioning off your list and making sub-lists based on these characteristics is segmentation, and it ensures that you are reaching out to your contacts with the right message at the most opportune times. Marketing automation software makes it easy to split your contacts into different groups for more targeted and personalized marketing.

4. Sending Emails Without Testing

Testing emails is an act of quality assurance that you should not ignore. Testing your emails can save you from big email marketing failures that can weaken the brand trust and credibility you have built with your subscribers over time.

• Test your emails for broken links and missing images.
• Check the from name, reply email, subject lines, and hooks for spelling and grammatical errors.
• Preview the plain text version of your HTML emails and ensure proper organization of all elements.
• Check dynamic content to make sure they’re rendering the correct values and aren’t broken.

Your automation software allows you to preview emails before sending them or send them to a designated test email address so you can ensure your emails render correctly.

5. Ignoring Email Metrics

Email metrics point to how successful your campaigns have been or if they have failed. They help you identify problems in your email marketing strategy, if there are any, allowing you to improve on any areas that need work.

Having clear goals for your email campaigns will help you know the right metrics to focus on. Some email metrics to pay attention to in your marketing automation software are:

• Unopens
• Unsubscribes
• Click Through Rate (CTR)
• Conversion rate
• Return on Investment (ROI)

Are you making any of the mistakes identified above? It’s time to stop underutilizing your email marketing automation software. Start doing more, faster, by setting triggers and workflows for repetitive tasks in your email marketing activities. And, if you’re looking for email marketing automation software, try Benchmark Email for free!