Unlock the Power of Automation: How to Build a Customer Email Journey

Imagine this: you spend hours crafting the perfect email campaign. You hit “send” with a triumphant flourish, only to be met with…crickets. No clicks. No conversions. Just the deafening silence of an unengaged audience.

Navigating the world of email automation is a common struggle for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). You know the power of email and its ability to nurture leads, build relationships, and ultimately drive sales. But translating that potential into reality can feel impossible. 

At Green Apple Strategy, we’ve helped businesses of all shapes and sizes leverage the power of email automation. We’ve collaborated with brands with dedicated marketing teams and bustling sales departments as well as smaller businesses with a single sales representative. Through these experiences, our digital team has identified key best practices that every SMB can utilize to build a customer email journey that fosters engagement and drives results.


How to Build an Effective Automated Email Journey

Chart Your Course Before Setting Sail

It’s always important to map out where you’re going before you invest time and energy building your automated campaigns. Think of your email journey as a roadmap. Where are potential customers in their buying journey, and where do you want to take them? Identify your goals (e.g., brand awareness, lead generation, customer retention) and use them as guideposts. Continually review data to ensure your journey aligns with these goals.


Leverage Automation for Key Customer Journey Milestones

Another helpful tactic as you build your automation roadmap is to take a deep dive into your typical buyer’s journey. Are there specific touchpoints where potential customers seem to stall? Can email automation free up your sales team’s time by providing support during these crucial phases? Identify these opportunities and design targeted email sequences to nurture leads and guide them toward the next step.


Segmentation is Key: Speak to the Right People.

When it comes to email automation best practices, it’s essential to remember that targeted messages resonate better and drive higher engagement. As you consider the automated email campaign you’re building, take the time to understand your audience and segment your emails based on demographics, interests, or past behavior. For example, you may want to start with an automated welcome campaign that introduces your brand to new email subscribers. From there, you can build out more specific campaigns to support your sales process. 


Humanize the Interaction: Because Robots Can’t Build Relationships

Personalization is key, especially in automated emails. Wherever possible, use subscriber names and tailor content to their interests. Maintain a conversational tone—imagine you’re having a one-on-one chat with a potential customer, not blasting a generic message to a faceless list.


Don’t Be a Set-It-and-Forget-It Marketer

Email automation shouldn’t be a “set it and forget it” strategy. If you truly want to maximize its potential, it’s important to regularly assess performance metrics and glean insights from subscriber behavior. You want to monitor results and use this data to refine your messages and optimize your email journeys to achieve your intended results. 


Test, Learn, and Optimize: Because There’s Always Room for Improvement

One of the most powerful aspects of digital marketing is that it provides the opportunity to constantly learn and improve as you go. Do you consistently send out the same emails and workflows? If so, this is a prime opportunity for A/B testing! Experiment with different subject lines, email structures, and calls to action. This allows you to gather invaluable subscriber data and continuously optimize your email journey for maximum impact.


Bonus: Don’t Forget about People Who’ve Fallen Off the Radar

There’s a reason that email open rates rarely rise above 50%. People are busy. Not everyone will actively engage with every email. Once you build out your initial email campaigns, a bonus tactic is to design re-engagement campaigns to reignite conversations with unengaged subscribers. A well-crafted email sequence might be a powerful tool to win back valuable leads—or it can be an opportunity to invite them to unsubscribe, which would clean up your email list and lead to better results. 

 

Experience The Transformative Power of Email Automation

Email automation offers a powerful tool to connect with potential customers, nurture leads, and cultivate lasting customer relationships. By implementing these best practices, you’ll be well on your way to developing an automated email journey that drives results and fosters brand loyalty.


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A B2B Guide to Marketing Automation

women having a business meeting a cafe


As a brand, connecting with your target audience is crucial. In order to connect with your target audience effectively, you need to know what content resonates with your target demographic, their sales cycle, and what they value most about your product or service. This type of in-depth research can be difficult to reproduce at scale, but marketing automation can be a powerful tool. Marketing Automation can help you identify your potential customers’ needs, establish several touchpoints on their sales journeys, and bring more sales to completion.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to a set of tools and processes that are used to communicate with existing leads, bringing them closer to the point of buying. Any time a customer adds an item to a cart, leaves the page, and later receives an email with “Forgot Something?” in the subject line, that’s marketing automation at work. Setting up a series of processes, emails, reminders, or follow-ups can help you increase communication with your customers without taking the additional time or requiring you to hire new talent. Instead, marketing automation uses well-designed processes to help you discover potential customers, replicate high-performing practices, and encourage repeat purchasing behaviors. 

Marketing Automation Saves You Time and Overhead

Marketing automation has numerous benefits, but the most important is the time you save by streamlining your sales cycle. Rather than spending hours identifying and contacting qualified leads individually, it gives you the capacity to reach out to leads at the ideal point in their purchasing journey. There’s no need to manually import customers into your database. Instead, an automated marketing tool can identify and label leads for you by tracking a user’s interaction with your brand. 

Marketing Automation Can Strengthen Your CRM

Marketing automation also increases the power of your customer relationship management (CRM) tool, such as Salesforce. In tandem with a CRM, marketing automation can help you build a customized onboarding process and follow-up communication for clients in order to strengthen your customer relationships.

Especially in B2B industries, having a personalized connection can make or break a sale. Because automation analyzes your audience’s actions, it actively nurtures your leads by personalizing their experience and automatically segmenting their journeys. Marketing automation can monitor behaviors such as clicks, site visits, or purchase histories and provide your leads with information and opportunities that are customized to their needs. You’ll see improved conversion rates, and you’ll be able to assess and improve your sales pipeline with actionable data. 

How You Can Implement Marketing Automation

While marketing automation can be immensely effective, you need a strong foundation to see powerful results. This includes a reliable contact list, an up-to-date website, active email marketing tactics, and social media management. If you need a starting place, try refreshing your current marketing by conducting client interviews or researching SEO best practices.

Once you’ve established reliable groundwork, you need to indicate your specific goals. Your goals may include an increase in subscribers, clicks, sales, or page likes. After you’ve determined your goal, decide what platform you want to use.

There are several MA systems available, but consider your preferred budget, ease of use, type of marketing automation, and customer service when deciding which one is best for you. Finally, you should determine if you want to implement alone or hire a professional marketing company to begin your process. 

Iterate and Improve Your Marketing Automation

Nothing works as well in a silo as it does when combined with other tools. To continue achieving marketing automation goals, you should pair MA with inbound marketing and CRM tools to increase its reach.

You’ll also want to include other team members in setting up and improving your processes. Sharing reports with senior executives and data with your sales team will allow you to collect and implement their insights into the sales funnel. With the feedback and assistance from various departments, plus the results from your marketing automation tool, you can optimize your content, messaging, and strategies to retain your current customers and attract more.

Need Help Getting Started with Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a powerful tool that can be complex to implement. Green Apple Strategy is a full-service marketing agency that helps clients communicate effectively to their desired audience. Are you interested in learning more about how we can help you start your marketing automation journey? Contact us today for a consultation! 

How to Leverage Marketing Automation to Support Your Sales Team


When most businesses think about marketing automation, they tend to focus on—you guessed it—marketing. They’ll use marketing automation to send welcome series, lead generation campaigns, emails for conferences, newsletters, etc. And, that makes sense. Marketing automation is a great way to create personal and relevant marketing experiences for your customers and potential buyers.

However, one of the often overlooked marketing automation strategies is sales enablement. As I’ve mentioned before, when marketing and sales work together, businesses thrive. But, what role does marketing automation play in that effort?

How to Leverage Marketing Automation to Support Your Sales Team

Here are two simple advantages every marketing automation platform provides your sales team:

  1. Equipping your sales team with insights on any activity from the account. Marketing automation allows you to track everything from email opens to how long someone watched a webinar. This is valuable information for sales representatives when they’re following up with a potential lead. But, in many cases, looking for insights beyond the individual prospect they’re following up with can make a tremendous difference. Finding out what other people within the account are also downloading can provide sales members with a more comprehensive view into all of the potential challenges the organization is facing.
  2. Sending sales emails on behalf of your sales team. There are a couple of benefits for leveraging marketing automation to send emails on behalf of your sales team. First, these emails are tracked. This helps your sales team actually know who is opening your email, who is acting on it, and who isn’t interested. Another advantage is that it gives both marketing and sales the ability to test and see which type of subject lines, messages, and calls-to-action are most effective for converting new business.

Marketing automation isn’t just a marketing tool. It’s a sales tool. However, in order for it to truly work, you need to make sure your marketing and sales teams are completely aligned. Taking the time to discover how you can leverage marketing automation to support sales will not only make your sales teams more efficient, it will ultimately help them be more effective.