Email marketing remains an incredibly valuable channel for businesses looking to engage with customers and drive growth. Newsletters, in particular, allow you to build relationships, nurture leads, and promote your brand on an ongoing basis.
But producing captivating email campaigns involves a tremendous amount of work. Between creating compelling content, designing beautiful templates, maintaining subscriber lists, and analyzing performance, it‘s easy for email programs to become an endless time sink.
Fortunately, there are fantastic automation tools available today that can eliminate many of the tedious tasks associated with managing email newsletters. In this guide, we‘ll explore some of the top ways you can leverage automation to streamline your email marketing efforts. From adding new subscribers to repurposing old content, these automated workflows will help you work smarter, not harder.
Here’s an outline of what we’ll cover:
- Automatically Adding Subscribers
- Segmenting Your Lists for Relevance
- Utilizing AI to Enhance Campaigns
- Repurposing Existing Content
- Keeping Lists Clean and Updated
- Securely Backing Up Subscriber Data
- Routing New Leads into Workflows
- Syncing with CRM Systems
Let’s dive in!
Automatically Adding New Subscribers
One of the most basic but mission-critical automation tasks is getting new email sign-ups added to your mailing lists. Rather than manually exporting, formatting, and uploading lists, you can create automated workflows to add subscribers from website forms, chatbots, or other sources into your email service seamlessly.
Website Signup Forms
Start by looking at the forms on your website—chances are you already capture emails in places like contact pages, gated content offers, or standalone subscription boxes. Tools like Zapier make it a breeze to take form entry data from form builders like Typeform or Wufoo and automatically add it as subscribers in ESPs like MailChimp, Constant Contact, or ConvertKit.
For example, you could build a Zap with the following steps:
- New submission comes in to Typeform signup form
- Triggered Zap takes email address and any other fields
- Subscriber is added to designated list in ConvertKit
With this automated in the background, you no longer have to manually export and upload subscriber info. As soon as someone fills out your form, their data flows directly into your email service.
Chatbots
Another great way to capture subscriber sign-ups is by using chatbots on high-traffic areas of your website. Bots from providers like Drift or Intercom make it easy for visitors to self-identify sales prospects or subscribers. You can offer them checkbox options to get email, push notifications or both.
Pair the bot with a tool like Integromat to automatically fire off subscribed contacts into an ESP tool. Dedicate specific mailing lists in your ESP for bot sign-ups—that way, you can track engagement and fine-tune messaging. With multiple bot placement and creative subscriber offers, you can build a solid subscriber base to complement your form efforts.
Follow CRM Data Flows
If you use a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot to manage contacts, you already have a wealth of subscriber data at your fingertips. CRMs track detailed records of all your prospects and customers, including email addresses just waiting to be utilized.
Rather than exporting CRM contacts to build email lists, use an automation platform like Microsoft Power Automate to sync data flows. Build a flow with your CRM as the trigger, filter for contact email addresses, and insert them into chosen ESP mailing lists. Set up dynamic segments in your ESP based on CRM data points like lead score so that you can trigger behavioral automations.
This keeps your subscription lists automatically in sync with your CRM contact base. You can progress subscribers through tailored email journeys aligned with your sales methodology.
As you explore options to automatically grow your mailing lists, just remember—the key is obtaining explicit consent. Make sure signup forms and bot offerings clearly communicate that contacts are opting in to receive ongoing promotional emails. Maintain compliance with anti-spam laws, and you’ll be good to send!
Segmenting Your Subscriber List
Email segmentation lets you group contacts together based on certain shared attributes, behaviors or user profile data. You can then customize and personalize content for each group to boost engagement, conversion rates and ROI from campaigns.
Say you have 10,000 newsletter subscribers. That likely includes bloggers, developers, marketers, publishers, entrepreneurs and many other specialties. With a one-size fits all newsletter, much of your content ends up irrelevant to portions of your readers.
Segmenting by user profile data allows you to tailor your message for the needs of each subset of customers. Group together small business owners and emphasize financial tips. Provide growth strategies for start-up founders. Showcase new ecommerce features for online store owners.
When you can serve hyper-relevant content to reader groups, you achieve much higher open and click-through rates. Readers feel like you “get” them because the info is aligned with their interests and role.
Manually sorting through subscriber data to carve out segments is extremely tedious. This is where Zapier’s “filter” step adds tremendous value. For example, you could build an automation with:
- New signup added to ConvertKit master list
- Zapier filters by tag/field values
- Contact added to segmented CRM groups
Now persona groups automatically stay up to date in your CRM for targeted outreach. Embed dynamic content blocks in newsletters personalized for each group based on their tags. You maintain the personal touch at scale.
Utilize AI to Enhance Newsletter Campaigns
Artificial intelligence capabilities have expanded rapidly, with many practical applications for optimizing your email marketing workflows. AI can automate several key facets of producing a high-converting newsletter, saving you tons of work.
A great use case is having AI generate the first draft of email content based on your brand guidelines, past campaigns and desired messaging. Tools like Jasper.ai or Phrasee take inputs around topics, tone of voice and types of information you wish to cover. They output draft copy for review that you can then tweak and polish into final shape. This automated assist cuts the hardest part—getting started—out of the content creation process.
Another way to employ AI is through automated email subject line testing. Rather than you manually inputting a dozen different subject line variants to split test, tools like Mailshake auto-generate a broad range will pull-quote style subject lines for each campaign. It tests all variants against your list and automatically surfaces the top performers for you—allowing you to leverage AI data to create killer subject lines.
Look for AI opportunities to enhance every major step—from ideation to creative direction to optimization. The right automation makes producing standout email content scalable.
Repurposing Existing Content
One obstacle many marketers face is generating enough high-quality content continuously to fuel email campaigns week after week or month after month. Copywriting doesn’t scale. However, you likely already have troves of insightful material peppered across blog posts, guides, internal decks and past newsletter editions sitting untapped.
Automating content repurposing unlocks all that underutilized copy to ease the burden of ongoing creation. Set up workflows in your marketing stack to identify evergreen, high-traffic pages from past periods. Flag them for potential to promote in upcoming newsletters as “From the Vault” styled flashback features.
You can also leverage repurposed content for entirely new formats. Promotional excerpts from previous emails could populate social queues. Blog posts could auto-convert into downloadable guides gated for email signup. Chunk up guides into a structured email course delivered in sequence.
Getting creative with recycling existing collateral into email, social and gated content gives you an automated loop of perpetually fresh material. You maintain variety for audiences while mitigating manual production needs.
Keeping Subscriber Data Updated
Nothing torpedoes deliverability or trust with subscribers faster than outdated, bounced email addresses cluttering your lists. Yet contacts change jobs, switch providers, or opt to unsubscribe every day. Staying on top of list hygiene with manual pruning is near impossible at scale.
That’s where intelligent list cleaning automations come to the rescue. Services like Email Verify Pro actively check the validity of email addresses and domains from your subscriber lists. Invalid emails get automatically removed while still delivering key metrics about bounces.
You can couple verifies with more advanced user lifecycle tracking tools like Listware that monitor subscriber activity. Setup rules to automatically unsubscribe people from lists if they haven‘t opened over “X” emails in “Y” months. Transfer cold leads into less frequent re-engagement nurture streams. Maintain subscribers in life stage buckets like active, inactive, lapsed to optimize ongoing targeting.
Automated list maintenance ensures your open/click rates stay sky high while keeping you compliant with anti-spam regulations around consumer consent. A win-win for all.
Securely Backing Up Your Subscriber Data
No one likes to consider worst case scenarios when managing mission-critical platforms like email service providers. But surprising system outages do periodically occur, where access email distribution infrastructure gets temporarily disrupted.
Having an automated backup in place that securely stores a copy of subscriber lists offline acts as the ultimate insurance policy against disruptions. Losing your centralized subscription database could set your lead gen efforts back years, so it‘s worth establishing redundancies.
Tools like JetBackup centralize backups of ESP subscriber data along with other vital documents and media from across your web properties into a single dashboard. Set up automated workflows to export subscriber information from ESPs daily or weekly into encrypted storage repositories that jetBackup manages.
If ever needed, you can rapidly restore subscriber lists, thereby minimizing potential email send disruption during ESP incidents. Make sure to still comply with privacy regulations around backing up personal user data like email addresses when transferring off centralized platforms.
Routing New Leads into Segmented Workflows
As you continue adding new contacts via the methods we discussed earlier, you need ways to automatically filter recipients based on activity and route them into appropriate streams. This prevents sending one generic newsletter blast to your whole list regardless of subscriber level.
Instead, leverage email service provider (ESP) features like convert flows or lifecycle stages to place new subscribers on specific onboarding paths. At signup, contacts get tagged into a predefined multi-message welcome stream over their first 30-60 days designed to orient them to your brand.
NICHE tool like Lemlist enhances existing ESP segmentation with intelligent tracking of subscriber engagement. It lets you define granular journeys to transition customers into based on their email opening and clicking activity. Move warm leads demonstrating solid interaction into product pitch funnels. Graduate loyal brand advocates into VIP insider circles granting exclusive content and offers.
Workflows centered around subscriber actions help you cultivate relationships over time vs one-off emails. Lead routing gets your whole list involved rather than just new signups. Before you know it, lifecycle messaging at scale becomes second nature.
Syncing with CRM Systems
As you nurture contacts through email journeys, recording their activity and progression stage directly in your central CRM database ensures alignment. This top-level visibility into subscriber metrics supercharges your sales reps. Seeing open/click rates, past email engagement and more in the CRM timeline equips them to have smarter sales conversations.
Rather than re-entering data, automated syncing maintains your CRM contact records updated effortlessly. Platforms like Zapier specialize in establishing automatic data flows across ESP, CRM and other systems in an organization’s martech stack.
Define specific subscriber KPIs in your ESP you wish to migrate like campaign send/open logs, link click tracking or geography. Set up a Zap with your CRM like HubSpot or Zoho as the destination, transforming email engagement into neatly organized timeline activity for account reps to leverage. Consider handling subscriber vs purchaser data differently for most relevance.
Your salesforce stays empowered with email interaction insights added directly to workflows they already live in day-to-day. No manual exports or toggling between programs necessary to contextualize subscriber outreach.
Take Your Newsletters from Manual to Automated
Producing standout email marketing no longer needs to come at the expense of your sanity. As we’ve explored throughout this guide’s 8 sections, marrying best-in-class automation tools with established email newsletters allows you to streamline painful manual processes.
From building your audience to crafting compelling stories to optimizing performance and beyond, automated systems eliminate the friction. They enable you to practice segment-savvy, customer lifecycle focused email marketing at scale—with less work than ever.
The time and energy you save from these intelligent workflows can get reinvested into strategy, creative innovation and exceptional subscriber experiences. Game-changing!
