89 billion – that’s the number of emails sent by individuals and organizations around the world – every. Single. Day. A whopping 54%, about 42 billion, come from businesses and non-profits. That’s an immense amount of email. Sent manually, at one-minute per email it would take 87 million people – one-fourth of the population of the United States – 8 hours a day to send it. That makes for a lot of cramped fingers, and a lot of spent money.
Thank heavens, then, for email campaigns and autoresponders, which increase efficiency and improve the timing and personalization of a company’s emails – radically improving the ROI of email related programs.
Email Campaigns
If you’ve ever received an emailed company newsletter or other offer, chances are that it was sent using a email campaign tool. Email campaigns reach the entire of a targeted audience with the same message at the same time.
Whether it’s to 10 people, or 10 million, email campaigns are created in a process that’s as easy as selecting an audience, defining a message, and then scheduling when to send it. A few hours after being sent, reports on the efficacy of email subject lines and in-email clicks can be used to improve future messaging. Additionally, lists of your most and least engaged recipients can be leveraged to engage through different campaigns.
Many emails that an organization sends, however, don’t fit into this one-time, large-audience format. That’s where autoresponders come in.
Autoresponders
Organizations often need to reach contacts with a specific (“the right”) message at a specific (“the right”) time. autoresponders do this perfectly, knowing exactly when to send what message, to whom.
A perfect example to illustrate how autoresponders become useful is as follows: At 1:00 PM, Contact-A downloads a whitepaper through a website form. At 3:00 PM, Contact-B clicks on an in-email link to learn more about a product. At 5:00 PM, Contact-C reaches day-three of a software trial. Without soon receiving follow-up emails to address new informational needs at their new, but varied relationship stages, it’s very likely that each contact will fall out of an organization’s sales funnel.
To know when to follow up and what to send, however, a business has to continuously have eyes on each contact’s actions. Autoresponders do this without missing a beat, resulting in perfectly timed, perfectly messaged emails. This means that instead of watching contact lists, marketing teams can focus on growing the sales pipeline, and sales teams can focus on winning deals.
For most organizations, email campaigns and autoresponders radically improve the ability to reach and individually message leads and contacts, while increasing the focus and efficiency of sales and marketing teams. To learn how to use email campaigns or autoresponders in Vtiger, see the linked documentation, or contact us at [email protected].
