Email automation has been superceded by autonomous email. But for some is a concept that is easier to ignore than embrace. Automated email, also referred to as triggered email or behaviour-driven email, is any email message automatically sent in direct response to an individual user’s specific actions made (or not made) on your website or web app. Autonomous email does everything for you.

Transactional emails are highly valuable to consumers because they provide crucial information like receipts or password resets, but because of CAN-SPAM these emails can’t provide or contain much promotional content, they also includes order confirmation content.

Marketing emails are the standard means of sending promotional and incentive messages to large segments of your customer base, like discounts, sale items, promotions, new product launch, well as newsletters, but they don’t offer the one-to-one communication customers now expect.

Email automation refers simply to the process of the fusion of elements into an email with some of the process handled automatically for you. By bridging the gap between transactional and marketing email, automated email provides a scalable and efficient method for marketers to send user-specific messages in a responsive way.

Automated email achieves the best of both worlds between timing and content to provide marketers with messages that have:

Relevance – When a user receives an automated email, it’s because they’ve taken an action which triggered a workflow. As a result, the message they receive is highly relevant to them and they’re more likely to open and engage with the email.

Engaging content – Automated email content is designed to increase user engagement with your app or website. This could mean teaching new customers how to use your product, encouraging users to give feedback, or providing a lapsed customer with an incentive to return. For example, you might want to set up an automated “how-to” email trigger if certain people have signed up for your service but have yet to start using it.

Brand building – As a highly personal communication channel, automated email serves as an extension of your brand. It gives you the opportunity to strengthen the connection between you and your customers by communicating thought leadership, assisting with cross-sells, or by sharing timely updates about features they haven’t used yet. Simply put, email automation drives user engagement. Customers are much more likely to open, read, and take action with an automated email.

What is the distinction between email automation and autonomous email

There are many examples of autonomous applications that are now commonplace, they cover a broad spectrum of applications from remote operation of equipment to predicting imminent consumer purchases. 

Autonomous email marketing, is a way is still email automation but goes further to use all the data on your site to identify and refine elements of your database to make the message pertinent, but the distinction goes much further. It identifies each individual consumer’s imminent wants, needs and desires, from the products you offer, ranked and presented precisely timed to align with that consumer. For email marketing it is called predictive personalisation software (PPS).

Deep dive: Propensity response models in predictive analytics.

PPS identifies imminent purchases based on previous buying history and perpetual impressions, and is verified by McKinsey, Forrester, Bain and Statista all renown research firms, to deliver a 20 fold increase in ROI greater than traditional email marketing and omnichannel marketing combined. Let us underlined that number: automatic email has been superceded by autonomous email as it outperforms it at a ration of 20:1. You will get twenty times the sales you are getting at the moment from automatic solutions.

Regardless of the vertical of ecommerce your concern is focused on, you already know marketing and promotions are cut-throat. Therefore not only is it essential to have software that competes at the highest-level against enormous competition, but most significantly, it needs to be cutting edge, and perpetually advancing, to stay ahead.

Hands-free personalisation for each individual customer 

It’s widely appreciated that personalising product selection for each consumer encourages an enormous level of additional income. Their loyalty delivers a hike in basket size (AOV), immediately, which converts as they now stay with you because you’re showing them what they want, into customer lifetime value (CLV). What is less appreciate is how much more powerful it is over automatic solutions, where you still need and must use some degree of human input.

Behind the scenes there are other PPS benefits. The rate of return (RoR) falls enormously, as it’s what they want rather than impulsive, or the wrong size, colour, fabric, cut, style etc. A machine learning algorithm doesn’t get the product selection wrong. It’s unique and personal to each individual consumer!

PPS uses data captured as each individual visits your site, including what they look at, return to most often, etc. It then aligns this with both that individual’s buying history and their perpetual purchases, to rank every SKU on your site in order of ones with the greatest likelihood of being imminently purchased by that person. 

Instead of waiting for consumers to buy specific products, promoting this season’s stock for example, PPS it uses a predictive analytics algorithm to work out what which products offer the greatest buying propensity for each individual consumer. There is no segmenting involved, besidesesonalization big data has made segmenting redundant.

Then, using a machine learning algorithm, it also calculates when that person is most likely to do so. At that precise moment it sends them their own unique email with their tastes, interests, likes , which delivers you the highest ROI possible. PPS is 100% autonomous software, that requires zero human input.

PPS is installed as a plugin, (approved by your respective platform) and gathers all the required website data you need, and then applies it in the most immediate and lucrative way possible. It uses the product details, images, language and currency you use. 

A free month’s trial of PPS is available, so you can begin reaping the rewards today.

SwiftERM is a Microsoft Partner company.