What Is Email Automation?

Few marketing channels can compete with a well-designed, optimized email marketing strategy when it comes to reach, impact on customer engagement, and ROI, but not every email marketing program is set up for success.

Embracing email automation can take your email strategy to the next level, helping you respond to shifting customer behaviors and preferences in the moment.

Email automation is a process that helps brands create, send, and optimize marketing emails faster than ever—and it’s possible thanks to email automation tools like the Braze customer engagement platform.

In this guide we’ll walk you through both the process of email automation and some of the top email automation capabilities you need to know about.

What is email automation?

Email automation, also known as email marketing automation, is a type of marketing automation that, as the name suggests, automates some of the more manual tasks involved in creating, sending, and optimizing email campaigns.

Email automation examples

Some use cases of the most common ways brands leverage marketing automation as part of their email strategy include:

• Delivering timely nurture campaigns at key moments in the customer lifecycle, such as following a purchase or customer service interaction, to confirm and remind a customer about a reservation or appointment, to ask customers to rate a product or service they’ve recently used, to check in when they haven’t used a product or service in a while, etc.
• Automating the process of creating personalized email campaigns, such as using AI-personalized recommendations based on customers’ past interests and behaviors or relevant content based on their location, content in the user’s preferred language, and unique messages based on individuals’ activity and attributes
• Segmenting customers in real time based on their behavior, interests, and activity for targeted email campaigns, enabling in the moment, responsive emails that’s more likely to resonate and drive action.

10+ examples of automated email campaigns

Some of the most popular types of automated email campaigns marketers send across industries include:

Email automations for engaging new users

• Double opt-in campaigns: Emails that get sent to new subscribers confirming that they’d like to be added to your email list and prompt them to click a link to confirm their subscription.
• Welcome campaigns: Emails that welcome your newest customers or subscribers in real time.
• Onboarding campaigns: These guide your audience through using your company’s products and services and educate them about the benefits, value, use cases, and features.

Email automations for engaging active users

• Continue-your-streak campaigns: When members of your audience start—or continue a streak—with your brand, such as using your company’s app on a daily basis, this is the perfect opportunity to recognize and gamify this behavior, which is associated with strong engagement and loyalty over time.
• Upsell campaigns: When your customer has purchased something, you can follow up with relevant add-ons; these are common in eCommerce emails as well as in emails sent by restaurants, delivery apps, and travel and hospitality brands.
• Free-to-paid subscription campaigns: These can be sent to encourage free trial users to convert to becoming paying subscribers
• Year-in-review campaigns: These emails recap your customers’ key highlights and milestones from engaging with your brand or using your products or services over the past year

Email automations for engaging lapsing and churned users

• Abandoned shopping cart campaigns: Send these when users add items to their cart, but don’t complete their purchase; these are common in flows for eCommerce emails as well as for other verticals such as restaurants,delivery apps, and travel and hospitality
• Re-engagement campaigns: Also known as lapsing-user campaigns, these are messages you can send to check in when a customer shows signs of lapsing
• Win-back campaigns: These are emails you can send to already lapsed users to encourage them to come back and interact with your brand again

Examples of real brands that have used email automation as part of their customer engagement strategies

Email automation example in action: How Canva used email automations to dynamically personalize campaigns for their customers

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it was more important than ever for Canva to reach their audience with highly relevant information. They used Connected Content on the Braze platform to dynamically pull localized, translated content into their email campaigns. Because they had the right automation capabilities at their disposal, Canva was able to send language-personalized emails at scale while boosting open rates by 33% and increasing platform engagement rates by 2.5%.

Email automation example in action: How French carpooling platform BlaBlaCar used an automation to find the winner of an A/B test

BlaBlaCar had a simple goal for their A/B test: Drive higher open rates. To optimize their campaign, they launched a series of A/B tests in Canvas, gauging the impact of email sender name (i.e. a real person’s name “Mia” vs. “Aurelie” vs. “Julien” vs. the brand’s name “BlaBlaCar”) on engagement. By testing email sender names, BlaBlaCar was able to identify variants capable of increasing open rates by 20+%.

Email automation example in action: How dating app Happn used automations to successfully onboard their email marketing campaign subscribers

Dating app Happn was frustrated by high bounce rates and low open rates for their email campaigns. To make sure they were reaching their users’ correct email addresses in an engaging way, they added an automated in-app message to their onboarding flow asking for the user’s email. After users entered their address, Braze automatically triggered an email confirmation, followed by a welcome email. Users then received an onboarding email with instructions and screenshots walking them through how to use the app. The whole flow created an effective onboarding experience while also developing the relationship between Happn and its new users, boosting open rates by 3X and decreasing bounce rates by 42%.

What are the benefits of automated email campaigns?

Email marketing automations mean marketers can spend less time putting together email campaigns, manually sorting through and segmenting subscribers, and generating performance reports. And because email automation tools make real-time personalization possible at scale, brands are able to evolve beyond sending irrelevant campaigns and instead create highly targeted, interactive, and dynamic personalized email experiences that are more likely to resonate with users and can result in a higher ROI.

With email automations, brands get even more out of their email program leveraging today’s marketing automation tools to provide more appealing, more impactful email campaigns.

For instance, Braze research reveals that API-triggered messaging can result in a 34% uplift in conversions and API-triggered fulfillment campaigns are 2.4X more effective at driving customers to your company’s app or website.

How can I set up email marketing automations for my brand?

You can set up email marketing automations for your brand by using an email automation platform like Braze. These tools have features such as real-time triggers, dynamic personalization, intelligent automation, and next-best action capabilities, that do the work of creating unique, personalized email user journeys for each customer for you. You set up the workflows, and the email marketing automation tool scales your efforts across your segments and audience, so your users receive the right emails at the right time.

Wondering what email automation platforms are? Let’s dive into that topic next.

What are email automation platforms?

Email marketing automation platforms like Braze make it possible to build out, deploy, and manage email marketing campaigns faster by taking care of the manual tasks involved in creating email campaigns—which drives brands’ ability to engage and retain customers more efficiently.

For instance, instead of having to manually personalize an email for each recipient, email automation platforms can do things like address individual customers by their first names, send recommendations based on their past activity, trigger real-time campaigns in response to their actions and interests, tailor the campaign content based on their location or language, and send the campaign at the time each subscriber is most likely to engage using predictive AI—automatically (after your marketing team sets up these types of automations in the platform) and at scale.

Platforms with advanced generative AI features can also help email marketers cut production and analysis time by creating images and copy for campaigns, running automated content quality checks, and identifying segments which are most likely to convert.

What are some of the best tools to look for in an email marketing automation platform?

The most important features to look for in an email marketing automation platform are capabilities that allow your brand to personalize your emails in real time, send automated emails as part of seamless cross-channel campaign efforts, optimize campaigns for maximum relevance and performance in the moment, save marketers time, and engage with subscribers in ways that enhance the customer experience and increase customer lifetime value.

Features to look for:

• Automated message personalization: Enrich emails with relevant content, products, promotions, and recommendations informed by each recipient’s unique preferences and behaviors
• Automated optimization: Instantly optimize email campaigns and send subscribers messages that are most likely to drive the most engagement and conversions, whether it’s optimized timing, campaign selection, or channel filter
• Live customer profiles: This is a tool that brings the key details about your customers—such as their age, location, language, purchase history, loyalty status, affinities and preferences, and more—from across sources and auto-updates their customer profile in real time, in one central place
• Dynamic segmentation: Deliver emails to highly-specific, live-updating groups of your overall list based on custom attributes you define (e.g. by specific preferences and characteristics such as the customer’s location or last item purchased) to provide a more relevant, targeted experience
• Send-time optimization: Send emails during each user’s automatically-calculated high engagement windows to boost engagement
• Intelligent campaign selection: Automatically deploy the campaigns that are performing the best to more users, driving engagement
• Intelligent segmentation and targeting: Quickly create and compare segments based on performance metrics like session frequency, lifetime revenue, time since last purchase, etc.
• Triggered campaign capabilities: Send (or “trigger”) timely campaigns in the moment in response to user behaviors to keep your messaging relevant and encourage high-value actions when customers are primed to convert
• Frequency capping tools: These help marketers avoid over-messaging users by letting you set up parameters for automatically manage message frequency and volume, such as capping sends by channel, by campaign tag, or by segment
• Testing and optimization tools: Look for a platform capable of automating the process of running A/B tests or multivariate tests and applying insights from the tests in real time
• Cross-channel automation: For brands that engage their customers across channels, you’ll want to look for a platform that offers cross-channel automation so that the right messages are being deployed at the right time via the right channels based on individual preferences and engagement patterns
• Journey Orchestration Craft resonant customer journeys and cross-channel messaging experiences such as onboarding flows, nurture campaigns, win-back strategies, and more. With next-best actions, send perfectly-timed nudges or dynamic flows that adapt to and guide customers to take the next best action in their journey.
• Generative AI-powered automations: AI-powered copywriting assistants, image generators, content QA tools, segment builders, and more can help marketing teams save time by taking care of these tasks instantly

Email and email automation FAQs

What are some best practices for setting up an email automation strategy?

Some best practices for setting up an email automation strategy include:

• Gathering your business requirements from key stakeholders so you select an email marketing automation platform that provides the most value for the entire organization
• Selecting the best email automation platform that will meet your needs; this includes support for real-time personalization and cross-channel engagement
• Making sure to establish clearly defined goals in alignment with your business objectives
• Running campaign tests, analyzing the performance of your campaigns, and optimizing your campaigns in the moment to help ensure your auto emailing is achieving your desired impact when it comes to critical email marketing KPIs like open rates, click rates, conversion rates, and revenue per subscriber

What is the difference between email marketing automations and drip campaigns?

Drip campaigns are a type of email marketing automation. These campaigns are emails that can be set up to be sent to users when they take (or don’t take) a specific action or in response to known information about the user (such as their birthday, years of being a loyalty member, loyalty member level, etc.). Because these emails are sent out one at a time over time, such as over the course of days, weeks, months, or even years, they’re called “drips.” The examples of automated email campaigns brands commonly send that we listed above, including welcome and onboarding emails, abandoned shopping cart emails, and continue-your-streak campaigns, are examples of drip campaigns.

It’s important to note that while some email automation platforms may offer support for sending predefined drip campaigns, not all are capable of sending real-time dynamically segmented and personalized automated campaigns in the moment.

What are some need-to-know email deliverability best practices?

If you’re looking to succeed in email automation, measuring email delivery and understanding deliverability is critical. If your emails aren’t making it into the inbox, then your best email automation attempts will be futile. Our email deliverability guide gives an in-depth overview of the need-to-know email deliverability best practices. Some of these include:

• Always authenticating your emails
• Using permissions-based marketing
• Keeping users engaged and having a strategy for re-engaging inactive users
• Monitoring and adjusting your strategy based on deliverability performance
• Sunsetting lapsed subscribers

Why is implementing cross-channel marketing automation important?

Automated email campaigns have the power to help brands generate revenue and create loyalty. One of the best ways to enhance your existing email program is to reach your customers on other channels where they are also likely to engage with your brand. Braze has found that using the right combination of channels in your campaigns can significantly increase engagement.

Forward Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in the Braze Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended October 31, 2024, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on December 10, 2024, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.