Exploring the Power of Email Automation

Two-thirds of sales professionals believe that in 2024, most people in their role will rely on some kind of AI or automation technology.

So if you’re not currently taking advantage of email automation, you risk falling behind your rivals.

Ready to take your first steps in the world of email automation? You’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll answer questions like:

• What, exactly, is email automation (and what are the benefits)?

• How can you automate your existing cold email workflow?

• What are the best cold email automation tools for sales teams?

Let’s get into it…

What Is Email Automation?

Email automation is the process of sending emails triggered by the recipient’s actions and behaviors.

One of the most common use cases is a welcome email: when someone subscribes to your newsletter, you reach out to thank them for signing up and let them know what they can expect from your content.

Without automation, you’d have to manually email every single person who joined your newsletter. It’d be slow, inefficient, and dull.

Instead, you can automate the process, helping you deliver a smoother user journey while saving a bunch of time on repetitive, low-value tasks.

Email Automation vs Bulk Emails vs Drip Campaigns: What's the Difference?

The phrase “email automation” is often used as a catch-all term for any emails sent automatically, including things like drip campaigns and bulk email.

But while all those processes make it quicker and easier to send emails at scale, each is distinct. Let’s look at the differences:

• Email automation involves sending emails based on actions or triggers (like signing up for a newsletter).

• Bulk email involves sending the same email template to a large group of recipients at the same time (like an offer or product launch announcement).

• Drip campaigns involve sending a series of scheduled emails to nurture recipients toward conversion.

Timing is the main difference between these three campaign types. Because email automation is triggered by the recipient’s own actions, it typically feels more personalized, which makes it more engaging and persuasive.

What Is Email Automation for Sales?

Email automation is often used by marketers to trigger campaign types like welcome series and abandoned cart emails.

But email automation is also highly valuable from a sales perspective, especially when it comes to improving cold outreach performance.

Examples of Cold Email Automation

As a salesperson, you need to get a little creative to leverage the benefits of email automation.

Marketers have a ton of information about the people on their email list — which products they’ve viewed, which content they’ve interacted with, and more. But with cold outreach, you rarely know what actions your prospects are performing before sending the first email in a sequence. So automation is best used in sales follow-up emails.

For example, imagine you include a calendar link in one of your cold emails. You could then create two potential automated follow-ups: one triggered by the recipient booking a meeting, and the other reminding them to book a slot on your calendar.

5 Benefits of Sales Email Automation

Okay, so you have to get smart to take advantage of email automation for sales. But the rewards make it well worth the effort. Let’s consider five key benefits of sales email automation:

1. Save Time and Boost Sales Productivity

Did you know sales reps only spend about one-quarter of their time actually selling? The rest is taken up by things like deal management, data entry, and other admin.

Clearly, the more time reps get for revenue-generating activities like prospecting, reaching out to customers, and attending meetings, the more likely they are to hit quota.

So it makes sense to automate wherever you can (including email outreach).

2. Improve Cold Outreach Performance

The less time salespeople spend on building cold email campaigns, the more bandwidth they have to analyze results, run A/B tests, and optimize their approach.

Automation and AI can also help you get valuable context from your performance data, with three-quarters of sales professionals agreeing that it enables them to access insights they otherwise wouldn’t be able to find.

3. Send More Personalized Emails

Personalization is arguably the single biggest benefit of sales email automation.

When emails are triggered by the recipient’s own actions, they’re guaranteed to feel highly personal.

This has a major impact on performance, with one study revealing that emails featuring advanced personalization generate an average response rate of 17%, compared to 7% for non-personalized emails.

4. Enhanced List Segmentation

Email automation gives you greater scope to segment your prospect list based on actions and behaviors.

This makes your emails feel more engaging, which can lead to more opens, clicks, and replies.

5. Build Stronger Prospect Relationships

Better personalization and segmentation; more ability to analyze campaign data; more time for reps to spend on sales-related activities. Combined, the benefits of email automation allow your sales team to improve their messaging and focus more on nurturing relationships with prospects.

Which adds up to more engagement, sales, and revenue from your cold email campaigns.

How To Automate Your Cold Email Workflow in 6 Steps

Ready to get started with cold email automation? Here’s how to make it happen…

1. Choose a Cold Outreach Solution

You can’t just open Gmail or Outlook and instantly start sending automated emails.

First, you need to choose the right cold outreach platform for your business.

We’ll go into more depth on the best cold email automation tools in the next section. But we truly believe that for most businesses, the smart choice is to use QuickMail for email automation.

With QuickMail, building multi-step outreach campaigns is quick and easy.

Plus you can add conditional logic to sequences, allowing you to send different follow-ups based on the recipient’s actions.

2. Define Your Audience

Having chosen an outreach solution, it’s time to think about your audience.

What would make them buy your product or service? What concerns would stop them from converting? And how can you reassure them?

The better you understand the people you’re targeting, the easier it becomes to build automated email sequences that speak to their specific goals and pain points.

On the flip side, if you don’t know your audience, your emails will feel generic and unengaging.

3. Set Campaign Goals

Next, you need to define the specific goals for your automated email campaign.

Do you want prospects to download a piece of content? Book a product demo? Attend a webinar?

For best results, set SMART goals:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Achievable

• Relevant

• Time-Bound

So rather than simply attempting to increase webinar attendance, you could set a goal like: “Get 100 people to sign up for our next webinar by the end of June.”

That way, there’s no room for confusion about whether you’ve achieved your campaign objective.

4. Create Email Templates

Now that you know who you’re targeting and what you’re trying to achieve, you’ve got all the information you need to write engaging cold email templates.

Think about the best ways to leverage email automation in your campaign. For instance, you might create different follow-ups depending on whether a recipient does or doesn’t click a link or respond to a previous email.

Learn more: For more inspiration, check out our guide: Cold Email Automation: Best Practices and Examples.

5. Sense-Check and Test Your Workflow

Email automation is far more impactful than blasting all your recipients with the same generic messages.

But it’s also a little more complicated. So it pays to read through each step in your automated sequence to ensure everything makes sense.

If possible, preview your emails before hitting “send” to check that all personalized elements are populating correctly (hint: you can do this with QuickMail). Because you’re not going to generate many replies if your email starts with: “Hi {{first.name}}.”

6. Measure Results and Optimize

Your work doesn’t finish at the point when you launch a new campaign.

Be sure to check in regularly to see how your automated email sequence is performing against key metrics like opens, clicks, and replies.

QuickMail’s advanced analytics make it easy to access the in-depth insights you need to optimize your campaigns.

Because we track lead activities based on when an email was sent, you can clearly understand the impact of every email and keep on top of deliverability.

Plus our A/Z testing functionality helps you level-up performance by trialing different elements like subject lines, email introductions, and CTAs.

5 Best Cold Email Automation Tools for Sales

If you could only choose a single email automation platform, we’d recommend QuickMail every time.

But, in reality, you can use as many tools as you like. And you can see even more benefits from email automation if you combine multiple platforms.

With that in mind, we’ve rounded up five automation tools you should consider signing up for right now:

1. QuickMail

QuickMail is a cold outreach platform for building automated, omnichannel campaigns incorporating email, cold calling, LinkedIn, and SMS. Let’s take a look at some of QuickMail’s email automation functionality:

• Build email sequences with conditional logic so follow-ups are informed by your recipient’s actions.

• Automatically send all your outreach messages from top-performing email accounts, helping you generate more replies from fewer sends.

• Categorize email replies based on sentiment using QuickMail’s advanced AI.

• Trigger specific sub-campaigns based on reply sentiment.

• Handle unsubscribe requests automatically.

2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator is (probably) the world’s favorite prospecting platform, giving you access to 61+ million business accounts and more than one billion LinkedIn users. 

While it isn’t, strictly speaking, an automation tool in its own right, you can set up saved searches on Sales Navigator based on your own predefined criteria. Every week, LinkedIn sends you an email full of accounts and prospects that match your chosen characteristics.

3. MailFlow

Use MailFlow to automatically warm up new email accounts. Why? Because when you send from “warm” email addresses, your messages are more likely to reach the main inbox — which means you get more opens and replies.

(By the way, MailFlow is included as standard with all QuickMail plans.)

4. NeverBounce

Finding potential leads isn’t the end of the prospecting process. You also need to verify their contact details so you don’t end up with a ton of bounces (which will torpedo your deliverability).

NeverBounce makes it simple by automating your list-cleaning activity. Just connect the tool to your email provider and NeverBounce automatically runs daily verification checks.

5. Zapier

Zapier isn’t a standalone email automation solution. Instead, it connects all the different tools in your outreach tech stack, from your outreach platform to your CRM to LinkedIn.

And that’s just for starters. At the time of writing, Zapier offers over 7,000 apps for combining user interfaces, data tables, and logic, allowing you to automate even the most complex workflows.

Unlock the Power of Cold Email Automation With QuickMail

Cold outreach is still the most reliable way for B2B sales reps to find, reach, and convert buyers.

And when something is effective, you should do as much of it as possible.

That’s why smart sales teams invest in email automation software to help them scale their outreach and create more personalized, persuasive messaging.

Ready to discover the benefits of email automation?

Sign up for your free QuickMail trial!