By Dean Ara

Why do MSPs need email marketing automation tools? There are a number of reasons. Overall, automating your marketing efforts enables you to deliver timely, targeted emails without the expense of a full-time marketing team. To be more specific, we’ve broken down the top three biggest selling features of email marketing automation tools for MSP marketers.

1.  Personalize Content to Target Prospects’ Unique Challenges

Email marketing automation tools, when implemented well, effectively leverage content to warm your leads and move them through the funnel by educating them about your services. However, high-converting content marketing is rooted in educating prospects about what you do and how you can help address their individual challenges.

Email marketing automation lets you deliver content targeted specifically to segments of your audience based on their:

What’s more, email marketing automation allows you to show prospects that you are paying attention to their unique needs and addressing those needs by educating them on how your services can help.

With email marketing automation tools, you can deliver highly-targeted content to your prospects to make them feel like your marketing is directed to them personally. According to a 2015 Aberdeen Group study, personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%.

In a dream world, every email would be hand-crafted to each prospect to increase the likelihood of capturing their interest. For busy MSPs, however, this is nothing but an unproductive fantasy. Fortunately, marketing automation is the next best alternative — giving you a manageable way to personalize each email interaction with every prospect and customer and in turn increasing your email marketing conversion rates.

2. Automate Content to Move Prospects Down the Sales Funnel

Email marketing automation is all about delivering content to the right people at the right time. Unlike one-to-one emails and one-off campaigns that you mass mail to an entire list of recipients at once, an automated campaign requires only the initial setup and will then automatically drip content to individuals when they meet specified trigger criteria.

A number of features of email marketing automation allow your business to do this — segmentation, drip email campaigns, and event-based triggers. By first outlining the problems faced by your customers in each stage of the buyer’s journey, you can automate content delivery, so your prospects receive content that is relevant to their stage of their journey at the most crucial moment.

For instance, you can set up event-based triggers that will automatically send content to a prospect when they demonstrate an action that is a fit with a particular stage in the buyer’s journey:

Let’s say your prospect has filled out a form on your website to download an ebook called “The Starter’s Guide to IT Outsourcing,” indicating he or she is likely in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. If your prospect later returns to the pricing page of your website, that signals that his initial interest in understanding potential solutions has progressed to choosing one solution and comparing his options (the decision stage).

Email automation event-based triggers allow you to capitalize on the shift in a prospect’s buying stage by sending that prospect an email with more content about your services right when they view your pricing page. This keeps you top of mind with your prospects and allows you to further persuade prospects at the exact moment they are thinking about their buying decision.

3. Analyze and Optimize to Hone Your Strategy

The age-old saying, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” couldn’t ring truer when looking at your marketing efforts. Data-driven email marketing automation tools provide robust metrics and reporting capabilities to help you understand what is working and what is not.

Your analytics can provide deep insights into your prospects’ behaviors to help you monitor the content they are most interested in and understand how you can better serve them. You’ll want to continuously evaluate your email marketing workflows to determine if you are sending the right number of emails in your drip campaign, are using the right cadence, or if there is a drop-off rate in the number of email opens or click-through rates for particular topics or individual emails.

Essentially, your email marketing analytics give you the ability to evaluate what content is attracting people to your services, what’s converting them to leads, and what convinces them to buy.

Don’t Have Time or Resources to DIY?

As an MSP, you have more than a handful of things competing for your limited time and resources — and finding the time to implement an email marketing automation solution might not currently be at the top of your list. Or maybe you’ve looked at the costs of implementing an in-house email automation solution and couldn’t quite stomach the bill.

You’re not alone. Many MSPs know they need email marketing automation tools but don’t have the resources to do it themselves. Fortunately, at Total Product Marketing, we’ve launched a new turnkey system called Five Pilots that provides a streamlined, cost-effective lead nurturing solution exclusively for MSPs.

Your business depends on generating leads, and we understand that most hustling MSPs don’t have the bandwidth or budget to house a full stack marketing team. Capitalizing on Total Product Marketing’s thorough understanding of complex Cloud and channel topics and proven expertise in inbound marketing, Five Pilots provides an affordable email marketing automation solution that nurtures your contacts and ensures that everything looks like it came from your brand.

With Five Pilots, you simply send your branding assets and a list of email contacts, and the rest is taken care of: premium content creation, automation, and measuring and reporting the results to deliver you piping hot leads. Find out firsthand how Five Pilot’s educational Cloud content can hook your leads and influence IT decision-makers — start your free no-commitment trial today.