What is Email Automation?

As businesses grow, building and maintaining relationships with partners, prospects, employees, customers, and leads becomes increasingly complex. It’s not uncommon for certain high-value communications to slip through the cracks or for important follow-up tasks to be forgotten in the hustle and bustle of day-to-day business operations. Software solutions that offer automated email outreach features can help address these challenges.

Benefits of email automation

Email automation can improve how businesses interact with their customers and target audience. Here are three of the biggest benefits of email automation:

It enables personalized customer engagement 

Automated outreach provides a wealth of opportunities for businesses to engage with their customers — sometimes, it’s as simple as reaching out with a birthday wish or sending an old customer a promotional email that entices them back to the service. Email automation makes this easy and efficient. 

It empowers users to stand out from the crowd in saturated markets

In already saturated markets, any business strives to stay top-of-mind. Email automation makes it easy to interact consistently with customers and stay ahead of competitors who might neglect customer engagement. 

It minimizes repetitive and time-consuming tasks

Email is the default communication tool for many business users, but managing incoming and outgoing emails can be overwhelming. Users can develop more efficient workflows by automating this time-consuming regular communication.

Features of email automation

Numerous software providers can help automate email — but not all services are created equal. Some features are of higher value to business users. Here are the top capabilities to keep an eye out for when attempting to automate email communications: 

• Automated email outreach: Automated email outreach allows businesses to automatically send targeted emails to their audience at scale without manual intervention.
• Automated email creation: This feature helps users automatically design professional email templates and dynamically populate them with personalized content.
• Automated email send and reply: The automated email send and reply feature sends emails on a set schedule or when a specific trigger event occurs and replies to certain incoming messages with predefined responses.
• Automated inbox management: Using automation to eliminate manual, time-consuming inbox organization and classification tasks.

What is email outreach?

Email outreach is the strategic process of sending customized emails to targeted audiences with the goal of increasing brand visibility or driving specific actions, such as booking sales meetings, promoting marketing offers, or driving engagement with a brand.

Best practices for using automated email outreach

Email outreach can be an extremely effective conversion tool if used correctly. These best practices will help you make the most of your email outreach efforts:

1. Understand your target audience

Various audiences have differing preferences for what they want to receive in their inboxes. Some customers might be interested in promotional material, while others might want updates on a brand’s latest products or services. Understanding your audience’s preferences and tailoring your email content is important. 

2. Determine the best outreach methods

Email outreach can come in different forms. If your business produces content such as blog posts or podcasts, emails can effectively alert your customers to the latest material available to them. Customers may respond to emails differently, depending on their content preferences. You should always evaluate the assets in your arsenal and use email communication to ensure these resources reach your customers at the right time. 

3. Decide on the frequency of outreach

While email outreach can effectively reach many people quickly, it must be done with restraint. Sending too many emails can lead to customers unsubscribing from your list or ignoring your most important marketing messages. 

Experience automated email outreach with Nylas Email API

Nylas Email API allows developers to easily access data and functions offered by different email service providers (ESPs)—all in one API. Developers can quickly build multiple integrations into a single application without extensive development periods, considerable maintenance, and poor user experiences.

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Benefits of automating email outreach with an API 

Instead of manually configuring outreach for each email provider or customer segment, developers should use an API to automate time- and resource-intensive tasks. Here are some of the most common benefits of automating email outreach with an API:

1. Native integration with multiple email providers – Developers often spend months building specific integrations for individual email providers such as Google, Microsoft, and Applel. A universal API simplifies this by allowing developers to access data from multiple email providers through one integration . 

2. Reduced lead time from ideation to production – Once a developer has received their brief on what an application or feature should look like, they’re under pressure to deliver on time. An API significantly reduces development time and alleviates strain on stretched development teams. 

3. Lower compliance burden on the developer – Privacy and security concerns have prompted legislators to introduce increasingly stringent regulations. Developers spend a lot of time learning about and adapting to these laws. Using an API, developers can offload this responsibility to the API provider while still giving users all the security features they need. 

4. Faster email delivery speed – Email APIs reduce the communication required between servers before emails are sent out. This allows a large number of emails to be sent out quickly. When using HTTP, firewalls are less likely to block emails, ensuring improved bulk email deliverability. 

5. Greater statistical insight on key performance indicators such as email deliverability, open rate, and unsubscribed – An email API helps businesses consolidate important information about the effectiveness of their email outreach program. With an API, developers can easily view and report statistics such as email deliverability, open rate, and unsubscribe rates so businesses can adjust their strategies if the desired results are not achieved. 

Automated email outreach use cases

Automated email outreach can be used in a variety of contexts and situations. Almost any business can benefit from communicating with its customers more regularly. Visit our automated email outreach use case page to learn more.

How to add automated email outreach to your app

Follow these four steps to easily add automated email outreach functionality to your business application: 

Step 1: Register for an API Key

The first thing you should do is register for an API Key. This is often free and allows you to start building your application immediately. 

Step 2: Integrate the API into your application

Once your application is created, you can use Nylas API to integrate the automated outreach feature. 

Step 3: Set access authorization for your application

User authentication is critical. There are two ways you can include it: hosted and native authentication. If you prefer to offload authentication to Nylas, opt for hosted authentication. If you want to customize the entire authentication process, choose native authentication. 

Step 4: Monitor usage and performance

Like any other software, the email outreach feature should be regularly evaluated. Developers should monitor usage to ensure that emails are being sent out in accordance with the users’ requests. If any usage issues occur, developers should also be ready to troubleshoot and resolve these issues in a timely manner. 

Target your audience more effectively with Nylas

Scale is crucial when conducting email outreach. Once you’ve built an email outreach tool, your users will expect that their emails reach their customers’ inboxes, not spam. Nylas guarantees near-perfect deliverability while removing the need to integrate with individual email providers or leverage a third-party IP.

If you want to learn how Nylas can help you deliver advanced automated email outreach features to your customers, request a free demo or claim your free API key and start building for free.