The Importance of Email Marketing Automation: How Campaign Monitor Makes it Easy to Boost Conversions

TL; DR: Campaign Monitor empowers small-to-medium-sized retailers with email marketing, automation tools, and strategies that can expand their reach and boost conversions. Rich customer journeys can quickly be created and automated to make the most of each correspondence. From beautiful designs to tracking email clicks in real-time, Campaign Monitor can make a company’s email campaigns far more effective without having to expand the marketing department. And with an eye always looking at the future, Campaign Monitor is constantly upgrading functionality to help businesses capitalize on email marketing trends.

Rip Curl is a surfing sportswear brand that is recognized around the globe. From its headquarters in Torquay, Australia, to the sands of Laguna Beach, California, Rip Curl is incredibly popular with anyone who wants to be associated with the surfer lifestyle — or just wear comfortable, trendy clothes to the beach.

While the company has a global reach, its marketing team is as lean as one of the world champion surfers it sponsors. That is how Rip Curl keeps its edge — and its personality. But even with a lean staff, an internationally known company needs to engage in cutting-edge marketing.

Rip Curl enlisted Campaign Monitor, the simple but sophisticated email marketing and automation platform, for help in connecting with customers through their inboxes. The results have delighted not only Rip Curl, but fans all over the world who are getting beautiful emails tailored to their desires.

“They were really using Campaign Monitor to punch above their weight,” Sateja Parulekar, Head of Product Marketing at Campaign Monitor, told us. “They are competing with global brands, but doing it with a smaller team and using email campaigns to drive revenue.”

Campaign Monitor can help any business, not just globally recognized brands. Its drag-and-drop templates make it easy to send beautiful emails that grab the reader’s attention — whether it be a potential customer or a returning one.

Building a memorable email campaign doesn’t need to be difficult. A retailer could easily overthink a design and have the product or service get lost in a sea of graphics and links. With Campaign Monitor, sleek simplicity leads to a more compelling correspondence. Its designs all include prominent places for photos that grab the attention of the reader and a place to include a decisive call to action.

Campaign Monitor has a series of free templates to choose from, or a company can make custom templates to personalize its marketing. The free templates can be used to begin a campaign immediately and are separated into categories so a company can pick one and begin adding its own personality.

Beyond the popular featured templates, Campaign Monitor has specific emails already set up for announcements, newsletters, deals and offers, feedback, and events. A Campaign Monitor tutorial shows step-by-step how easy the platform is to use, as a campaign for Converse is set up in minutes.

Images and company logos can be dragged right into the template from a desktop, and text can be entered directly onto the screen. A call-to-action button can be placed anywhere on the screen, as well, and adjusted in color, size, and font. The templates are optimized for mobile, too, and a split screen shows a preview of how the email will show up on a desktop browser or a mobile device.

Campaign Monitor believes each email has a purpose, both for the customer and the business, and each email campaign must stand out in three areas to drive return on investment.

1. The email should be personalized by using what a retailer knows about the recipient.

“That means incorporating where that customer lives, their gender, and their interests,” Sateja said. “Using that data to form what goes into the email is key for conversion rates.”

That personalization speaks to the consumer right when they open the email and allows them to feel more familiar with a brand.

2. The content should be focused and contain a key marketing message. The company can promote other interests that the customer has within that campaign, but the branding should stay consistent.

When Rip Curl sends an email campaign out about a wetsuit, it isn’t loaded with musings on which surfboard it would pair best with. It is focused on one thing: the product. How much it weighs, how it feels, and what makes it better than others.

3. Useful reporting is needed after the email is sent to enhance future campaigns and keep the momentum going. With Campaign Monitor’s analytics, a company sees what type of call to action is working for its audience and which promotions are most effective.

All of Campaign Monitor’s offerings are aimed to accomplish these three goals for a business. With an intuitive interface and smart automation tools, it is making these jobs easier, too.

Despite creating beautiful, targeted emails, Campaign Monitor’s hallmark is truly its simplicity. Large companies with huge marketing teams have always put together grand campaigns to target their customers, but Campaign Monitor can create a stunning, powerful email campaign with a team of one.

A host of other functions — created with simplicity in mind — set Campaign Monitor apart, especially its customer journey automation tools. A set of customizable automation tools to continue to engage the customer and drive conversion even after the email is sent.

“Our journey designer is built to bring powerful enterprise-level marketing automation to small-and-medium-sized businesses,” Sateja told us. “Define the data, the rules, and the content and you’re set.”

Campaign Monitor can take one connection and create an entire personalized journey for a customer based on their interests and interactions with the brand. A business can convert first-time customers into repeat customers by automatically sending them an email with a deal on their next purchase.

Conditions can be set to email a customer three days after their purchase with an offering of personalized items based on gender, location, or past purchases.

List customization is another time-saving feature included with Campaign Monitor. Pick from a list of previously added customer email addresses, drag and drop a spreadsheet of contacts directly into the dashboard, or choose a list from over 260 integration partners, including Salesforce and WordPress.

After the campaign has been sent, a suite of reporting tools gives a company even greater insights into customer interaction with its brand. A map shows where emails are being opened and how the recipient is engaging with them in real time. This data is used to create in-depth reports on every aspect of the campaign’s effectiveness, down to the percentage of recipients who clicked on a particular button.

Robust reports help companies see which campaigns, and specific aspects, are most effective. Campaign Monitor integrates these tools into the platform and makes them easy for small businesses to implement. The company is also focused on adding new features to enhance the customer experience and embedding best practices into its product so that it is always evolving with retailers.

Once Rip Curl caught the Campaign Monitor wave, the company rode it to success. This was especially evident when rolling out its Bombshell line of women’s wetsuits. Rip Curl Global Creative Director James Taylor credited Campaign Monitor’s emails, saying they “turned our Bombshell wetsuit into a global phenomenon.”

But Campaign Monitor believes access to that kind of email power isn’t just for corporations with massive marketing budgets, it can work for every business, which is why it is actively working on new features and integrations to move email marketing forward.

The focus is always on making the customer journey even more responsive and predictive. Whether that is embedding best practices to make sure a retailer captures information relevant to them or working on seamless video integrations, the company is always moving forward.

Making beautiful emails more accessible has always been Campaign Monitor’s objective. With over 2 million customers at 200,000 companies, it is definitely achieving that goal.