• by Dianna Dilworth , December 3, 2019

Email automation can make an email program more effective at scale. At a session during our Insider Summit Europe earlier this year, leading brands including Rakuten, KPN and New Skool Media talked about how bringing automation into their email programs helped them be more efficient even with a small staff.

We knew marketing automation could help us to reach all of those people in their journeys with only a few people [on our team] and throughout this technique it makes it possible for us to send 10 million emails a month,” said Leonie Bakker, manager of marketing automation at New Skool Media.

Eva Schneider, CRM Manager at Rakuten Deutschland, is the only person on her CRM team, so automation is core to being effective. She set up a series of automated email campaigns so that she could focus on optimization.

For instance, she created a re-buy campaign for certain products that people buy regularly. The site has millions of products, and this works for items that are likely to be replaced regularly. 

“If somebody buys pet food, they will likely buy the same pet food again in a month,” she explained. So the company set up a regular pet food email stream to clients that have made such purchases.   

Marketing automation requires increased skill sets and cross team collaboration. For Dutch telecommunications firm KPN, that required training brand marketers in data skills and analysts in marketing. 

“It is getting more more important that they understand each other and can work together,” said Hans Groen, manager of email marketing and marketing automation at KPN. “The marketing manager started with changing the title of his department from marketing to ‘digital marketing’ and after that, he has trained all of his people in this.”

Learn more from leading European brands at our next Brand Insider Summit Europein Kitzbuhl, Austria 3-6 February.