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Yet while automation gives brands the opportunity to send those marketing emails, nurturing subscribers on a consistent basis without a human needing to do it each day, there is a level of detachment automation feels automated. The easiest way to alleviate the fear of automated emails being too automated, however, is to establish email funnels that do the trick for you, run via automation, but still feel warm, human, and personalized. This article will detail how to do just that with your subscribers.

The Benefits of a Humanized Email Funnel

A humanized email funnel does much more for you than an automated experience. By making and sending emails sound as if a human is creating them and sending them instead of over-scripted and robotic mechanics, your subscribers pay attention. They've already trusted you enough to build a relationship with them via your brand, and they want to stay on your list as you've solidified a human connection for an extended period. This fosters better relationships and conversion rates. Enhance Your Email Deliverability Rate by combining this human tone with proper technical practices, ensuring your well-crafted messages consistently reach inboxes. Therefore, this mentality will only benefit your email marketing strategy on a larger scale and allow for much deeper audience engagement.

Automated Emails with Conversational Copy Will Always Sound More Human

The best way to ensure that automated emails sound more human is to use conversational copy. Write like you speak or how you would sound ideally talking to a friend or family member. Humanized greetings, awesome synergies, and appropriate engagement without sounding forced or overly processed are key. Avoid overly stiff text and anything that sounds like jargon for it will turn people off in a heartbeat. Copy that is best optimized for conversation is the easiest way for subscribers to conceptualize a more humanized experience despite the fact that the messages will be automated.

Beyond Just Their Name

Personalization is critical when it comes to making automated messages more human and it's vital to focus on more than just their first name. Use all additional data points from past purchases, browsing history, interests, etc., and fields about what they've engaged with before. This develops highly relevant content that makes them feel special. The more products you suggest, the more emails you send, and friendly reminders you give based on what you've learned about them over time, the more they'll see you as relatable. All of this transforms automated experiences into humanized ones.

Using Behavior-Based Triggers as Time-Based Emails

Nothing feels more responsive and time-based than behavior-based triggers, which is exactly what a humanized email funnel needs. If emails are triggered based on behavior shopping cart abandonment, downloads, repeat views, consistent site visits then it makes the funnel feel naturally responsive to the intention of the subscriber. Therefore, subscribers appreciate receiving relevant correspondence that they received at the time of action suggested to them. It makes for a humanized approach to what is otherwise a successfully automated process. The more a subscriber views the experience as authentically human, the better their experience will be as well multifold open rates and click rates indicate that this worked beautifully.

Adding Emotional Intelligence to Your Customer Journey

Emotional intelligence can be added to a funnel by predictively attempting to understand how the customer may feel at different points and catering to that emotional reaction. For example, someone may feel excited when they first subscribe; however, after one or two intro emails, they may feel confused or uncertain about how to proceed; ultimately, at a successful purchase with your brand, they may feel ecstatic. Use these emotional responses to your advantage with specific email triggers that help reassure, supplement, and celebrate such feelings. The more you emotionally react to predicted human responses, the more your sequences will resonate and allow subscribers to feel understood and important.

Using Storytelling as a More Human-Like Approach

Humans respond well to storytelling and love sharing their stories in a variety of formats. Therefore, if automated emails can include a storytelling component or better yet, a trigger related to such storytelling, these become far more relatable and human-like to subscribers. For example, if someone triggers a sequence because they share an experience or story about the brand, allow that person to relate even better to your cause and relive their journey through your automated process. Emails filled with narrative, rather than only informational updates, allow people to get excited for their next delivered email, anticipating it with much greater excitement. Therefore, it's a lot easier to create a more human-like approach this way, leading to many more opportunities for engagement.

Reducing an Unnatural, Awkward Email Frequency

Part of maintaining a humanized effort is ensuring that an otherwise unnatural email frequency is detrimental to success. Of course, if you're over-emailing and sending what feels like automated efforts on a strict policy schedule, people will feel frustrated and oversaturated. But if you're not emailing frequently enough, people forget about you. Find a frequency that comes across naturally based on feedback and expected expectations. A reasonable schedule and spacing of efforts will keep engagement without overwhelming subscribers. A comfortable frequency will make your automation campaign time-sensitive, expected, and appreciated.

Creating Real Subscriber Engagement and Interaction

The best way to ensure your email automation is humanized is to create real subscriber engagement that makes it more than just an email they receive. Encourage subscribers to respond; pose questions within the email for them to answer so you get to hear their responses or lamentations. Asking for real feedback shows them that you're not just another company with another campaign, but rather that you see them as individual human beings (not just percentages and stats), and this goes a long way toward fostering a human response. Inviting interactivity builds trust, solidifies relationships, and further humanizes your automated efforts.

Monitoring and Reevaluating Funnels Based on Communication Reaction from Subscribers

You'll never truly know what's working for your subscribers unless you're monitoring and assessing their reactions consistently. Therefore, one of the greatest ways to continuously humanize your automated funnels is to monitor and assess reactions from your subscribers all along the way. Maintain checks on open rates, response rates, clicks, and more to assess emotionally where your subscribers lie with your automated efforts. If you find certain topics are avoided like the plague with low open rates, take that into consideration and pivot that feedback to adjust content appropriately. This educated guess helps your efforts feel more like art than science, keeping the human factor at the forefront for ultimate engagement gains and sustained funnel success.

Imagery That Promotes Emotional Reaction

The way visual assets emotionally appeal to subscribers impacts the entire experience from exposure to automated email. For example, images support the emotional appeal you want to create. Real images, real people, real scenarios, and believable situations always come across better than stock images that are too professional or too unrealistic. Stock images can feel too detached and contrived sometimes for true authenticity and if you can get the right images, it's better to support an emotional appeal than work against it. Imagery with intention promotes an emotional appeal that gives the subscriber a personal connection, thus integrating the intention behind the automated email as more personal.

Teaching Your Team About Humanization With Automation

When humanization efforts are documented and taught to your marketing team, it ensures that all elements across all campaigns are humanized as such. Teach your team how to write authentically, how to leave their own little notes to each subscriber via data for personalization, how to trigger based on their actions, how to create emotional leads, etc. A team of in-the-know professionals all making similar decisions allows for the best creation of automated email funnels that will excel in successive response metrics. An educated team will consistently advocate for the blend of humanization and automated efforts for better success.

Evaluating Success of Humanization After The Fact

Evaluate your success in humanization of your automated email funnels after the fact to showcase strategic success. Subscriber retention rates, increases in lifetime customer value, increased stability of engagement, and overall campaign ROI paint a better picture over time. Successfully justifying value this way inspires continued investment in tactics for humanization of automated email funnels since it proves how important connections multiple times can be. Evaluating effectiveness after the fact empowers marketers to remember the importance of recipient personality and value over time and how much they can mean with automated emails.

Use AI and Automation Tools with Human Interventions

AI and automation tools allow for fast, effective, personalized, and timely communications. However, the greatest way to ensure that even email remains as human as possible and empathetic is to use a human intervention strategy. Everything that automation can do can be balanced out by human insight through reading AI and automated recommendations for empathetic language, casual tone, and relevance. The more human interventions occur at well-placed intervals, the more the automation process will complement rather than compromise authentic relationships and result in a truly human experience via email.

Honesty and Transparency Create Trust

The easiest way to humanize an automated funnel is to embrace honesty and transparency. Let them know what they're getting, why they're receiving it, and how you plan to use their information. By writing in an authentic, transparent voice, your audience is that much more likely to open your emails and be responsive to your message. Therefore, avoiding potential pitfalls with transparency and addressing your intentions with honest communication throughout the funnel builds a positive, trusting relationship.

Use Segmentation to Create Personal Relationships

There's nothing quite like receiving a message clearly intended for you. Segmentation allows marketers to send certain content that's accepted under certain conditions from and to specific subscribers. Segmentation can take place by demographic data, interests, behaviors, etc., and when an automated funnel can provide information to someone under clearly defined intentions whether for financial purposes or personal gains the subscriber appreciates the intent and that the brand cares about them personally in comparison to others. This furthers the emotional bond and perceived authenticity of the email, ensuring better subscriber response rates within the automated email funnel.

Creating Human-Like Timing for Automated Emails

If you're going to drip schedule emails, do so in a manner where it appears that humans communicate at non-scheduled, imperfect intervals. For example, don't have your emails go out at 1 PM every other day for three days. That's too much of a schedule and sounds robotic. However, if you send an email at a certain time and day responding to someone's previous email or a purchase on your website, that's helpful and human. Therefore, using the scheduled drip technique to drip someone based on their actions is permitted, for it becomes a naturally scheduled occurrence that feels much more personal than automated and this makes a difference for invested subscribers.

Conclusion: Balancing Automation and Authenticity

Developing an automated email funnel that feels human comes from the marketing need to find that balance between what the power of such automated technological choices can afford and the real human engagement that emotionally connects with subscribers. The gains to be had from automation alone are huge: marketers can scale communication, they can send at appropriate times and lessen the burdens of redundancies. However, when automation goes too far or veers to a numerically impersonal stance, it does the opposite, creating space where there should be intimacy and making subscribers feel less like a valued member of the brand community and more like a number.

However, this can be addressed by adding research findings into human engagement as part of the automated funnel. For example, unnecessary human engagement can be replaced by strategic findings that promote conversational messaging style, emotional intelligence, and appropriate personalization that make the automated funnel successful as if it were human. When discussing how to make email less automated and more human, a conversational messaging style allows for emails to be automatically sent in a naturally engaging way as one would transfer this type of communication to a friend or trusted colleague. 

An automated sender can do the same. In addition, emotional intelligence as part of an automated funnel makes sense to acknowledge where someone is at on an emotional level receiving the right message at the right time sounds humanistic, but it's true; people engage more successfully with automated content when it reflects their current reality.

Thus, over time, this email funnel that I would create would allow for subscribers to receive automated email communications that most assuredly felt all too real because of the human elements blended with automated action over time. They connect better to the brand and feel of value much more, over time breeding trust and loyalty because ultimately, good marketing relies upon making people feel good about themselves and their decisions. Therefore, marketing funnels that make people feel good about themselves and their decisions will yield better campaigns and better subscriber relationships over time for effective marketing measures in the long run.