![customer journey through automated email](https://static.gosquared.com/images/liquidicity/20_01_22_Customer_Journey/20_01_22_Walking_01@2x.png)
We like to think about the big picture. And in our business that means the full customer journey, right from the moment someone checks out our Blog and decides to follow along, through to the point when a customer decides it’s time to leave.
One of the reasons we decided to focus on building an automation tool is because it’s useful throughout the entire customer journey. It’s hard to find a tool that can work harder for you, and your customers, across such a wide range of scenarios and mindsets.
It makes sense then, to talk about email automation against the backdrop of the customer journey. We’re going to show you how email automation can help to grow your business, provide better customer service, and even influence what you choose to build.
1. Discovering your brand
![customer journey stage one](https://static.gosquared.com/images/liquidicity/20_01_22_Customer_Journey/20_01_22_One_01@2x.png)
The first step is building up an email list. Don’t be tempted to buy email addresses or trick anybody in any way into giving you their email address. It’s against the rules, it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t work. When someone enjoys your content you won’t need to trick them into handing over their email address – they’ll be glad to do so.
Do it the slower, organic way, and the results will be worth it.
For the sake of this post, which is focusing on email automation, we are going to assume you already have a well-designed website, that you understand your audience, can see how many people are coming to your site, and that you have a blog or website which gets organic traffic.
If any of those statements aren’t true, then there’s plenty of posts on this site that will help you get to this starting point.
Now you’re set up with the basics, the first step for using email automation to grow your business is to collect those email addresses.
How to get someone’s email address
![](https://static.gosquared.com/images/liquidicity/20_01_22_Customer_Journey/20_01_22_Email_01@2x.png)
Before you start collecting email addresses, make sure you have a system for storing them. With the importance of data privacy and data protection, it’s best to use a mailing list or database that has these protections built-in.
Newsletter
![running a newsletter](https://static.gosquared.com/images/liquidicity/20_01_22_Customer_Journey/20_01_22_Newsletter_01@2x.png)
We’ve been running the GoSquared Weekly newsletter for over 200 weeks. We have tens of thousands of subscribers who are a mix of current and past customers, and blog readers. It’s where we share our latest blog posts, our favourites from the archives, and the best of what we’ve read from the internet that week.