What is the most efficient way to personalize your emails? The answer lies in the email automation process. Automated or triggered emails help you send tailored messages to the right person, at the right time.
Using automated emails to enjoy the benefits of personalization might sound a paradox. These emails are sent when a particular event on your website triggers them. The relevance of these triggered messages gives the illusion of personal touch.
What are Triggered Emails?
Triggered emails are fired by specific actions taken by website visitors. This automated process is also called behavioural marketing automation. It allows marketers to send automated messages based on the user’s behaviour. These emails are successful because they are timely and highly relevant to the recipient. Essentially, trigger marketing is based on a series of events.
Trigger-based emails must be part of your email marketing strategy. Thanks to sophisticated targeting, you can build trust with customers and make sure you don’t leave any money on the table.
Another benefit is that automated emails help you with the operational tasks, so there is no need to send invoices or confirmation emails one by one, for instance. You can be more efficient and use your resources more wisely as well.
Trigger email types:
- Welcome emails: This type of email reaches the inbox when a user completes the subscription process and automatically joins your mailing list. A welcome email usually sounds thankful, engages the recipient, and promises more value in the future.
- Reactivation emails: These emails intend to bring back customers who haven’t shown any sign of engagement during a relatively long period. Reactivation emails ask to start the communication over and remind what value the subscriber gets from the company. In case reactivation emails don’t work, it’s a good practice to remove inactive subscribers from the mailing list.
- Abandoned shopping cart emails: When subscribers like a product, add it to the shopping cart without confirming the purchase, they receive an abandoned shopping cart email. This type of trigger email aims to help leads with decision making and turns them into customers.
- Transactional emails: This type of emails is used to confirm a purchase, order, or payment. Transactional emails are a way to ensure the customer that you received their payment, and their product is on the way to the recipient.
- Birthday emails: These are emails that companies send to celebrate a subscriber’s birthday. To make this possible, gather users’ birth dates in the subscription forms or the footer of an email.
What is the Difference between Triggered and Marketing Emails?
Marketing emails aim to promote products, whereas triggered emails reassure the recipients that a certain process has been started or finished.
Although you can use triggered emails for upselling as well, the ultimate goal isn’t selling, but rather providing information to the recipients. An email triggered marketing campaign means better email marketing retention rates, increased customer engagement, improved click-through rates, and overall higher customer satisfaction.
Here are some other benefits of trigger emails:
- Delight your Customers
Sending triggered emails ensures the customers that you care about informing them promptly.
- Nurture your Leads
The recipients might not be ready to buy now but nurturing them every now and then and providing them with relevant information could help them become customers later on.
- Increase Customer Retention
It’s five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than keeping the current customers. Re-engagement emails help you reactivate inactive users.
- Reduce time on Operational and Repetitive Emails
As mentioned above, an automated emailing process helps you reduce the number of operational tasks. It’s especially useful if you have a small team.
- Building Trust with your Customers
Living up to the customer’s expectations builds trust.
A Study shows that triggered emails receive 70.5% more opens than other types of emails. This number is pretty convincing.
Why are Triggered Emails so Efficient?
The reason why these emails are successful is that the recipients expect these emails. When they hit the “Subscribe“, “Buy“, or “Download the E-book” buttons, the users assume that you will be sending an email to reassure them about the process.
Not sending a welcome email could imply that the subscription process wasn’t successful.
A customer who just placed an order on you ecommerce website would be concerned if they didn’t receive the order confirmation email in the next couple of minutes. They would wonder what happened and might get in touch to see if their order went through.
This is an unpleasant experience for the customer and adds unnecessary pressure to your customer service team as well. You can use your time and money more efficiently.
Why Do You Need Time to Turn Leads Into Customers?
Most people visiting your website are just not ready to purchase anything. They might be browsing your site because they are bored or maybe they actually want to buy something but got distracted and left your website without checking out.
It’s also possible that the visitors are still comparing your product with a competitor’s product. You still have a chance to convert them though.
You need to think about your nurturing strategy to move these prospects into the conversion funnel. Optimize your shopping cart recovery email or educate the recipients about your product. Once the recipient needs your service or product, they’ll remember you, as you’ll be on the top of their mind thanks to the series of on boarding emails you sent them.
How to Send Personalized Automated Triggered Emails?
Before you start designing the email flow based on assumptions, stop for a moment. Think through the customer journey and the scenarios you need to cover.
- Ask the relevant questions when signing up new people to your email list
For example, you can ask about their job role or age. This information is priceless when it comes to segmentation.
- Use Personalization Tokens and Techniques
Use the recipient’s first name to make your email more personal. Use the data available to tailor your message to them. Make sure your email is relevant to the recipients concerning life cycle stage and product as well. Active Trail put together this very informative infographic about Email Personalization Statistics and their impact on sales, revenues and email marketing metrics.
- Track Website Visitor Behaviour
If the reader stayed on a particular landing page quite long, it’s a good indicator that they are interested in a specific topic or item. Customize a deal for this person and send a special offer to them.
How to Set Up your Automated Behaviour Email Campaign?
Build an effective triggered email framework
Setting the conditions for when to send triggered emails might seem easy, but it can quickly become confusing if you don’t plan ahead.
To start with, you need to build the right trigger email strategy. There are three main key points you need to think about if you want your triggered email campaign to be successful:
- The Timing of your triggered on boarding emails: You need to determine which automation triggers are the most relevant to your goals, and which play an important role in your marketing metrics.
- The Trigger Email Copy: You need to determine which information is the most relevant to your recipients. It’s important to find the balance between what the customer needs to read and what you need to communicate in terms of features and benefits of your product or service.
- The Trigger Email Design: It’s crucial that your recipients are able to read your email, no matter what device or email client they are using. In order to design responsive email templates, you can use a professional email template builder. You can craft a beautiful email from scratch within minutes thanks to its flexible drag’n’drop editor. Or you can simply choose and edit one the pre-designed, mobile friendly email templates.
How to Plan a Triggered Email Campaign?
The best way to design your triggered campaign is to use flowcharts to visualize the process. It’s easier to digest the information and understand how different scenarios can fire different messages. This email workflow visualization below is an exceptional example of a triggered email flow chart. This trigger email chart breaks down the campaigns into 4 weeks. You can quickly scan it and see what actions trigger specific emails.
Depending on how the recipient has engaged or not engaged with your email, you can schedule your next emails. The recipients who opened the first email, clicked, and subscribed would receive a loyalty email on the fourth week.
Those who opened the email and clicked but didn’t subscribe or abandoned the subscription process would receive a second email with an extra incentive on the second week.
Subscribers who didn’t even open your email would receive another email with a different subject line.
Trigger Email Best Practices and Tips
- Create though-out automation
- Try different trigger emails for different purposes
- Make your message clear
- Create subject lines according to the trigger action
- Segment subscribers
Create though-out automation:
Make automation work for you, so your trigger emails will be logical and to the point. Monitor the statistics of your campaigns and run A/B tests to achieve better results.
Try different trigger emails for different purposes:
Examine the opportunities of your email marketing campaigns. Be flexible and try various trigger emails if you have enough time and resources. The higher-quality trigger emails you send to the point, the better the buyer journey will be.
Make your message clear:
The email inbox is not the right place for long philosophical words. Your trigger email should be short and include only information that is relevant to the trigger action.
Create subject lines according to the trigger action: The subject line of the trigger email should reflect the activity that causes the start of the email workflow. By following this best practice, you ensure recipients that your company is here for them.
Segment subscribers: Segmenting your audience enables you to send trigger emails with more specific targeting for your customers.
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