Are you running an email marketing rodeo or simply a one trick pony program? Many marketers run the latter as they look at the opt in to be a way to turn on the one way funnel similar to direct mail. Well this is not hitting a PO Box but hitting the inbox. The inbox is directly tied to this magical digital rodeo we call the internet which enables us to create actions based on actions. Have I lost you yet? I hope not.
Marketing online is taking a turn to marketing automation. There is not way using past techniques that we can always be there to know when someone is ready for A or B to happen. But using the new systems of marketing automation we are finally gaining ground to creating trigger based campaigns on actions, behavior and timing. It is something that has been a long time coming. I hope you are ready to take the bull by the horns and make the leap out of the chutes.
What are triggers in email marketing? Well they can be all of the following and more. Depending on what you are able to do I suggest you review these and saddle up with one or all of them.
1. Time based triggers.
I typically refer to these as customer lifecycle. They can be in the welcome emails, thank you emails, and sales prospecting emails. When someone comes to your site and does something you can actually start a clock that sends out emails based upon a “day plus X” factor. Using time based triggers you can continue your conversations based on the path you want to take someone down. Now the trick with time based email campaigns is that you need to always be reviewing and adjusting them. Just because you want people in the first 30 days to see X/Y does not mean that the timing always lines up with the actions. If you are using time based campaigns from a subscription you should be constantly fine tuning the spread on the days to find the optimum times. There is not a magic formula I can give you as every one is different. But I have some ideas. I like to work in multiples of 3’s personally. By using a 3 day spread you can move them back and forth allowing the frequency to have enough room so as to not overwhelm your subscribers with so many emails that they unsubscribe faster than you can saddle up your horse. The goal is to hitch your wagon to the right team so that they can all pull together moving the subscriber down the golden road to engagementville.
2. Event Based Triggers.
Someone comes to your site and because you are a cowpoke that has saddled up some automation magic you can actually reach out to them based on what they have viewed. Imagine someone comes to your site, looks at your services and does not do anything. If you have the systems in place you can actually have some flows set up that trigger a re-engagement email that gives them information based on those events or pages that they just looked at. The big benefit here is that you are providing content that is focused at the “event” or moment of what they were interested in. The trick here is not to come our of the chutes too fast. If you hit them immediately it can come off as a little big brother. Give event based triggers some time. Maybe an hour to a day. Longer than that risks them moving past the event in their minds and may not connect based upon what occurred.
3. Behavior Based Triggers. Lets say you came into an ecommerce site, looked at a shirt and a hat, compared some features, or read some product reviews. Armed with this knowledge you could send an email next that uses that product(s) placed in the email. Even staying simple like colors or categories can make an impact on tying relevant content to the campaign.
4. Conversion Based Triggers.
Similar to a event, conversions can be used based on goals set up in your analytics flows. Using a goal page to tie the visit to the subscriber you can start a series of emails based on the goal or conversion. Think about how a B2B company could use it for a white paper download. Now of course you are going to trigger the download email and thank you, but what about taking a delayed approach for 3-7 days later to ask them to review, rank or share a few other relevant studies with others they know. By using goal based results you can continue to provide focused content to that subscriber.
5. Transactional Based Triggers.
One of my personal favorites around email. Often these emails are light simply providing the transactional info from a sale. Now when you add in other variables like asking for a review, upselling like products, or even giving them an offer on their next purchase you are building a solid customer relationship. Other things that we see work well with these triggers are customer surveys 10-30 days after purchase to ask them how the product is working for them. Did it meet expectations? Would they recommend it to someone else? Do they have any feedback for you? Instead of simply focusing on the sale, focus on how to build that relationship and open up the opportunities to continue to connect in a meaningful way. People that purchase can be the greatest source of telling someone else about your product. These are the ones you want to keep engaged as it is easier to keep a happy customer as a repeat customer than it is to continue to always seek out the next customer.
We could go down the path to create more ideas around triggers, but cowboy these are some good places to start. If you can be good at these five ideas you can develop a strong trigger based email marketing and marketing automation engine that will take you to the next level.
The trick here with any of these is to not get stuck in mindset of once it is live it is done. These types of emails need to be continuously monitored, measured and changed up. If you get into the rut of just letting it go, eventually the impact will wear off.
