Often email marketing strategies focus on communicating to your existing database, but there’s an opportunity to capitalise on automated emails that send a targeted message based on a specific event or website behaviour. These emails are called trigger emails. Here is a rundown of those trigger emails that can be leveraged as part of your marketing communications:
Welcome Email Series:
First impressions count! When a new customer signs up for your email communication, best practice is to send them a welcome email to give them more information about your brand. It’s the perfect opportunity to incorporate a short video telling them about your services, or provide them with your social media profiles so they can connect with you in different channels. Many brands have implemented a series of welcome emails, then after a few weeks, take the opportunity to talk to new customers about your most popular products or give them a special offer to trial.
Research from Hubspot shows that welcome emails generate 320% more revenue per email than other promotional emails, as well as:
- 86% lift in unique open rate
- 196% lift in unique click rate
- 336% lift in transaction rate.
Remember though, treat the relationship with your new customer with respect. They might not be ready to purchase immediately, so use this welcome series as an opportunity to inform and educate, or talk about specific initiatives that might be coming up. Don’t expect a sale too quickly.
If you’re too focused on sales, using words such as “prize”, “free”, “buy”, “purchase”, or use too many capital letters, you may be classified as spam and blocked by the ISP of many inboxes.
Best practice for welcome emails should:
- thank the subscriber for joining
- set expectations around future communications
- instruct the subscriber how to whitelist your domain
- provide a link to your privacy policy
Transactional Emails
Open rates for transactional emails are four to eight times higher than traditional emails because customers are asking for information contained within.
Many website systems give brands the opportunity to integrate trigger emails into the ecommerce platforms, to send out emails like purchase confirmation, shipping deliveries and cart abandonment.
Did you know that on average, 68.5% of customers who visit your store and go to purchase will not complete the transaction? Cart abandonment is a big issue for ecommerce sites so think about how you can set up communication to drive customers back to buy. It’s worth thinking about the reasons why consumers might be abandoning the transaction – is the shipping too expensive, or did they find a better price elsewhere? Cart abandonment emails give you the chance to rectify this situation and offer an added incentive to purchase.
Reactivate Inactive Customers
You’ve invested the time to build an email list, but the names on the database are worthless if they’re not engaging with you. Consider how you can segment your data and send a customised email with a compelling offer to those people who have not liaised with you for a period of time. And don’t be scared to remove the inactive names on the list. You’re only clogging up their inbox so it’s better not to have any engagement than a negative one.
Not sure how to activate these trigger emails? Mastermind can direct your team to make trigger emails a core part of your email marketing strategy – sometimes it’s a one-off session, other times it may take persistence over a period of time. Whatever the case, we can pinpoint the gaps and create a solution with an effective strategy.
