Triggered Emails, often called Drip Campaigns or Autoresponders, are a more personalized type of email marketing. Triggered Email Campaigns are messages that are much more personalized than email tactics because they are started by a specific event initiated by the web visitor.While a usual email marketing campaign includes a single message that is sent to a group at the same time. With triggered emailing, prospects receive a different message at a different time based on the actions they took on your website. This makes the emails more personal, relevant and more timely.With a little more planning and research, Triggered Email Campaigns help you to stay in touch with your website prospects and lead them down the sales funnel.By taking some time to layout your sales funnel and analyze actions on your website and creating different emails streams (multiple emails on a specific cadence or with decision trees involved) based on different actions you want the prospects to take.Goals of Drip Campaigns

Best practices for the most successful triggered email marketing campaigns are of course specific to your business but below are a few thoughts on how you can use triggered emails to grow your marketing reach. Based on your specific goal, you may choose to employ these or adjust them slightly based on your needs and audience.

Turn Visitors Into Buyers & Recover Abandoned Carts

  • A web visitor may give up their email information but then not take any real action on your website, in this case you can have a set message that welcomes them to your site, helps them navigate and gives them information about your company and your best-selling products and services.
  • When a prospect puts items in the shopping cart and then never checks out, this is an ideal time to engage through a triggered response. Send a friendly and personalized email to bring them back and finish their order. If they do not respond to that initial email don’t stop there, have a triggered stream approach which shoots off another email 5 days later but this time with a coupon or some other incentive.
  • After an order is complete, the upsell opportunities are endless. You can suggest their next order based on past purchases or even use the social data you have from Facebook to suggest products that their friends are buying. Amazon is a company that is excellent at this. They do not see your purchase as the end of a transaction, rather the beginning of the sales relationship.

Encourage Social Participation

  • In each of your triggered communications you should make it easy for people to ‘Like’ you on Facebook or ‘Follow’ you on Twitter. In doing so you can then add these channels to their customer/prospect profile and eventually even ask them if they prefer to be contacted by email or through Facebook.

Qualify and Score Leads

  • By allowing a customer/prospect’s interactions with your website to be the start of the communication stream you will be sending messages that should resonate with your audience and be seen as timely.
  • From there, you can use these triggered emails and a customer or prospect’s interaction with both your email and the links contained with in it to continue to score that person’s sales readiness.

Ensure your messages are timely and relevant

  • By using a trigger message based on the “digital body language” of a customer or prospect and is sent only based on actions (or inaction) that they take you should be ahead of the curve when it comes to the timeliness of your email.
  • Combining the timeliness of your email with what you already know about that customer or prospect (use a good integrated CRM) will further allow you to ensure that your message seems personalized and contains information of relevance to the receiver.
  • Finally, ensure that you have decision trees and ways to trigger alternative streams of emails based on the actions that your receivers take both with the triggered email and your website.

Triggered emails are a key part of marketing automation and are worth spending time understanding and mapping to your lead generation or sales process. Of course they require a lot of content be created but at the end of the day a properly planned set of triggered emails can really grow your relationship and chance for sales by delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.


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