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. Continue Reading…

The most used triggered email message stream generally surrounds abandoned shopping carts or website signups where you give your email but do not complete a profile. If you are not using triggered messages around abandoned shopping carts and signups, you should begin to do so (see a good article on how to get going form MarketingSherpa), the emails are effective and can help you address a customer’s (or potential customer) real issue in abandoning their purchase. The problem in my mind is that the very nature of these being triggered messages pulls the real personalization and chance to connect with the consumer out of the equation. These messages generally consist of a generic message indicating that you are receiving the message because you did not complete an action on the site sending you the email. If that action was a purchase, the site might use some dynamic information about what was in your shopping cart and if above a certain dollar threshold trigger a message that offers free shipping if you complete the purchase. Sites often will offer you other ways to get in touch with them including their social media profiles and will wrap with some generic information about how you are a valued customer (maybe even telling you when you first became a customer). For sites that need to scale to large volumes of abandoned carts or signups there is perhaps no other way, however for the businesses where each purchase still matters tremendously and where you are just building your customer base I think you can do better. Continue Reading…

A really great example from the NBA’s Phoenix Suns (via Eloqua’s All About Revenue blog) on how using unique and deep personalization in your email marketing can drive incredible results. The Suns like any other business are looking to drive revenue from email marketing and similar to many other businesses know that their best chance at success is with previous customers, in this case former season ticket holders.  In order to make a truly personal and unique connection to their former consumers the Suns marketing team took a look at all the information available to them about these previous customers in their CRM system and tried to mine it for the most personal connection they could make. With that goal in mind they landed on a piece of information available to them about every former season ticket holder that was also completely personal to the particular customer, the date of their first season ticket purchase.  Continue Reading…