Email marketing was never intended to be a one-way communication channel. Despite the best efforts of those ineffective marketers who continue to hide behind “no-reply” email addresses, there has always been the opportunity to engage email subscribers in a conversation. This strategy has always relied on marketers deploying relevant, timely, and engaging email campaigns that encourage the kind of interaction that enables relationships to grow. With the advent of sophisticated marketing automation technology, the opportunity to take these relationships even further is literally off the scale.
For marketers who value facilitating more targeted conversations with their most engaged subscribers, behavioral triggering takes this opportunity to a new level.
What is Behavioral Triggering?
Behavioral triggering in email marketing refers to sending automated emails that can be personalized based on a subscriber’s actions or behaviors. Marketing automation platforms (like the emfluence Marketing Platform) track these behaviors and then use them to trigger specific emails that can be tailored to the user’s engagement, interests, and journey stage.
How Behavioral Triggering Works
When a user performs a particular action on a website, app, or within an email, it signals intent or interest, which can activate a sequence of automated emails. These emails are designed to move the user further along the sales funnel, address specific needs, or re-engage them if they’ve lapsed.
Examples of Behaviorally Triggered Emails
There are many different types of behaviorally triggered emails. However, the most commonly seen examples include:
- Welcome Emails: These are sent immediately after a user signs up, warmly thanking them for joining and introducing them to the brand. Often, these emails include a special welcome offer or discount to encourage the first purchase, along with links to popular products or resources to help new users explore the brand’s offerings.
- Abandoned Cart Emails: These emails are triggered when users add items to their ecommerce cart but leave without completing the purchase. Cart abandonment emails serve as reminders to return and finish the transaction. They often showcase the items left behind, include a clear call-to-action, and sometimes feature limited-time discounts or free shipping to boost conversion rates.
- Re-engagement Emails: These emails are sent to users who haven’t interacted with the brand for a certain period and are designed to reignite interest and bring customers back. Personalized subject lines, exclusive offers, updates on new products, or tailored content based on past behavior can make these emails more enticing and effective at rekindling engagement.
- Post-Purchase Follow-Up: Sent after a customer makes a purchase, these emails nurture the post-purchase experience by thanking the customer, providing order details, and asking for reviews. They may also suggest complementary products or offer customer support to ensure satisfaction, fostering brand trust and encouraging repeat purchases.
- Milestone Emails: These emails celebrate important dates like birthdays, anniversaries, or other personalized milestones and create a sense of connection with the user. By acknowledging these special occasions with a warm message or a personalized discount, brands can strengthen relationships, boost loyalty, and drive repeat purchases through a thoughtful, personal touch.
Setting Up Behavioral Triggered Emails
While most marketers will understand the benefits of setting up behavioral triggered emails, many will be concerned about the steps they need to take to turn this strategy into reality. Therefore, marketers will need to consider the following hurdles:
- Data Collection and Management: Marketers will need to ensure real-time, accurate data flows from their CRM system or e-commerce platforms to drive relevant, personalized emails. Then, there’s the problem of misplaced or mismanaged data. Data silos, where data is isolated in separate systems, can lead to missed opportunities and create compliance issues, potentially getting you into a lot of trouble.
- Personalization: Personalized emails based on user behavior, preferences, and past purchases will take time and resources to create and scale your operations effectively. Things don’t happen overnight, so take your time to pick your battles rather than trying to fix everything at once.
- Timing and Frequency: Marketers must find the right balance between timing and frequency to avoid overwhelming subscribers or risking their forgetting about them. The best way to optimize campaign frequency is to run A/B tests to determine the best intervals for each type of campaign.
- Deliverability and Compliance: To protect user trust and prevent deliverability issues, avoid spammy content, maintain a good sender reputation, and comply with privacy laws like GDPR and CAN-SPAM. Marketers in sectors like healthcare will also need to consider specific rules and regulations like HIPPA governing what they can and cannot do with patients’ data.
- Content Maintenance: Regularly update automated email content to keep it fresh and relevant, ensuring it aligns with current products, customer feedback, and evolving preferences. However, it’s also worth remembering that an email will always appear fresh as long as it is relevant, engaging, timely, and has never been seen before by the recipient. Just because email content is old doesn’t mean it’s not useful.
- Ongoing Testing and Optimization: OK, we’ve already mentioned testing, but this process should never end. Continuously test your subject lines, body text content, and send times to optimize your campaign performance and adapt to changing customer expectations.
Where Will Behavioral Triggering Take Your Email Marketing Strategy?
Incorporating behavioral triggers into your email marketing strategy can transform one-size-fits-all campaigns into a highly responsive, data-driven approach that speaks directly to individual users. This not only boosts engagement and conversions but also positions your brand as attentive and responsive to customer needs.
By sending emails in response to specific actions, you’ll deliver messages that directly match user intent. This level of relevance increases the likelihood of opens, clicks, and conversions, as the content is tailored to their current needs or interests.
Learn More
To learn more about how to set up behavioral triggered emails, contact our email marketing experts to schedule a demonstration of the emfluence Marketing Platform on expert@emfluence.com.
