The power of triggered emails in digital marketing campaigns

If you’re not making use of customer-triggered emails as part of your digital marketing strategy, you’re likely missing out on plenty of good opportunities to convert site visitors into customers. Here’s what you should know about triggered emails.

Customer-triggered emails are automated emails that arrive in a website user’s inbox in response to some activity they have performed on a website. We’ve all received hundreds of these over the years – every time we’ve made an online purchase, registered to access a website or signed up for a new service.

These are examples of merely functional, informational-triggered emails. But the same automation functionality, if used well and appropriately customised, can become a dynamic marketing tool that will generate more paying customers.

‘Abandoned basket’ email

If you have an e-commerce website, one type of triggered email that can work well for customer conversion is the ‘abandoned basket’ email.

If a user signs in, places an item or items in their basket, but then does not complete the purchase after a certain period of time, a prompter email will lead some users back to your site to complete the purchase. Surprisingly, very few e-commerce websites use these types of emails, despite their obvious utility.

Other triggered emails

Other types of triggered emails you might consider include lapsed-customer emails, to be sent to previous customers who haven’t visited your website in a while; periodic suggested purchase emails based on previous purchases; or emails triggered by users accessing or downloading particular content.

Taking advantage of user activity

Because they relate directly to users’ own activity, all of these types of emails are more likely to be opened than generic newsletters or global marketing emails. Of course, how users then respond to those emails depends on the nature of the content – how well customised they are and how specific the call to action is.

Provided you can get users to input their email addresses, triggered emails can be set up for almost any facet of user activity. However, you will succeed in converting users to customers only if your triggered emails help facilitate purchases that customers would more or less have wanted to make anyway.

To learn other great tools you can apply to your online presence to save time / create leverage in your business - you will enjoy this article - Leverage Tips: Nine ways to save time and boost results