3 New Ways to Use Triggered Emails in 2016

Triggered emails are especially potent because they take information you already know about your customers to build meaningful messages and offers to your current, potential and lost clients. If done well, trigger emails as a form of marketing automation is a time saving and highly effective way to build relationships with your target customers. Here are three new ways to incorporate triggered emails into your arsenal in 2016.

1) Momentum Building

So you have a birthday and an anniversary trigger – enough right? Probably not. A well-constructed momentum campaign has an added benefit of going beyond these annual occasions to further engage your subscribers via their previous interactions in order to drive customers back into your sales funnel.

In the form of a ‘report as a transaction’ transactional emails — receipts, invoices, notifications, reports, etc. — are opened at up to 8x the rate of regular promotional emails and are an ideal medium to incite engagement.

TripAdvisor sends some of the niftiest report emails I’ve encountered.

This one is a smart report that provides heaps of analytics about the reviews I’ve written. It’s transactional — wink, wink — but there are three strong calls to action to re-engage with the site.

2) 360° Customer Service Satisfaction

A positive customer experience is vital to maintaining a productive, ongoing relationship with your customer. Multiple studies have been conducted on customer service trends – here’s a few points regarding negative experiences:

• 44% of U.S. consumers switch to a competitor following a poor customer service experience. (NewVoice)
• 82% felt that their service provider could have done something to prevent them from switching. (Accenture)

• 48% of people who had negative experiences told 10+ people about it. (Harvard Business Review)

Sending a triggered email to follow up with customers regarding their customer service experience with a survey or link to a feedback form can provide you with the information you need ensure a positive resolution to a specific issue and to make any needed internal improvements. You can also use this opportunity to give the customer a relevant incentive for providing their feedback with an offer or discount.

3) Unsubscribe Qualification
The way an organization handles a simple email unsubscribe transaction can leave a lasting impression on the audience. It’s a customer engagement opportunity to increase goodwill – and even make a sale. Think of it as a bonus marketing channel. The purpose of an unsubscribe triggered email is a last-ditch effort to convince recipients to reconsider an unsubscribe.

• List Churn Mitigation: Your customer has expressed intent to unsubscribe, so you should lead with a clearly worded confirmation that the visitor has been unsubscribed. Then, take the opportunity to remind them briefly of the benefits of your email program – they may not know, or may have forgotten why they subscribed in the first place. Finally, you should close with a straight-forward call-to-action to rejoin your mailing list.

• Opt-Down: Sometimes customers want to hear from you, but less often. CAN-SPAM requires that you offer the ability to unsubscribe from all future emails from any main list or sub-list (referred to as a "universal unsubscribe"). However, if you have multiple special interest lists, you can often preserve your relationship with a subscriber by allowing them to simply opt-out of one type of list – or reduce the frequency at which they receive messages.

Remember: You are always required to offer users the ability to easily unsubscribe from all future emails from you.

By offering an opt-down option you allow the subscriber the ability to control what messages they see and/or the pace at which they receive them.

To use these triggered emails to their best advantage, they should be closely tied-in to your marketing, sales, and service processes and address particular points with precise timing. Once set these triggers can help you to effectively nurture relationships with your recipients with minimal effort on your behalf.

Looking to learn more about the power of automated trigger emails? Download Jacob & Clevenger’s ebook on triggered and behavioral email best practices to learn a few tips about setting up your own successful trigger email program.