Email remains one of the most versatile tools in your marketing arsenal, playing a key role in everything from lead generation to customer loyalty incentives. Managing email marketing messages effectively and getting each message to the right recipient at the right time would be a daunting task to handle individually, but with a marketing automation system, your marketing team sets up a flow of triggered emails for every occasion.
Triggered email messages turn a monologue into a conversation, and conversations lead to conversions. It wasn’t always possible to give each lead personalized attention, but with automated series of triggered emails, you’re able to have a one-on-one conversation with hundreds or thousands of leads at a time. It’s a flexible, scalable way of giving your leads and customers what they need as they need it.
Here’s a look at how some of the triggered email flows you and your marketing team can set up within a marketing automation system.
Welcome Series
A single email welcoming new leads into interactions with you is just the beginning. Your welcome flow gives prospects an overview of what you do and how you can help them succeed, so it’s vital to keep these emails brief, accessible, and content-rich. Triggers for your marketing automation email welcome series might include signing up for a newsletter, commenting on a blog post for the first time, or creating an account for an online forum. When a prospect takes a given action, the welcome email series is initiated, leading to triggered autoresponse emails ensuring that you have correct, up-to-date information on your new lead. Subsequent welcome-series emails might introduce leads to new services you offer or invite them to complete an action they started and didn’t finish.
Request Series
When leads are a little farther along their buying journey, they’re on a fact-finding mission. They want more in-depth information, which they get by downloading white papers, case studies, and e-books from you. As with welcome-series emails, your marketing automation system will send out autoresponse emails to downloads, but these triggers serve more than one purpose. They can also trigger alerts to your sales department if a lead requests information that’s highly correlated with buying – downloading detailed spec sheets, for example, or requesting a quote. Questions for sales can also trigger a personal response from a member of the sales team. Time-sensitive triggers later in the request series give leads a nudge if they have asked for information but have not yet followed up within a given time.
Replacement Series
Many customers have recurring needs for your products and services. A designated replacement series of emails helps them keep to their timetable for reordering or making appointments. Buyers often look at replenishment reminders as a service, so they’re an important part of customer care. Your marketing automation system integrates with your CRM and sales information to track buying histories and trigger emails at the appropriate time for reminders. Because your MAS relies on history rather than guesswork for these triggered messages, your replenishment reminders come at precisely the right time.
Reactivation Series
Customers are far too valuable to lose without understanding why they have gone dormant. Triggered emails that reach out to leads and customers who have disengaged from you can help bring them back. Timing is the most common triggering event for a reactivation email flow, and your marketing automation system can track how long it’s been since an account has seen activity. Other triggering events that might guide a customer’s account through a reactivation sequence include abandoning a shopping cart or opting down from newsletters or other subscription content.
Marketing automation flows can be as simple or complex as your business needs them to be. By making it easier to turn your customers’ communications into conversations, you guide them through every step of the buying journey with the right email marketing messages triggered at just the right times.
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