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The Next Stage of Behavior-Based Email Automation
About a year and a half ago the Wall Street Journal ran an article, Why Email no longer rules… that led to extended discussions on whether email had seen its last, best day. One could easily understand the argument. When social media first pummeled its way onto the scene, three things stood out:
1. It was immediate.
2. It enabled companies to react at the individual level.
3. It had scale.
The first two points were what really trounced email initially. From a marketing standpoint, customers grew accustomed not only to getting responses the moment they most needed them, but also to receiving messages that reflected them personally.
To be successful, emails needed to evolve.
Over the last couple of years, companies have started connecting emails to website analytics and CRM systems to automate communication based on certain triggers. This is often called behavior-based email automation. When done right, behavior-based email automation has the potential to make email even more personal and precise than social media.
We stumbled upon some great data in a post the other day from Mark Brownlow of email marketing reports on how this automation has worked:
- Bank of America reports that event-based trigger emails are 250% more effective than broadcast promotional emails
- People who purchase after getting cart abandonment emails spend 55% more than those who buy straightaway
- Happy Birthday” emails from Epson produce 840% more revenue per email than the overall email program
-S&S Worldwide drive 40% of email revenue through trigger/transactional emails that account for just 4% of email volume
- One study [by Experian Cheetah mail] found abandoned cart mails getting 20 times the transaction rates and revenue of standard email campaign.
- [To see the full set of data, read Email Marketing Report’s post.]
But what about pushing it further?
I’ve definitely responded to cart abandonment emails and it’s really nice that I get a free cup of coffee offer every year from Starbucks on my birthday (seriously, Starbucks - I love you) but what about other stages of the customer lifecycle? Here are a few new ideas pulled from early use-cases of our own email automation tool, Performable Engage.
Email that reflects behavior on and OFF the site: The lines between web, social media, mobile and other channels have all but evaporated from a user-perspective. And yet, there remains a gap between email and social media. Bridging it will take more than just placing share buttons in emails. I have a friend who loves Etsy. Every time she tweets about it, she’s driving traffic there. Wouldn’t it be great if Etsy responded automatically with a thank you or a special offer targeted for its best social media advocates?
Email that prevents churn: Currently email automation has pretty much exclusively rotated around the sale. With the exception of the birthday email, existing customer communications tend to fall back on the newsletter or mass email. If I am a paying customer of a SaaS company for example, and I haven’t been using the service I paid for, someone should check in on me. Maybe I forgot my password. Maybe I’m dissatisfied with the service. Maybe I’m thinking about bailing. By automating a check-in email for paying customers who have not logged-in in months, companies could catch customers on the brink.
Email that is connected to your help desk: Help desks are critical to the customer lifecycle. Recently Performable integrated with Zendesk. We also integrate with Tender (and shh… we’ve got another integration announcement coming soon). If a customer is having trouble with your site, the communications that spawn from that experience are incredibly important. Do you email a customer when they first open a support ticket? If that ticket hasn’t been closed within a reasonable amount of time are you responding with a tailored communication and perhaps a discount for good measure?
The take-away here is not that you need more emails, but that you need better ones. In the same way that email automation is evolving to reflect behavior and the full customer lifecycle. It should also evolve to prevent over-communication. I’d love your thoughts: What other behavior-based communications would be useful? What emails have impressed you?
