Many of us started our email campaign careers in batch and blast mode. Many are still there. But with the tools on the market available today to track your user’s behavior and the ability to sync those tools with your CRM software, the barriers are coming down. It’s time to leap over the hurdles and change your marketing strategy.
One of our Eloqua customers, Mark McCary, Senior Director of Global Marketing at Platts, uses the term “customer-generated marketing”. (You know, as opposed the marketing-generated marketing that most of us are currently doing.) Marketing Sherpa calls this concept “triggered email”. No matter what name you give it, it’s your goal.
I’m not naive. I know it’s easy for me to spout off about what you should be doing, and blithely overlook the fact that this is a massive change in your strategy. Your email blast numbers will dramatically decrease. However, conversely, your email campaign metrics should dramatically increase. As an added bonus, your campaign will have a longer lifespan since users can be triggering the campaign for as long as you have it running.
If you’re experiencing resistance, offer to test marketing-generated versus customer-generated campaigns and let the numbers speak for themselves. Here is an excellent takeaway from the recent Marketing Sherpa Email Summit:
John Heidrich and Joe Nettum from Allstate described how their team is moving toward a triggered email strategy…They compared results from a campaign to encourage customers to sign up for an online account service system. One set of messages was sent batch-style to the entire list, and another set was sent to new customers, triggered by policy purchases:
- Open rates for the triggered email messages increased 84% over the batch messages
- Clickthrough rates for the triggered email messages increased 32%
Yeah, those numbers will speak quite eloquently for themselves.
What types of things should trigger an email campaign?
Certainly a purchase qualifies. But website surfing is your next best friend. For example, if you have three main products described on your website, you can measure the number of page visits to each area. Which product has the most page views? That should trigger an email to the prospect about that specific product. (What if they’re all three equal? Send an email with a comparison matrix to help the prospect differentiate your offerings!) You can also trigger off of whitepaper downloads, product trial downloads, abandoned purchases, and much more.
We’ll write about other triggers in a future post, but first….tell us your ideas! Have you seen anything work well? Is there something you want to try?
Photo credit: timsnell | flickr
Posted in: Email Marketing, Nurturing Campaigns, Segmentation
I’ve never read about this kind of triggered approach. It’s fascinating. We’re looking into opt-in blasts after reading some good numbers there. Thought I would share the study: http://www.heilbrice.com/blog/uncategorized/dont-be-afraid-of-e-mail/
So does something like a purchase trigger the email or do you still have customers opt-in voluntarily?
Hi Dave – In this model we’re assuming that we already have some kind of opt-in from them in the past and we’re using their trigger to begin a new dialogue with the prospect or customer. Good study – thanks for sharing! And thanks for stopping by.
A fantastic read….very literate and informative. Many thanks….where is your RSS button ?