Practical Inspiration: Trigger Emails as an Intro to Behavioral Marketing
This week I fulfilled a professional career goal of speaking at HubSpot’s INBOUND—which is funny because I am terrified of speaking in public. However, I am incredibly passionate and knowledgable about behavioral marketing and I want to help others learn from my experiences, successes, and failures.
I’ve attended a lot of marketing conferences. The majority of them are heavy on inspiration and light on tactical information. When I was crafting my session, I wanted it to be a healthy dose of both. I wanted attendees to walk out with a new perspective and with a feeling of empowerment to implement the ideas themselves.
Because, after all, magic happens when inspiration collaborates with execution.
Behavioral marketing is fascinatingly complex, which is why I love it. For this session though, I wanted to make it accessible and applicable to as many different types of businesses as possible. So, I decided to focus on behavioral trigger emails. In my career I’ve found that trigger emails are one of the best performing options and an easy-to-access gateway drug to behavioral marketing. And, because I’ve been able to apply the same tactics successfully across all different types of businesses, I knew that the diverse group of companies in attendance at HubSpot would be able to do the same.
Below are the key takeaways of that session. You can also check out the slides from the actual presentation here.
5 Steps for Common Sense (Email) Trigger Control
Step 1: Set your target—think bigger
You need to have a goal in mind, and not just the next step, but the next goal. When you’re thinking about setting goals keep the following three things in mind:
- Go beyond the first result and think of the lifetime value.
A one-time customer in any business is fine, but doesn’t create sustainable, exciting growth. You need return customers or renewed customers who are deeply engaged with your products and content. - Keep in mind, you can use the same behavior to trigger different content depending on the persona and where they are in the funnel.
You might have several personas who are all at various stages in the purchase funnel. You can trigger off a product page view, as an example, and deliver different emails with customized content depending on the lead’s persona and their stage in the funnel. - Know your customer journey, and understand the behavioral steps needed to lead them down the funnel.
You need to build a clear path for potential customers. Start by asking: “What did my current customers do before they purchased?” And don’t just look at all of your customers. Look at interactions of your most valuable customers — those who have renewed or purchased more with every new transaction. It’s important to note, if you are a startup or new business and do not have customer data yet, that’s ok. Hypothesize a customer journey, make sure you can track performance, and be prepared to iterate and optimize as you collect data. Once you have an understanding of the interactions and activities of your best customers, you need to understand what actions are significant in comparison to those who did not convert. The interactions with the biggest difference between the two data sets can become the initial milestones of the customer journey.
Step 2: Determine the actions—high value, high impact
You can’t create trigger emails for everything, you have to make a choice. When you’re mapping out what interactions you want to build trigger campaigns off of, prioritize those actions that lead to the highest value to your business and/or have the highest impact on moving a lead from point A to point B.
To prioritize your trigger emails, look at your customer journey. What behaviors are the most significant? And, what points of interaction across your website, app, and blog align with those behaviors? Ideally, the actions to trigger off of are key to transitioning a lead from one stage of the funnel to the next.
As an example, if reading a case study is a pivotal point where a lead moves from consideration stage to decision stage, trigger an email off of a case study page view. Or, if a look book download leads to purchases, trigger off of that. Just make sure that triggers are placed in specific strategic points of interaction that correlate to your customer journey.
Step 3: Craft the message—let the data tell the story
The key to making trigger emails effective is to tie the message to the behavior. I have found a lot of success in acknowledging the action taken in the subject line and messaging of the email. For example, if a lead read a case study and you triggered a follow up email from that, mention the case study. If someone viewed a product page, name the product in the subject line. It’s a simple idea, but extremely effective.
Step 4: Deepen the value—tie it to content
The message is just the starting point though. To truly deepen the impact, deliver more value, and catapult leads further down the funnel, you need to tie that message to content.
Delivering next-stage content via trigger emails gives you the ability to capitalize on a perfect storm of lead engagement while you’re product is top-of-mind.
Think of your customer journey (again). This is how you can deliver the content that fills in the gaps between milestones. Make sure the content compliments the initial behavior and correlates to the overall message of the email.
Step 5: Take it further—trigger off the trigger
This goes back to the very first step of creating a goal that is not just an acquisition goal, but one that is tied to the lifetime value of the customer. To really capitalize on the trigger strategy, you need to make sure you’re creating opportunities for inclusion. You want leads in the interest stage to move as quickly as possible down the funnel—so give them a place to skip a few steps with a hand raise.
- Drive leads down the funnel using click-throughs on the initial email to trigger additional delivery of content or workflow enrollment. You can also include ‘next step’ content landing page confirmation pages.
- Extend the same strategy outwards with Facebook retargeting campaigns and custom audiences built off of the destination page view. The ads should include next step content to create more opportunities for interaction.
- Use dynamic content on blog posts and web pages that are customized to the persona or funnel stage. HubSpot’s smart CTAs are an often underutilized way to create organic opportunities to deliver customized content.
Results speak for themselves
Using these steps, I’ve seen a 45% average open rate, 18% average click through rate, 13% increase in year-over-year sales at a brick-and-mortar retail store, an increase from 19% to 41% in daily sales from emails, and can attribute 46% of total yearly revenue to trigger campaigns at a SaaS business.
I hope this provides you with some inspiration for creating a behavioral marketing strategy for your business—and gave you a framework to go out and do it. As you embark on your own behavioral marketing journey, remember this:
Behavioral marketing strategies and they marketing automation systems they rely on are living, breathing things. You need to treat them as such.
You need to be constantly analyzing, maintaining, and optimizing. This is a strategy built on learning from micro failures and amplifying infrequent successes. Entering into the world of behavioral marketing and marketing automation requires persistence, determination, and patience. It’s complex, not flashy, and thoughtful and most people will think you’re crazy, full of nonsense, or creepy. However, when you do it well you and can show real value to your business and, deliver greater value to your customers.