This comprehensive guide to transactional triggered and journey emails teaches you how to optimize your email marketing strategy and provides best practices and tips for success.
We email marketers are always searching for easier ways to do our jobs. We don’t want to skimp on quality, but we have had to learn how to do a lot with a little because we’re chronically understaffed and underfunded.
Marketing automation allows us to send regular emails that focus on predictable behavior. For example, we can email when a customer achieves a goal or reaches a trigger or intent point. It must be a substantial part of every email marketing program.
We work with major retailers that earn at least 50% of their email revenue from automated emails like triggers, transactional emails, and journey emails. These messages are highly relevant, tied to a customer’s action, and deliver value that should lead to a conversion.
Email marketers must continually review whether we’re doing marketing automation correctly. So, we’ve compiled this guide as a handy way to check your program to see if you’re following best practices.
It’s not a complete guide to marketing automation. Instead, use it as a cheat sheet on what marketing automation means for your company and what to consider to do it better and get the desired results.
Also Read: AI Cold Emails: Hit or Miss?
3 categories of marketing automation: Transactional, triggers, and journeys
Admit it: email marketers are brilliant at using terms that have either lost their original meaning or mean different things for different people in different circumstances. Below are the definitions for these three kinds of automated emails.
1. Transactional email
These mark a transaction–an exchange of value–such as an order confirmation or a payment receipt. They can be financial or contractual. They signify the exchange of commitments, such as payment for a service or receipt of that payment, and the fulfillment of that commitment.
Consider two popular transactional emails in retail ecommerce: the order confirmation and the shipping confirmation. The order confirmation is like an electronic receipt, while the shipping confirmation confirms that your purchase is coming.
Keep this archetype handy as you define a transactional email for categorization and legality to ensure you have covered all your bases.
For example, under U.S. commercial email laws and regulations (CAN-SPAM), a transactional email doesn’t require an opt-out link like a promotional email does. It is excluded from the regulations governing email because it is a necessary part of the transaction process.
Here are seven common transactional email examples and see how they confirm a contractual relationship or the company’s part in the transaction:
- Welcome email (Yes, really. It confirms a subscription.)
- Order confirmations
- Shipment confirmations or delays
- Out-of-stock notices
- Declined credit cards
- Warranty delivery
- Information about guarantee or other purchase protection
- Recall notices for purchased products
Keep these strategic points in mind as you develop your transactional emails:
Pay attention to email design
Design it so the personalized information you add to them is clear, concise, and organized logically. It should reflect the brand without distracting from the content and deliver key information such as order or shipment conditions so the recipient can see and understand it.
The design also must scale up for large orders. We don’t think enough about the design of confirmation emails for people who place large online orders. With a dozen items or more, these purchases can break a template or simply look bad.
For example, I might order one or two things from Amazon at a time. My sister, an interior designer, will order 40 items or more for her business. The design must look as good for a 40-item purchase as it does for one or two items.
Don’t forget to cross-sell or upsell
Have a cross-selling or upselling module in your transactional email to drive additional revenue. Transactional emails can be monetized if your country’s email laws and regulations permit it. You can suggest a related purchase or the next logical product a buyer would want. These can be critical for incremental revenue because customers are ready to buy.
Also Read: New Bulk Email Sender Rules: How to Stay Out of the Spam Folder
Send transactional emails promptly
Deliver them in 30 seconds or no more than five minutes after conversion. That’s because people just gave you their credit card numbers on the web, and they are understandably paranoid given all the attention on ecommerce fraud today. Lack of prompt delivery will skyrocket calls to your customer service.
2. Triggered email
We consider triggers to be one or two emails that launch automatically based on a customer’s action. To us, triggers are the short engagement emails we send when our customer does something to send us a signal. They don’t need to be a series or have major orchestration. We just need to send an email or two.
My definition departs from the email convention. We used to think of email triggers as any marketing automation that didn’t involve money. But with the rampant adoption of more data and information, better technology, and greater sophistication, we need to rethink.
Below are six common examples of triggers as we define them:
- Browse and cart abandonment emails
- Welcome/onboarding email series
- Post-purchase upsell or cross-sell messages
- Review requests
- Satisfaction surveys
Each of these emails can be a one- or two-shot deal. You might consider testing a three-email cart abandonment series because it’s close to conversion. But no matter what, these are short engagement automated emails.
You might be wondering why the welcome is transactional but not the onboarding. We’re glad you asked! The onboarding will educate you on brand, product, or service facets. The welcome, in essence, confirms your subscription.
Keep these strategic points in mind as you develop your trigger emails:
They must be evergreen
They don’t need repeated changes and updates and should be specific to the purpose or customer action you want.
Also Read: The Email Marketing Renaissance: Beyond the Blast, Building Relationships
Consider who should receive your emails
When you build a trigger, be sure you account for who should receive the message and the ones who shouldn’t. Many marketers make the mistake of trying to include as many people as possible in a triggered email but not whom they should exclude.
For example, a customer browses a product and then exits the site. They return later, put that product in a cart, and then leave the site again. Do you send a browse reminder, an abandoned cart notice, or both?
Answer: Send only an email about cart abandonment. Why? Because cart abandonment is much closer to intent.
Every trigger you create should have logic for “includes” (the people who should get your email) and “excludes “(the ones who shouldn’t).
You’ll have to widen your focus, look at your automated messages as an ecosystem, and think through everything. Every email automation will have different rules based on your products and audience. But the most important thing is your list of includes and excludes.
Messages need expert timing
Test to learn when most customers are in their inboxes and in the mood to pay attention to messages.
3. Journey emails
The email journey is a series of three or more emails that take the customer through a set of information designed to lead them to a micro or macro conversion.
Each journey email in the series has a specific function but isn’t a string of unrelated emails. They create a conversation across multiple emails. One builds on another with different content, but all remain focused on moving the customer down the path.
Each journey has branches and complexity based on actions or the lack of action, clicks, purchases, and the like. However, unlike transactional or triggered emails, whose messages can be singular and linear, journeys are generally more complex and dynamic.
Two journey emails B2B marketers use often are onboarding programs and post-purchase education.
Although journeys are common in B2B, they also can be useful in B2C email marketing for some purchases. A B2C email journey might be more simplistic and based on clicks, segments, or dynamic content modules that draw on past behavior to present content.
That level of sophistication makes it a journey. A less-sophisticated series with a linear path is a trigger, not a journey.
Also Read: Forget the ESP! 4 Email Marketing Initiatives That Drive Real Growth
Triggers are sophisticated in their targeting, but journeys are sophisticated in their messaging, timing, and approach.
Audit your email program to find out how sophisticated your post-purchase communications are. If you’re low on the journey scale, focus there because it will help you increase email revenue. (See more on email audits in the next section.)
Look at the balance between those categories to determine whether your messages address the customer experience and the customer’s journey with your brand.
Keep these strategic points in mind as you develop your journey emails:
Why should customers care about your email?
Understand and account for why a customer should care about the email. We might think we have a story customers need to hear before they buy, but that’s not always true.
Craft a storyboard
Use what you know about customer motivations to compose a storyboard that includes your customer segments, your includes and excludes (see Triggered Emails above), and the decision points along the journey where a customer can branch off to a new experience.
Testing: Because marketing automation is not ‘set and forget’
If I could take back anything people said about the benefit of automated emails, it would be “Set ‘em and forget ‘em.”
You can’t set up an automated email and forget about it. You set them up and test them to see how well they perform. You optimize them based on your testing. Then, you test and optimize again. And then, you keep checking on your automation to be sure they’re delivering the desired results.
Also Read: Beyond NPS: Why Customer Feedback Needs a 360-Degree Revolution
Keep these strategic points in mind for testing your email automation:
Have a testing plan
A testing plan should be part of your workflow when creating a new automated email or series. In this plan, you’ll define what to test and what timeline to follow.
You can test many things in your automated emails, from design to timing, content to sending orders, and cadence.
Pay attention to iterations for regular improvement
Could you add a second email to a stand-alone automation? What could you add to a series? How else could you improve it?
Look for ways to add sophistication to an email journey. Review and revise your testing schedule to deliver more results you could use to optimize your emails.
Audit every marketing automation
We learned a great lesson about this from our connection, Andrew Kordek, when we worked together in an email at a mega-retailer with stores, catalogs, and ecommerce.
Andrew would inventory every marketing automation every 3 to 6 months. He printed reports with all the statistics on every email campaign. We loved reviewing those reports and seeing our improvements and what the creative looked like. We could go into any meeting and be ready to report on performance, revenue, audience, and more. We kept these reports in binders and checked them regularly.
You can follow our example to track performance and check that the creative aligns with your brand. Set this as a recurring team task, not just one-and-done, and schedule time for team review sessions.
Also Read: From Legacy to LaaS: The Evolution of Loyalty Programs
Marketing automation: Your cheat sheet to email success
Marketing automation is the ultimate money tree. Once you launch your programs, you’ll find nothing like pulling reports and discovering how much money you made since the day before. It’s the most gratifying part of the job–seeing how the work you did six months before is paying off now.
The more automated programs you set up, the more revenue you’ll earn. But you can’t just flood the zone with automated emails. The best marketing automation is smartly planned to meet a strategic need. Then, it is given time to be developed, tested, optimized, audited, and improved regularly.
Incremental innovation pays off here. Start with something small and build on it to make it better. You don’t have to perfect the entire journey before you launch, but look for ways to improve it. And you will always find ways to improve them.
Here’s our final tip: If you think you’re done improving automation, you aren’t. But that’s a good thing! Because you’ll be excited about the progress you see and the money you’ll make.
Watching your programs grow because of the work you put in to help them succeed can be one of the most satisfying parts of your work as an email marketer. Savor it! Then, go back and look for one more improvement.
