Five email marketing journeys your small business could automate tomorrow
We know that phrases like “automation” are beginning to feel a bit like a buzzword rather than something helpful. But the reality is that there are probably email marketing journeys that your small business could automate tomorrow and could save your team time. The focus on automation is coming from a place of marketing teams spreading themselves thinly across an increasingly fragmented landscape. By automating where you will have more time to focus on those things you just never quite get to but really want to do.
In this blog post we are going to talk about five marketing journeys we think you could automate and take away the headache from yourself or your team.
Before we dive into the example it is worth noting that broadly speaking automation can be triggered in two ways. The first way is through an event; an event is the customer completing a task that acts as a trigger. Events often used are things like subscribing to a marketing list, purchasing a product, attending an event. Whereas emails can also be triggered to be sent on a specific date. For example, on 24 December we are going to enter everyone in this segment into a series of emails over the Christmas period, from wishing them a Merry Christmas to telling them all about our fab boxing day sale.
Welcome journey
A welcome journey is a fab way to onboard a new subscriber and set the expectations of the relationship moving forward. It could look something like this:
Trigger: Signed up to receive email marketing from your small business
Email 1: Thank you for subscribing and a little bit of information about your business
Email 2: Here’s a thank you for subscribing. Offer them an incentive it could be a discount or it could be some exclusive content, but the idea is you want them to feel special.
Email 3: Reminder about redeeming the incentive.
Then they are in your normal marketing email campaigns.
Post purchase journey
No one has time or desire to be manually sending post-purchase confirmation emails, but why not take it a step further and create an automated post-purchase journey.
Trigger: Purchased a product
Email 1: Purchase confirmation (personalised with product details, receipt and any delivery information). Personalisation can be created through pulling through fields or information from your internal systems
Email 2: Invite feedback on their purchase did it meet their expectations
Email 3: Because you brought x, we thought you might be interested in Y
The great thing about this email journey is that you are trying to extend the lifecycle of a customer in a personalised way. It does mean a bit more set up for day 1 as you will need to group similar or related products to make it easy for your customers.
Re-engagement
We have spoken about re-engagement email campaigns in a recent blog post, but these are often an underutilised opportunity to win back customers who have stopped engaging or to just clean your data, so you’re not wasting money on speaking to someone who is no longer interested. These can run in the background consistently and can be either automatically triggered by an event (e.g. not opening an email for 12 months) or you could send it at regular intervals to anyone that meets the segment. They key bit for this journey is that once they’ve finished it, if they’ve not re-engaged don’t forget to remove them from your data.
Joining instructions
In a previous company, we used automated journeys to give people information they needed to know about an event. The email journey was triggered 7 days out of the event and each email contained different information. Our top tip here is to plot out a journey that would be logical to your customer and chunk up giving them the information they need pre-event. Once you’ve done it for one event you can just update the templates for future events.
Customer Feedback
In a previous company we used an automated journey to get customer feedback post events from customers and we have shared below what this looked like:
Segment: People who attended an event.
Day 1: Thanks for attending our event, invite for complete NPS survey, if a virtual event a catch-up on demand link.
If NPS survey completed, customer drops out of the journey.
Day 3: Reminder to complete NPS survey.
If NPS survey completed, customer drops out of the journey.
Day 7: Final chance to complete the NPS survey.
Previously, the company just sent one post event email and by doing three we drove up response rate. But we were also able to track individuals experience overtime through the platform we were using. Giving us the opportunity to build a more rounded view of the customer.
