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10 Proven Tips for Making Your Trigger E-Mail Program a Success!

Amy — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 15:58:57 +0000

These days, everyone and their brother has a thrust e-mail program but surprisingly, very few folks have triggers.

Trigger e-mails, also known as good dog e-mails, are sent to individuals based on actions. The action could be good (thanking them for an order), bad (when they abandoned a cart, for example) or indifferent (confirming a vote in a poll) but it’s always a happening/event/instance. Triggers are successful because they have higher response rates, better deliverability and improved LTP (lifetime profit.)

So, how do you make a trigger program work for your business? Here are ten proven tips…

First things first. Like most e-mails, the majority of your success will come from outside the envelope – in other words, make sure to spend some time perfecting your “from” address (works best if it comes from a “real” person); “to” address; subject line (you have 24-35 characters because that’s what fits in most inboxes); the first two lines of the e-mail (statistically over half the people stop reading after the first two lines); the format and the deliverability.
Inside the envelope, work the top two inches of your e-mail. A lot of companies really blow the “preview pane” of the e-mail – they stuff in a bunch of irrelevant copy (for example, an unsubscribe message, which should NEVER go at the top) or even worse, they’ll leave the first two inches blank, just a meaningless blob of white space. The best e-mailers know that “you need to work your window” – meaning make sure that whatever you want the reader to know is right up top. For example, if you have an offer and/or a deadline, it needs to be in that space. If you’re featuring new products, make sure you have an “xx new items” headline at the top.
Implement your trigger program in stages. Lots of folks wait till they can do all the triggers, which isn’t the best strategy as some are so much more difficult than others. Figure out which ones you can do easily and start with those. Some ideas would be abandoned cart, abandoned search, abandoned site, EBOPP (e-mail based on past purchase), EBOSI (e-mail based on selected interest), we’ve missed you, a celebration (happy birthday, congratulations on the new baby), ask the experts (tips, case studies, podcasts, webinars), surveys, and automatic reactivation promotional programs.
Start simple. Is the list of e-mails above overwhelming? Then start by improving your order and shipping confirmations and/or your thank you e-mails. Make sure you have nice thank you e-mails for everything that the user does on your site – signing up for your FREE newsletter, requesting a catalog, registering at your site, filling out a request for quote, and so on. Look carefully at each of those e-mails and figure out what you can do to improve it – what it would take to make someone want to click on it and do/buy/view more? Does every e-mail you send out look like it’s from a real person? Is it written like a letter you’d read? Does it have things of interest that they haven’t seen before? Will it make them want to click?
The magic formula for triggers is all about the timing. Reward them for what they do right (and wrong), at the perfect times. Always and often! For example, using one abandoned cart e-mail is ok but using a series of five (or more) is fantastic and really makes a program. You need to keep in contact with them till they take another action – finish their checkout, add to their order, complete their lead form, request a quote, register for a webinar and so on. The more you ask for what you want, the greater the chance you have of getting it. In about 95% of the cases, the first trigger in a series should be sent out within two hours of the action. So, in a perfect world, if a user goes to your site, puts stuff in their cart and then abandons it, they will get their first abandoned cart e-mail within a couple hours (the sooner the better as long as it’s not in the repeat window.) If you can’t deploy those e-mails one-by-one and you simply must do a batch process, do it. It’s not the best choice, but it’s far better than nothing.
Use an offer with a deadline. Deadlines work because they create urgency and cause people to focus. Can’t give anything away? That’s ok but figure out how to incorporate a deadline anyway – there are lots of choices — limited quantity/limited supply, a limited-time sneak peek, etc.
Personalize as much as you can. If someone abandons a cart on your site, show them what was in their cart in the e-mail. Make it easy for them to complete their order. Never press though – pressing is knowing too much about someone (for example, “you were at our site at 12:03 this afternoon and you were looking at…” – that’s just too much and users typically don’t respond well to it.)
Don’t spend a ton of time nitpicking the creative. The best trigger campaigns are not always the ones that are the most aesthetically pleasing. In fact, they’re usually the ones from the companies who have the timing and the message down right. Mailing the right offer (message) at the right time is far more important than having everything just perfect. (Remember, e-mails are meant to be clicked on, not necessarily to be read or printed out and hung on your wall!) That’s not to say that the visuals are not important because they are critical – people see things in pictures online – however, it is to suggest that you don’t need to make your designer go through 111 versions of a trigger to get it just right.
Don’t forget the buttons. Triggers, just like thrusts, need very solid action directives – big, red, CLICK HERE NOW buttons that get them to click to your site, cart, lead form, or wherever else you want to put them. Make sure to include at least one button in every view.
The person with the most e-mail addresses wins. You can’t send a trigger e-mail out to someone if you don’t have their e-mail address. So, if you’re going to commit to a trigger campaign/program, you need to collect e-mails anywhere and everywhere you can on your site. Make sure your e-mail captures are on every view of your site – not just along the bottom. Try using pop-ups on exit, especially for abandoned carts and searches. (Don’t think pop-ups work? Try them. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.)
BONUS TIP: Track. Track. Track. It doesn’t matter what you do if you’re not measuring it properly. When it comes to triggers, look at open and delete rates; clickthrough rates; page views/user paths; AAUS (active average user session) and time spent on launch; drills/actions; passalong rate, action rate (carts opened, lead forms completed) and item sales (be sure to include feature items and items that were not in the e-mail.) Build on your success. If something works, keep doing it and keep improving it.

First, Shoot All The ESP’s…

Amy — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 02:04:02 +0000

Becky Tesh asks “I’m hoping you can help. E-mail is a huge part of our success online and this year our results are tanking. (We’re over thirty percent down on e-mails but up on SEO/SEM sales.) Our opens are down… our clickthroughs are down… and it keeps getting worse. What can I do? Our provider says that our deliverability is 98.5% and that it’s not their fault. He recommends we do a survey but my boss is not in favor of sending out additional e-mails that don’t make money at this point. We’ve tried every creative thing we can think of – there must be something else we can do… Otherwise, I am going to need to cut at least one person from my department.”

Look, I don’t care what your ESP says or how good they are, they don’t have 98.5% deliverability. It’s kind of like delivering mail to the ghetto. As Chris Rock says, “I’m sure the postmen do a phenomenal job but some sh*t gets lost and some sh*t gets stolen.”

If bills and Verizon rebate cards can vanish into thin air IRL just imagine what happens in cyberspace.

Yowza.

So, what do you do? If you’ve tried playing with timing, format, subject line, and all the other “creative stuff”, you should consider sending a percentage of your names to an ECOA (email change of address) provider like Fresh Address. I’m blown away by how much these type of services have improved over the past couple years (although Fresh Address has always been good.) If your file is huge, you don’t need to send it all, just the percentage of it that will give you an indication of what’s going on. (Please, I beg of you, start with the good names. Your 2010 buyers are way more important than 1972 inquiries.)

Second, and yes, I must say this, MONITOR DELIVERABILITY AND SEED YOUR FLIPPING LIST. Either use a service that helps you with this kind of stuff (Return Path is one of my favorites) or do it yourself. It shocks me how many companies do not do this. Catalogers and direct mailers are especially notorious for not seeding their lists, something they’d never NOT do in the real world. Again, you can buy a service or if you don’t have any money, set up one on your own.

Get addresses at Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, and anywhere else that’s appropriate for you.

Assign each box a read or not-read status. For example, if you are going to get eight boxes at Gmail, four of them you should never read (do NOT even open them) and four of them you should. This will give you a quick indication of what’s working. (Yes, this can make a VERY BIG difference.)

After you’ve set up the boxes, look carefully at trends. How long are your e-mails taking to arrive in the in-boxes? What do your e-mails look like? (In other words, are they being tagged with security warnings?) Is the mailing being “delivered” to the SPAM folders? (Sadly, that does count as delivered for most providers.) Some of the wackadoodle free services (especially the European ones) even deliver stuff directly to the trash can. As if that’s helpful.

I spoke with a client recently who has been having trouble with Yahoo for about a year and they just now found out that their provider was not assigning domain keys. (Yahoo requires them.) Sadly, this ESP also shows over 94% “deliverablity” on average.

Becky – in your case, you are mailing to a lot of schools – it’s easier to get a date with the Pope than to get e-mail delivered at some schools. Consider calling some of the biggest schools on your list (where you have the most names) and asking them how you can best communicate with them. A lot of times their tech guys will tell you EXACTLY what you need to do. (It often has to do with timing – meaning when you send them.) Yes, the process is time consuming but it’s worth it.

Carrie Stiller Says: "Are You Smoking Crack?…

Amy — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 04:18:00 +0000

You always ask that question to other people so now I ask you, ARE YOU SMOKING CRACK? You told my boss that we shouldincrease the number of e-mails we send out? You were joking, right? You know our company. We can barely do one e-mail every other week and now you want us to dosix times that? SHOOT ME NOW.”
Dear Carrie.
Nope, not smoking crack although I must say that it should accompanymany clients’ first payments these days. (“Here’s your retainer fee and a little something extra for the stress we know we’re going to cause you…”)
As for SHOOTING YOU NOW, I know where you work. That’s torture enough for you.
The problem with your company is that youfolks approach every e-mail like you are creating the next Sistine Chapel.
Last I counted, there are eight departments and over thirty people involved in every e-mail and that’s BEFORE it’s deployed. I get that you are a REALLY big organization and that a lot of people need to be in the loop. However, I’ve also seen the comments that go to your creative team and most of them are nit-picky, “move this 1/64 of an inch so it lines up exactly” scrawls written by some wackadoodle-run-amok that feels they need to mark their territory like a dog, er, with a red pen.
A couple quick facts about e-mail –
E-mails are meant to be acted upon IMMEDIATELY, not saved and/or printed out to read later. The cold, harsh reality is that e-mails have a very short shelf life (typically less than 48 hours) so the faster you get thereaderto your site (or on the phone, if that’s your preference), the better. That requires strategy, not the random navel pontification of design tangents.
E-mails are NOT meant to be wall art. I know. I know. Your dreams of millions of customers printing out your e-mails, framing them and hanging them over their fireplaces have just been shattered. Spending days and days developing and honing the “perfect” e-mail is a complete exercise in futility. People who feel the need to change the red burst from cherry to fire-engine colored should be shot public-execution style. Period.
Most of your e-mail success will happen outside the envelope. The majority of your e-mail success will come from the To, From, Subject Line, Format, Deliverability and the first 1-2 inches of your e-mail. In other words, perfecting the “guts” (aka the body of the email) is often a colossal waste of time. I’m not saying that creative isn’t important — IT IS — but you’ll likely get more bang from your buck by getting the six things I listed above right.
If you focus on what’s really important, getting out e-mails will be so MUCH easier and as an added bonus you’ll reduce your need for bullets and/or cocaine.
Please note: the six times frequency that Carrie describes above is not meant for all companies. It could be more or it could be less for yours. If you need help figuring out how many times you should be mailing, write us today at info@amyafrica.com.

Trigger E-Mails

Amy — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:43:00 +0000

Jessica Kelley says: “I finally figured out thrust e-mails and now you are talking about triggers. H-E-L-L-O Amy Africa. You are not nice.”

Jessica. Jessica. Jessica. Haven’t you ever watched Jeopardy? That was not properly phrased as a question. (And if the question was about me being “not nice”, well, we have even bigger issues.)

Perhaps what you meant to ask was “what are trigger e-mails?” because EVERYONE is talking about them. (Ok, that’s a lie, very few people are talking about them and even fewer people are doing them which is a complete shame because they are unequivocally one of the easiest things you can do to improve your site TODAY, without spending a lot of money. But I digress…)

Trigger e-mails, also called “good dog e-mails” are sent to individuals, based on actions. (On the flip side, thrust e-mails are deployed to everyone and their brother based on YOUR whim/fancy/schedule.)

The action could be good (thanking them for an order); bad (an abandoned cart or search form) or indifferent (confirming a vote in a poll.) But it’s always a happening, event or instance.

Triggers are successful because they typically have higher response rates, better deliverability and improved lifetime profit.
If you’re interested in triggers, keep coming back to this section for more info. Triggers are one of my all-time favorite things to do online and we’re going to spend a ton of time on them.