Triggered Emails can hit Easy Money for E-Marketers

By Larry Kavanagh

Almost 60 percent of online retailers don't send emails or do any type of follow-up marketing to shoppers who abandon carts, according to a recent survey. Abandoned cart emails are the most basic and lucrative of a class of emails called "triggered email." Merchants who ignore triggered email are missing out on some easy money — perhaps they had too much money to begin with?

The Good Autopilot
Triggered emails get their name from being "triggered" by something a shopper did. This could be placing an order or, as noted above, leaving a site with products still in the shopping cart. The email should be sent immediately after the trigger from the retailer itself or its email service provider (usually a day or more later). Triggered emails use a standard creative template. Once set up, they're sent automatically, requiring no further marketing intervention.

Triggered emails produce more than 15 times greater sales per email delivered. So why do so many merchants ignore them? It's probably because, on a daily basis, they produce relatively small amounts of revenue.

Using data from the chart below, delivering 100,000 emails in a campaign will produce $15,000 of revenue over a couple days. By comparison, even the lucrative abandoned cart email (ACE) might produce only a few hundred dollars a day. But, that ACE will deliver sales today, tomorrow, the next day, when you're on vacation, out sick or stumped for ideas for your regular email. Furthermore, you can magnify the impact by setting up many different types of triggered emails and sending out series of them, rather than just one. Here's how to get started building your program into a wheelbarrow full of cash.

Getting Started
Build triggered emails to deploy after a shopper has:

made a purchase;
signed up for your email program;
requested a paper catalog (if you have one); and
abandoned a shopping cart.

In the first three cases, thank the shopper. Then, in all cases, offer a small promotion — a discount or some other type of offer — with a very quick expiration, like three days. Include links to a selection of top performing categories on your site. Edmund Scientific does a great job with these emails.

Serial Mailing
Once you've mastered the basics, create a series of emails for each trigger. Consider using this series for shoppers who just placed an order:

1. Thank-you with offer (one day to three days after order).

2. Survey: How was your experience? (seven  days later).

3. Cross-sale email based on what the shopper purchased (14 days later).

4. Recommend to a friend: coupon for the shopper and a friend (21 days later).

5. Product rate and review (28 days later).

Continue to include several different links back to the site in each email in the series. Make these links sexy; don't just dump shoppers back on your homepage. Entice them with a list of customer favorites, clearance items, hot new products, etc.

You can create series for the other triggers mentioned as well. Ask shoppers who abandoned carts if they had some difficulty checking out, for example. Or remind them of the great items already in their carts — and just a few clicks away from being in their house! You can also warn that you're on the verge of clearing out these old carts, so shoppers should complete checkout in the next three days to get the items they've already selected.

Series ROI
As you extend the series, your sales per email delivered will drop. You won't produce $2.45 for each effort. However, the series mentioned previously can produce, in total, about $7 per email delivered. That means for every order you get on your site, you can get $7 more revenue by simply employing a series like that one.

What's amazing is how few sites take advantage of this opportunity to present their most recent buyers with the chance to purchase again. Maybe most sites already get so many orders they just don't have the time or energy to get a few more.

If you sell via several channels, supercharge your triggered email programs by sending your series to shoppers who behaved similarly in another channel. If you collect email addresses from in-store buyers, send them the same "buyer" series outlined previously.

Finally, it can be a lot of work to set up five or six different triggers each with several efforts in a series. But you don't have to do them all at once. Get the basics started, then add a trigger or an additional effort every couple of weeks.

Once your program's in place, optimize it by continually testing new creative and offers. Also, at least once per quarter, review all of your triggered emails. Fix broken links if need be, or slant content to take advantage of a new season (fall, summer, etc.). And as my last warning, start exercising regularly! You'll need your strength to carry all the extra money to the bank that your triggered email program generates!

Larry Kavanagh is founder and CEO of e-commerce software-as-a-service developer D.M.insite (lkavanagh@dminsite.com).