Triggered messaging: Turning lost leads into long customer lifecycles

Triggered email campaigns are helping marketers reduce cart abandonment, improve conversion rates and retain customers better than ever before. In fact, as surveys continue to demonstrate, if you don’t have a triggered messaging campaign in place already, you could be missing out on serious returns and losing your customers to other sites every day. Even worse, those sites could be turning your lost leads into long, healthy customer relationships.

Right time, right message
Triggered messages work better than traditional batch emails because they are in sync with what customers want from the start. Timing is critical. Think about these situations:

• A client has signed up and receives a welcome email within minutes
• A client has been shopping online and receives a triggered reminder to checkout half an hour later
  or
• A client is looking forward to a public holiday and receives a themed offer a week before.

In each of these cases, the recipient is already engaged and the communication is relevant, so they are more likely to act.

As emarketing technology evolves, triggered messages are increasingly personalised and targeted and marketers are reporting improved customer retention and loyalty as a result. They are tracking potential customers from the first visit, using automated data mining to create a dynamic purchasing profile based on what customers have browsed, carted, purchased or abandoned.

Real-time triggers communicate with their customers using personalised messages. They’re seeing abandoned carts turned into repeat sales as their customers respond to emailed offers and promotions, returning to the site again and again.

Abandoned carts don’t have to mean lost business
65% of new customers don’t complete their purchases, choosing instead to abandon their carts. 90% of these lost leads never come back and marketers have a matter of minutes to persuade them to turn around and complete their purchase before they’re gone forever.

Sending perfectly timed, personalised messages achieves up to 20% reduction in cart abandonment alone. But that’s only the beginning. The latest figures show they result in a 15% to 30% increase in overall sales.

Send emails your customers want to receive
The beauty of real-time triggered messages lies in their variety. Reduced spam bounce and improved open rate are the progeny of content relevance and personalisation. So use the data mined as your customers shop to make their mail content as targeted as possible:

• Turn the abandoned cart around with product images and information; your potential purchaser nearly bought it once already. Reviews from other customers and special offers increase likelihood of conversion even more
• Convert a casual browser into enthusiastic buyer with enticing offers based on products they viewed, reassuring them yours is the best deal they’ll find
• Say ‘Happy Birthday’ to your customers with a personalised coupon. It’s proven to yield 360% higher revenues than the average marketing email
• Cross-sell. Enhance your order confirmation emails with tailored promotion of other products the customer might like
• Request a review. It doesn’t all have to be about sales. A new review is unique marketing for your product and the fresh content will boost your SEO
• Anticipate your customers’ requirements. Did they buy ink cartridges? Set up a campaign to contact them with the latest offers just as you estimate they need to replenish their stocks

Get the best from triggered messaging
The most important part of any triggered messaging campaign is starting it. Talk to your trusted experts. Whether they’re your current agency, in-house team or a new supplier, is not as important as getting going and testing the results. But there are certain vital considerations to discuss if you are to maximise the enormous potential of your future campaigns.

Start simply and expand gradually for maximum segmentation, proven to increase email open rate by 20%. Don’t try to create lots of programmes from the first day. It’s far better to pick one first, get it working and then test and measure until it performs the way you want it to. If you repeat this phased process with each programme, you will create a very powerful, multi-layered emarketing tool that you can monitor precisely. With this approach, you will see ROI quickly and can adapt each programme accordingly if one is outperforming another.

Integrate your ecommerce and emarketing platforms. This gives you access to a lot more data. Transactional data is gold dust and can be translated directly into marketing collateral if these platforms are correctly aligned. A good triggered messaging system will harvest the data from a customer’s cart, whether they purchase immediately or not, and use this tailored information for future marketing messages.

Finally, automate everything to make processes as easy to manage as possible. Lost leads don’t have to stay lost. Triggered messages, implemented correctly, can turn them into lucrative customer relationships.

Mike Austin
CEO, Triggered Messaging
@TriggeredMsging

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