According to Epsilon, triggered emails have a click-through rate 115% higher than traditional emails. If your business is still facing a customer churn rate of 8% or more, then trigger-based email marketing campaigns may be just what your business needs in order to see a reduced churn and higher stick rate to increase your overall monthly recurring revenue (MRR). There are many types of triggered email marketing campaigns but for our purposes, I’m going to cover the following three types of triggered email campaigns:

1. Activity Based Trigger

2. Behavior-Based Trigger

3. Event-Based Trigger

Activity Based Trigger
Simply stated an activity-based trigger is any interaction your customer or potential customer has with your brand that will allow you to send an email in response. In November 2017, Statista reported cart abandonment as 50% less like to be read compared to post-purchase but most likely to make it to your customer’s inbox. I was recently on Overstock’s website looking for living room couch. Being a prior customer, they already have in their system what prior purchases I’ve made and what items I’ve looked at. In the case of the living room couch, I wasn’t completely sold so I left it in my shopping cart. The next day, Overstock sent me a follow-up email with a last day discount warning.

The above email image is only a portion of what the entire email looked like. More scrolling within the email and I see more crammed in images with x% off which can be a bit overwhelming, not to mention irrelevant to what I was actually looking for.
What Overstock could’ve done with the email was incorporate additional personalization in the body text with more pictures based on past purchases and browsing activity.

Something like this:
We saw you were looking at our blue tufted couch to (fingers-crossed) become a part of your latest room décor. We’re flattered. Here’s the inside scoop: we try our best to make recommendations that complement your style. Based on your latest selections we have a few of these popular picks to complement the blue tufted couch (so you don’t miss out, this is the last day to get up to 45% off).

This gets the message across about the sale and also lends to a little personalization to start to build likability and encourage the sale without shoving all types of other sales within the same email. This also segues into the next trigger.

Behavior Based Trigger
A behavioral based trigger comes from the actions your customers do or don’t take when interacting with your business online. Based on their interactions with your business, your behavior based marketing campaign can send them an individually customized message. So in the example of Overstock and the blue couch I was looking at, they could’ve easily tied in my past search history and used it to send me a behavior based email message:

Oh My Gorgeous! We found the perfect pairing for the blue tufted couch you were looking at,checkout these gorgeous throw pillows, some are even up to 45% off.

77.3 percent of online retail orders were abandoned instead of purchased in 2017 (Statista).

Here’s another example with Spirit Airlines. Love them, don’t like them or somewhere in between they will follow up with you via email. Let’s say you start to look up flights to book for an upcoming trip but before you could hit checkout you were interrupted by an important phone call (or maybe hungry kids).

Spirit Airlines has a follow up email to help remind you to continue where you left off including your destination and date of your upcoming trip. They also offer additional deals in case you no longer wanted to book your original flight.

“Did you forget something…”

Event Based Trigger
Welcome or an order confirmation are examples of event based trigger emails. In this case,Ellevest (a financial services company) presents an early access welcome email which provides a clear call-to-action above the fold.

The Financial Services industry has the highest triggered email open rate at 98.1% (Statista).
Below the fold of the email, Ellevest conveys transparency in what you can expect from them as well as an open door to reach out for any questions.

Email based triggers, when implemented with a personalized message, can reduce your overall customer churn. Whether you decide to use activity, behavior or event based triggers, the strategy needs to be about the message which enhances and builds the overall experience for your customer.