How-to

Multi-Touch Triggered Email Campaigns: Best Practices & Examples

By Bluecore Marketing

Triggered email campaigns are incredibly important and effective for retail marketers since they help automate nurture and engagement activities in a way that is highly relevant to consumers. Today, they’ve become a key component of retail marketing strategies — and if you aren’t using triggered emails yet, you could be missing an opportunity to increase conversions by 8x or more.

These benefits can be magnified by a successful multi-touch triggered email campaign. If you only send each type of triggered email once, there’s a chance it will be lost in the subscriber’s inbox or they will read it and not take the desired action. However, adding multiple email touch points will help you follow up with these customers to ensure a higher rate of engagement.

With an understanding of how triggered emails work, backed by the knowledge of important best practices to optimize your multi-touch triggered emails, your brand can enjoy the benefits of these automated email marketing campaigns. But before we dive into best practices, let’s examine exactly what these campaigns are and how you can start crafting them.

What are Triggered Email Campaigns?

Triggered emails are automated emails that send when a predefined condition is met — such as a shopper signing up for your mailing list, a change in your product catalog or a customer abandoning their cart without purchasing anything. These conditions are often associated with the passage of time, new product information or a shopper engaging in a specific behavioral pattern. When your brand starts using at least one trigger to drive sales, you’ve officially created your first triggered email campaign.

The primary benefit behind these campaigns is they respond to not only a customer’s current actions or interests, but also predict future attitudes and activities by finding trends hidden in customer data. Then, they match those attitudes with behavioral or merchandising triggers, allowing you to reach a customer’s inbox with relevant messaging depending on their actions or changes in your product catalog. This helps your brand regularly nurture customers with personalized, relevant and interesting content, since 91% of customers prefer brands who recognize them, remember them and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations.

However, when people receive emails from brands, they aren’t always immediately available to engage, and might forget to check back later. This is why many marketers eventually turn to multi-touch campaigns. Adding several touches will offer shoppers a friendly reminder to purchase a product that’s waiting for them in a cart, on their wishlist or on your site.

Creating a Multi-Touch Triggered Email Campaign

Multi-touch triggered email campaigns shouldn’t be designed on a whim. To create one, you’ll need to outline a strategy and then find a solution that can support your chosen campaign strategy. You can start planning your triggered campaigns using the following four guidelines. 

  1. What is the trigger? Brainstorm actions and behaviors that would warrant a triggered email, such as joining your mailing list or purchasing a product. Generally, these revolve around behavioral triggers or merchandising triggers.
  2. What message should we send? Determine what type of action your triggered email should inspire. For example, if a customer abandons their cart, send them an email that reminds them to complete their purchase. You can include additional content too — like personalized product recommendations to expand a customer’s order size.
  3. Where should we send the message? Triggered campaigns are usually sent over email, since email allows for a high degree of personalization and is very effective at driving sales. However, many retailers also create trigger campaigns for their mobile applications or webpages. In this post, we will focus on email specifically.
  4. How many attempts should we make? Think about how many times you’d like to reach a customer while creating your multi-touch campaign. After all, each new email will require new content and being too overzealous with outreach can prompt customers to unsubscribe. 

Answering these questions thoughtfully will put your team on the right track to creating an effective multi-touch triggered email campaign. With that said, your marketing team should still follow a few best practices to ensure you create effective campaigns that drive conversions.

4 Best Practices for Multi-Touch Triggered Email Campaigns

Defining a trigger and crafting relevant messaging will give you a good starting point for your triggered email campaigns. However, it’s important to dig deeper to create a multi-touch campaign — you’ll need to avoid redundancy, implement more complex triggers and filters and strategically time your outreach. 

Whether you want to optimize your multi-touch campaigns or configure one that’s net-new, here are some best practices to keep in mind:

1. Tweak messaging and content for each email touch

All emails within a multi-touch campaign may encourage a shopper to complete the same action, but that doesn’t mean they should just receive the same email multiple times. Mix up the messaging and content to make each email feel unique to the shopper. Below we have two examples from an Under Armour multi-touch cart abandonment series. As you can see, each email has a slightly different message and offer.

In the Touch 1 email, the header copy reads, “This Gear’s Ready to Go” and offers free shipping on the shopper’s next order.

In the Touch 2 email, the header copy reads, “Hustle Up!” and creates a sense of urgency.

Also notice that the products featured in the “Gear Recommended For You” section vary in each email. Because this block of the email is dynamic, you can A/B test, for example by using co-view or co-purchase products to see if one approach entices shoppers to add more items to their cart and increase the order value.

2. Pay special attention to the order of your audience filters

Incorrect order of audience filters can result in closing the door too early on a viable group of shoppers, leaving potential revenue on the table.

In general, you want to start with the largest audience possible in the beginning, and narrow down that audience with additional filters until you settle on the perfect audience for each touch. To do so, always start by finding the customers who “did” something. For example, with a cart abandonment email, you’ll want to start by finding all the people who did add product(s) to cart.

Then, narrow down the audience with additional “did notfilters, such as “Did not remove product(s) from cart” and “Did not purchase products.”

3. Think of timing logic relative to when the original event took place

Timing logic is particularly relevant for subsequent touches after Touch 1 in a multi-touch series. When mapping this out, think of timing relative to when the original event (e.g. carted, viewed a product detail page or searched) took place. For instance, if you send a “Cart Abandonment Touch 1” two hours after the abandonment event and your “Cart Abandonment Touch 2” is meant to go out 24 hours after the original abandonment event, then it should go out 22 hours after Touch 1. When in doubt, draw a timeline on a piece of paper to keep things straight!

In the example below, the Cart Abandonment Touch 2 timing logic is based on receiving the “Cart Abandonment Touch 1” email between 20 and 22 hours prior.

4. Remember to set frequency caps

One of the main concerns when it comes to running multi-touch triggered email campaigns is the risk of sending too many emails, resulting in an increase in unsubscribes. But getting in front of this issue is easy to do by setting trigger frequency caps. These are particularly relevant for subsequent touches after a “Touch 1” in a multi-touch series. It is an optional frequency cap to ensure a customer has not recently received that same touch by qualifying in a different series.

By following these four best practices, your multi-touch triggered email campaigns will enjoy better performance. To further fortify the strength of your multi-touch triggered email campaigns, let’s take a closer look at a few successful examples of triggered emails. 

Examples of Triggered Email Campaigns

Choosing a trigger isn’t easy. There are a lot of different consumer behaviors and actions on which your team may want to capitalize, and the sheer number of trigger choices can become overwhelming. To further compound the challenge, each trigger requires a different level of understanding regarding not only your customers, but their behaviors and the products they like. 

Since taking the first step can be quite daunting, here are a few retail-standard email triggers to get you started.

Welcome emails

When a customer subscribes to your mailing list, they send a clear signal they’re waiting for your brand to impress them. Since first impressions are everything, you want to ensure this email is prompt and relevant to your potential new customer. 

Try to personalize your welcome emails based on past or predicted behavior from a customer and attempt to coax them into making their first purchase by evaluating a similar customer’s typical path to purchase.

Post-purchase emails

For many people, part of the appeal of shopping in person is getting instant gratification from their purchase — but when it comes to shopping online, delayed gratification is inevitable. 

Purchase confirmation emails mitigate delayed gratification by ramping up the excitement of ordering a product by thanking a customer for their purchase, confirming the purchase and letting them know it will arrive soon. These emails are often single-touch and an essential component of many triggered email campaigns.

Special occasions

Is it someone’s birthday or brand anniversary? Is a festive holiday right around the corner? Don’t miss out on an opportunity to celebrate — it could net your team a new purchase! 

During special occasions, gift giving is almost a certainty. By contacting a customer on a special holiday, you’ll reach them when they’re thinking about making a purchase, whether it’s for themselves or someone else. In these emails, encourage your customers to treat themselves with a selection of personalized product recommendations.

New arrivals

New arrival triggered emails are designed for customers who have shown interest in a certain item or category. As soon as a new item or product line that matches a customer’s interests is added to your stock, they will receive an email that features the new addition to your catalog. 

These emails are great candidates for multi-touch campaigns. If a customer doesn’t open a new arrival email, it’s easy to tweak the email’s content and resend it at another time. Don’t forget to set up workflows that will freshen up the subject line and switch up your product recommendations as needed.

Back in stock

Sometimes a customer will send signals they’re interested in a product by viewing the product, carting the product or adding it to their wishlist — but they don’t take immediate action to purchase it. Additionally, your retail marketing solution may be able to predict affinity toward certain products due to past behavior.

If a product goes out of stock while a customer still shows signs of interest in the product, send them a back in stock email as soon as the product is available again. This will help your team create a sense of urgency (if it went out of stock once, it could happen again!) and capitalize on pent-up demand.

Wishlist reminders

When a customer adds a product to their wishlist, they display a significant level of interest in that item. By sending triggered emails that remind shoppers of their desired products, they’re far more likely to complete the purchase. 

For best results, put wishlist emails in a multi-touch campaign — customers may need some time to consider their purchase and may need a few nudges before they’re ready to buy.

Replenishment emails

Replenishment emails take advantage of a customer’s unique purchase cadence to remind them to buy an item again. Since not every customer purchases with the same frequency, your replenishment emails should always be personalized to a single customer based on predictive signals.

For example, imagine if you had two customers that regularly purchase the same moisturizing cream from your store. The first customer purchases every two months, while the other purchases every three months. Without personalized replenishment emails, you wouldn’t be able to message each one at the time they’re most likely to purchase – you’d message one too early and the other too late. This could result in missed opportunities for sales.

Additionally, try to make your replenishment campaigns multi-touch — customers may need occasional reminders before they realize it’s time to restock. Send at least one reminder right before they’re due to replenish, one on the day they’re expected to replenish and another after the replenishment date has passed if they still haven’t purchased.

Product review requests

When a customer receives their product, try to solicit feedback within a reasonable time frame to help promote the product to new customers, while ensuring the current customer is satisfied. 

Product review triggered emails help your brand get this feedback by asking a customer to share a product review after they’ve spent a day or two with the item. It’s helpful to have a multi-touch campaign set up for review requests — customers may need some time to form an opinion on their recent purchase.

Re-engagement emails

If a customer used to shop at your store regularly but hasn’t made a purchase within a predefined period of time, they may be at risk of abandoning your brand. To retain these customers, try sending well-timed, personalized re-engagement emails using a retail-specific predictive marketing solution. This will help you identify at-risk customers using the unique cadence at which they buy.

For instance, if a customer used to purchase dog food from your store every month but they haven’t purchased in 45 days, automatically invite them to return to your online store and make their scheduled purchase. Consider making their re-engagement emails part of a multi-touch campaign, since you want to ensure at-risk customers see your efforts to win them back.

Abandonment emails

If a customer takes a certain action that indicates interest in one or more products but ultimately doesn’t purchase anything, you should have at least one abandonment triggered email ready to send. 

Abandonment emails may be triggered when a customer leaves your site after adding products to their cart or after showing strong interest in a certain product, product category or site search term. Ideally, these emails will help bring shoppers back to your site and encourage them to finish their purchase.

Final thoughts

Triggered emails are an essential part of nurturing customers, and multi-touch triggered emails provide more opportunities for customers to engage. However, keep in mind that creating a triggered email campaign requires plenty of planning, experimentation and an intelligent retail marketing solution that can support these plans from their initial conception to their execution. For a multi-touch triggered email campaign, this is doubly true.

By leveraging the power of personalization and automation, you can encourage more online purchases at your store while taking steps to retain and engage your existing customers. Now that you understand the fundamentals of a successful multi-touch triggered email campaign, you’re ready to go forth and enjoy a spike in new customers as well as incredible email ROI.

Bluecore Marketing