I just came back from a journey. I adopted Luca, a 100-pound standard poodle, in Palm Springs, California, and drove him back to my home in Dallas. The trip took my co-driver and me 20 hours over two days.
But we didn’t just jump into the car with Luca and all his belongings and food and point the car down the highway. Thanks to my strategy-first mantra, “Strategy before tactics,” we put together a map that showed us which roads to take, which towns to aim for or avoid, which hotels took dogs and where to take pit stops every few hours.
As we built our travel plan, I thought about how much it was like creating an email journey (no, really). An email journey automates repeatable actions, freeing you to focus on other parts of your email program.
You probably have a few of the most common journeys in your email program. But have you looked them over lately to be sure you’re getting as much out of them as you could?
Email journeys: The money trees of your email program
An email journey is a series of related emails you set up in advance to send automatically when specific customer actions trigger them.
Your email journeys are the foundation of your email marketing program because they automate repeatable actions. Most of them make money for you in the background, too. That’s why they’re money trees.
As long as you tend to them regularly, they will keep making money for your company while you work on campaigns and other initiatives — like creating more journeys.
Many retailers I speak with regularly say they can attribute 50% or more of their email revenue to automations and journeys. That’s a good motivation for investing in journeys.
From automations to journeys
In the early days of email, we called this series of triggered messages “automations.” They went out automatically, after all. Then Salesforce introduced its journey builder, which you would use to set up a complex combination of automated emails. Suddenly, everyone started calling these automated programs “journeys.”
This renaming helped us rethink automation as more than a series of email messages. Instead, we understood it to be a coordinated journey customers take with our brands.
Dig deeper: An email automation blueprint for smarter customer journeys
Journeys and automations are similar but differ in the details. Both send automated emails triggered by customer actions, but a journey is broader, spanning multiple series and relying on data to decide which emails to send in different situations.
This list might help you understand the differences:
- Trigger mail: A transactional email that responds to a customer action.
- Example: Purchase confirmation.
- Automation: A short series with one or two emails sent to everyone who triggers that automation.
- Example: Shipping confirmation/delivery notice.
- Journey: An automated series of three emails or more, each with a function or goal, sent over an extended period. Journey emails often call on customer data to determine automatically which email to send next, which customers to email and when to send.
- Example: An onboarding series triggered when a customer opts in, with emails that:
- Welcome the customer.
- Introduce your customer to your brand.
- Show them what to expect from your emails.
- Move them to a first activity, such as a purchase or account registration.
- Example: An onboarding series triggered when a customer opts in, with emails that:
Understanding these distinctions helps you design more potent triggers, automations and journeys. When evaluating platforms or writing an RFP, you’ll need clarity on what you want to accomplish with automations to confirm the platform can deliver. Clear definitions also make reporting, setup, execution and data access more reliable.
3 steps to set up a successful email journey
These are the fundamentals for creating an email journey, but they can also help you audit your journeys to discover where you need to modify or update them.
1. Specify inclusions and exclusions
Knowing who should not receive an email in your series is just as important as knowing who to include
- Which customers should get which emails in the journey?
- Who should be excluded?
- And who truly belongs on the journey in the first place?
You might have one purchase journey for first-time buyers, another for repeat customers and a third for buyers in your loyalty program. A win-back automation, which you send to customers who have never bought, would differ from one for customers who have stopped buying.
Accurate data is essential here. Loyal customers don’t want to be treated like first-time buyers. Exclusions can be harder to determine than inclusions, but they help prevent sending emails to the wrong audiences.
2. Build your journeys one at a time
When I was consulting with Fannie Mae, the U.S. mortgage financing company, I met with the head of their email team. When our conversation turned to email automations, his face lit up and he said, “You have to see ours!”
He pulled out a paper chart, easily 4 feet long, with hundreds of email triggers, automations and journeys he had created for the email program.
I was astonished. “How did you get all this done?” I asked.
His answer: One by one over a long time. He started with one automation, polished it and then went on to the next one. This long building process is essential for creating a successful set of journeys.
Dig deeper: 3 high-impact email automations you need to drive revenue
You can’t expect to sit down in a strategy session and emerge with a complex set of journeys, each with its twisting routes of emails and actions that reflect all the ways customers interact with your emails and your brand.
Don’t wait to launch your journey until it’s perfect. That will cost you momentum, not to mention lost revenue and time you could have spent on other projects.
Create a basic journey and launch it. Then build on it. This process of incremental innovation incorporates what you learn from your tests and operations to inform your next move. When you’re satisfied, then move on to your next journey.
3. Map your journeys beyond linear flows
Journeys are more complex and rely on more data than triggers or basic automations. Automations are linear flows, with few outside influences determining message conditions.
Journeys account for behavior, purchases, sector influence and much more. A true journey should look like a map with several email automations, like a highway map or blueprint.
I created one for a financial services company that changed the emails customers received according to:
- What they clicked on.
- What kind of business they were in.
- How many employees the business had.
- Total sales.
- Other data.
That’s why you must include time in your planning process to think through every decision or potential outcome before creating the messages or setting up your triggers.
Next level: Review and update journeys regularly
If I could take back one thing from the early days of email development, it would be the phrase “Set it and forget it.” That’s how we sold the automation concept. We decided to set up the automation and let it run without supervision. Big mistake.
- Links break, especially if your company changes website navigation.
- Data goes bad or the platform loses back-end access to your CRM.
- Customer expectations change.
- Templates get outdated.
- Customer habits change.
The world is constantly changing, and your journeys must keep up. You don’t run your car without regular maintenance. Your journeys need the same attention.
Schedule time to check in on them to ensure they’re running as they should. Test every automation before you launch your program. Then, go back and retest regularly to ensure your assumptions are correct.
Dig deeper: ‘Set it and forget it’ is how automated email ROI dies
When I worked for Sears, we had a successful email journey for customers who bought washer-dryer sets without the pedestals that raised the machines to more comfortable heights and included storage for laundry supplies.
Our research showed that if we sent those customers a follow-up email promoting the pedestals 7 days after installation, they would buy them. Later, we discovered that the 7-day period had shrunk. We tested again (and again and again) and found that a shorter period after installation was more effective.
The lesson here: When you assume something based on a single point in time, you will need to rerun your data occasionally to be sure your assumptions are still valid. You can also test other things, like dayparts and message content.
Set up email journeys that work while you focus on growth
Email automations and journeys have become essential for email marketing programs. Today, marketing automation platforms are more sophisticated and easier to use. Even the most basic ESPs have some automation built in, with the capacity to integrate with your CRM system and other data sources.
That 50% revenue benchmark I mentioned can be a handy guide if you’re wondering whether you have enough automations or need to expand your program.
If you’re below 50%, you have some work to do. As my Fannie Mae client showed me, you can always find another functional automation. And if you’re way above that, contact me to produce a white paper together.
Whether talking about a single triggered message, a short automated series, or a complete journey, triggered messages are more intelligent and effective than batch-and-blast emails.
In case you’re wondering, the Palm Springs-to-Dallas trip went (mostly) as planned. Now, we’re testing new scenarios, like how Luca is getting along with Pippin, who has run the household solo until now.
Just as we’ll optimize our two-dog household, you can use incremental innovation to refine your email journeys. After all, email is life!
Dig deeper: How persuasive email design can influence the ecommerce customer journey
The post How to make email automations work as hard as you do appeared first on MarTech.
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Author: Ryan Phelan