Personalization makes all the difference when it comes to email marketing.

If you’ve tried using a greeting tag to address your subscribers by name or segmentation to assure you’re only delivering relevant content, you’ve probably seen first-hand that personalized emails perform better, leading to higher open rates and click-through rates.

But nothing says personalization quite like following-up with relevant information. And there’s no better way to make that happen than through automation and triggered emails.

Email marketing automation can seem intimidating at first, but remember—email marketing automation isn’t just for big companies! Constant Contact’s powerful, yet simple tools can help your organization develop more efficient and strategic online marketing, so you can save time while growing your business.

What are triggered emails?

A triggered email is an email that is sent in response to your subscriber’s actions or behaviors. 

For example, a welcome email is sent when someone signs up for your email list. In this case, the welcome email is the triggered email, while your subscriber’s action of signing up is the trigger. 

Makes sense, right? But what are some other ways you can use triggered emails to deliver personalized content?

Here are some of the best ways to use triggered emails to send the right message to the right people at the right time—automatically.

The best part about automation is being able to deliver great content time and time again, without lifting a finger. Here are five ideas for triggered emails to try:

1. Welcome Emails

The first few messages your new contacts receive are crucial for setting expectations and building their personal investment in your business.

A great way to do this is by sending an automated welcome email to new contacts. You can build strong relationships with an email series triggered by how subscribers engage with previous emails or as an autoresponder when they join a new list.

The best part is that you set up your welcome series once, and it works for you indefinitely. The experience is the same from your first email contact to your thousandth!

Looking for tips on what to include in your automated welcome series? Check out this blog post to learn the three emails you should include.

2. Birthday and Anniversary Emails

Everyone loves to celebrate. Acknowledging anniversaries or sending special birthday “presents,” such as coupons, are both great ways to stay engaged with your contacts. 

Of course, to send a birthday email you have to, well… know your contact’s birthday. If you didn’t ask for that information in your original sign-up form, don’t fret! Consider sending an email campaign with a survey block to ask your subscribers to provide their personal information, such as birthday and anniversary dates. You can also ask contacts to update their profile by clicking the “Update Profile” link in the footer of any email they’ve received from you.

Anniversary emails can be particularly useful for many industries: realtors who want to congratulate their clients after a year of homeownership, animal shelters who can reach out to adopters after they’ve had their furry new friends for a few years, a poetry club who is congratulating members while also requesting dues, or—maybe most obviously—a wedding planner congratulating the happy couple.

Follow these simple steps to set up your automated birthday and anniversary emails today. More of a visual learner? Check out our video tutorial for creating a birthday email.

3. Resending Emails

Sometimes, your contacts just don’t open your emails.

This could be for a variety of reasons: they’re too busy, your email got buried in their inbox on a particularly busy mailing day, or maybe they just didn’t find your subject line that enticing.

The good news is that you can set your email to automatically resend to contacts who didn’t open the first time and even tweak your subject line in the process, by using Constant Contact’s resend to non-openers feature.

Using this feature, you can schedule a resend and select how many days you want to wait before resending. Looking for some pro advice? Of all the contacts who will open your Constant Contact email, 89% open within the second day of having received it, and 93% open by the third day. Waiting for the fourth day to resend ensures you’re less likely to resend an email to someone who was already going to open—which could be seen as spam and result in complaints or unsubscribes.

4. Abandoned Cart Emails

According to OptInMonster, roughly 76% of online shoppers will abandon their cart at checkout. Cart abandonment is even higher on mobile than it is on desktop.

Abandoned cart emails are a great way to combat this phenomenon and urge your customers to complete their purchase. 

If you are using Shopify for your online store, you can use Constant Contact to automatically trigger an abandoned cart email whenever a Shopify customer visits your store, adds something to the shopping cart, reaches the shipping page (or beyond) in the purchase flow, and doesn’t complete the purchase.

Click here to learn how you can re-engage Shopify customers who didn’t complete their purchase, with an abandoned cart reminder email.

5. Click Triggers

Have you ever received an email, clicked on an article within it, and thought, “Wow… I wish they sent more things like this!” 

Using click triggers, you can follow through on that wish for your readers.

Within Constant Contact, you can set up an automated email series to trigger when a contact engages with a specific email, such as opening it or clicking a link. This allows you to gather passive information from your subscribers and gauge what they may be interested in. Then, using an automated email series, you are able to deliver more content that they will find relevant and interesting.

Start taking advantage of triggered emails today

Triggered emails give you the power to tailor your content to each unique contact and deliver the right message, at the right time. Not only are triggered emails highly personalized and valuable for your customers, they are also convenient for you and save you valuable time down the road. 

Remember, it’s more expensive to get a new customer than it is to retain a current one. Provide your subscribers with value and you will keep them coming back. 

Need help getting your online marketing off the ground? Check out our new guide, The Download, for practical advice, helpful tips, examples of what works and what doesn’t, and a whole lot more!

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