The automated message is email marketing at its finest. By definition, an automated message is a mailing that is generated by an action, behavior or profile. As opposed to a general marketing message, they are expected or anticipated as they are targeted to their individual recipients.
Requiring little maintenance after initial setup, your marketing team will need to put forth little effort to manage these messages. The icing on the cake is that because they tend to be highly relevant messages, these are frequently your most opened and clicked emails in your email marketing program.
Reasons Why We Love Automated Messages
- By design they are based on an action taken by a subscriber
- The automation makes them virtually effortless
- Subscribers engage with these messages more than any other message type
6 Ideas for Creating Automated Messages
When planning an automated messaging program, begin by creating a list of the most critical steps in your sales cycle. Think about what message you would like for your customer, prospect or subscriber to know at that time. These are the messages that have the opportunity to become an automated message. To help get you started, we have provided six suggested automated emails for various industries.
- The Upsell Message: Offering paywall or paid for content is becoming more and more frequent in the publishing industry. Consider automating a triggered message to send to email subscribers once they have read X number of articles for free. At this point, they are on their way to becoming a loyal reader, and they may be interested in paying for content if they get something in return.
- The Level Up Email. Gaming companies can send a message when a player is close to reaching a key level in the game and include content about the cool features that will be unlocked at that level.
- The Abandoned Cart Email. For retail, when a customer leaves an item in their shopping cart, send a message to remind the shopper of the item. Retailers can even offer a discount to bring the customer back to purchase the item.
- The Device Specific Email. Publishers with mobile applications can send a message to subscribers who view emails on their mobile devices, informing them of ways to download the publisher’s mobile application. Publishers can also create triggered messages with their most viewed content as a win-back campaign to increase page views.
- The Segmented Email. In a B2B environment, when a new subscriber indicates their job title at the point of collection, such as Purchasing Agent, marketers can send a targeted message containing valuable information for purchasing agents to that individual subscriber.
- The Celebratory Email. Where appropriate, collect birthday information and send a message to your subscriber with an offer or simply a birthday greeting. Although these types of messages are not based on actions, but instead based on profile data you’ve collected from subscribers themselves, they usually have a very high engagement rate.
Employing an email automation campaign should be effortless. Taking a little bit of time to setup your automation campaign will save you time in the long run so you can spend more time on what really matters. Download our Automation Solution Guide, “Automate Your Way to Email Marketing Paradise” to learn more!