We all use our websites to gather email lists for many reasons, but the most common is " to generate audience, which will often be engaged with your emails about your website or your products. However, many make the same mistake over and over again " they just do not use the behavior of their email subscribers to target their emails. Here is when lifecycle email marketing can really help.
This is a major issue, when it comes to improving your conversions and improving customer retention. The reason is simple " if you create several emails and target each one of them to a different segment of your email subscribers or users, based on whether they opened your email, opened your previous email, clicked on a link from your email or didnt go through your conversion funnel, you are very likely to improve your conversion rate.
How Does This Exactly Work?
For example, you have 5 different steps in your conversion funnel and at the very first step you collect the email address of the user. It is worth creating several email templates using behaviour based triggers. To be really successful with this, you shouldnt just send emails titled Please complete your purchase, just because it wouldnt work. If you need some examples jump to the bottom of the post.
Instead, be creative " try to put yourself in your users shoes and simulate their behaviour. Ask yourself and be honest: What title will make you open the email in the first place? What will make you complete all of the remaining steps in the conversion funnel? What will make you open a second email from this website, if you didnt open the first one? How to approach the user in a way ensuring maximum success?
After you figure out the answers to these vital questions, you should create different email templates for the different segments of users you will be targeting. Never use the same email for all of your subscribers!
Implementation
Depending on your preferred email marketing system, you have a lot of options " if you do not use any, jump to the bottom of the article and read how Paul Stamatiou did it. For the rest of the examples, I will stick to my preferred email marketing system " Mailchimp.
In Mailchimp, you can take advantage of the ecomm360 events functions, which will allow you to track different parts of the conversion funnel. Additionally, you can also use filters to send emails to users who clicked a particular link or opened your previous email.
What I love about this tool is that they are trying to keep it simple " you can create an auto-responder triggered by a particular action and sent on a particular day with just a couple of clicks.
Once you are done configuring your triggers, it is time to design your emails. Mailchimp have an awesome drag-and-drop editor, which you can use to create an email template based on your preferences. This is pretty much all it takes to configure an auto-responder in Mailchimp.
Resources & Email Example
While I was doing research for this article, I read a very interesting article on lifecycle email marketing by Paul Stamatiou and whats even better, there I found a great presentation by Dave McGlure about Startup Metrics for Pirates.
When I decided to search for examples, I had something strange happening. While I was searching in Google for examples on lifecycle marketing, but didnt find any good ones, I decided to check my email and there I had a notice from GoDaddy about a couple of expiring domains and services. I did go to the GoDaddy website and almost completed the purchase, when I received a very long phone call and once I got back, I had completely forgotten about this.
On the next day, I received what I truly needed! GoDaddy sent me an email, informing me that they noticed that I didnt complete my purchase, so they were offering me 30% on all items in my cart! Whats more to want " in the end I received a 30% discount and also managed to get an example of lifecycle marketing in action.
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