Making the most of a trigger enhancement

We have a new audience group feature that lets you send more targeted trigger emails, and we’re excited to tell you all about it and give you a few ideas for how you might set it in motion.

As you probably already know, triggers are handy emails that send automatically based upon a particular event. With Emma, you can set up four styles of triggers: when someone signs up to receive your emails, when someone has a birthday or other date-related event, when someone clicks a link in a campaign or when someone completes a survey. And now, for the first time, you can refine any of those triggers based upon audience groups.

Trigger emails are often under-utilized in the world of email — sometimes because marketers fear they don’t look authentic. Sure, automatic emails have been around long enough that recipients know you’re not perched at your computer, hitting the send button just as soon as they sign up or click a link. But your audience will appreciate smart triggers — such as coupons, an exclusive invitation to an event or personalized product content — and these strategic emails may generate some of your highest opens and clicks. Effective triggers let your audience know that you’re listening to them and that you care about their interests.

How does this new enhancement change the trigger game? Pretty remarkably. By creating triggers with some truly targeted content, you can set the tone for future conversations with various segments of your audience — you don’t have to rely only on those more general triggers that speak to everyone at once.

So now for the tips … with these four ideas, you can put these new audience-group triggers to work right away:

+ Welcome new subscribers with an email, based upon the group they signed up for.
Different group memberships may call for different welcome emails. If you’re an outdoor adventure company, for example, you might display audience groups on your signup form so subscribers can select to receive communication about their areas of interest. Now you can set up separate triggers to welcome members to your “climbing” group in a different way than you welcome members to your “kayaking” group.

+ Send birthday coupons tailored to subscribers’ interests.
A date-related trigger is a nice way to recognize special days for your members. If you own a baby clothing boutique, consider collecting the birth dates of your subscribers’ little ones, and send out unique birthday coupons tailored to parents of baby boys and others to parents of baby girls. This  method would also work if you’d like to send unique birthday emails based upon location, age or prior purchase behavior.

+ Follow up with folks after they’ve taken a customer experience survey.
It’s a good idea to thank members for taking a survey. After all, they took time out of their busy days to provide feedback that you can use. If you’ve sent a customer experience survey to customers in different store locations, send customized thank-you notes to Austin customers and Houston customers. Of course, these triggers don’t have to vary by location only — you can set them up based on any particular way you’d like to segment your audience.

+ Limit the number of people invited to an event.
The new trigger enhancement also lets you limit who receives follow-up. If you have a link in a campaign about your annual big event, any recipient can click to view the event’s details. But you might decide that only clickers in your “members & donors” group will receive an invitation to the event by way of a trigger. You’ll probably find lots of other scenarios too — link-based or otherwise — where you’d want a trigger to go to one group but not another, and this new feature makes that possible.

I hope these ideas have started you thinking about how you can make use of this new trigger enhancement. If you haven’t set up triggers, or if you haven’t updated your strategy in a while, now’s a good time to use audience segmentation and personalized triggers to your advantage. The sooner you develop targeted relationships and conversations with your audience members, the easier they’ll be to maintain. And it’s likely that these folks will become your biggest fans, helping you attract new signups and customers.

Ready to implement triggers based upon audience group? Read more in our help pages.

And if these ideas for triggers based on audience group have raised any of your own, please share them with us in the comments section! We’d love to hear what you have planned.