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Benefits to Event Triggered Emails?
Event Triggered Emails are a brilliant way to increase extra revenue from existing and potential customers and generate return/repeat business, whilst re-enforcing brand loyalty and customer retention, and not to mention increase site traffic.

By reacting to what users have done on your site, (whether they have clicked a button, bought something or left a message) you can create relationships that lead to your customers returning to your site. This in turn creates valuable up-sell and cross sell opportunity and by engaging your website visitors with reasons to come back to your site you keep the sales-life cycle in motion.

By continuing the after-sales, after-enquiry process with your customers through personalisation of key content, delivered directly to their inbox, you are showing an interest in what these people want. This creates the competitive advantage of placing you in a positive light and in turn encourages users to return to your site, write a good review, recommend you to a friend and so on…

What is Event Triggered Email?

An “Event Triggered Email” or an “Automated Delivery Email”, are terms which relate to emails which are sent out to potential or existing customers or users of your website when an action (such as an order) or request has been made. Normally an EVE (Event Triggered Email) or Automated Delivery Email, ADE, are highly personalised and are sent to recipients that have given you their email addresses at some point previously, as opposed to prospective emails that you send out to bought-in email addresses.

The personalised, focused content of these emails is what makes them successful. These emails can be geared to contain specific content that relates to something you know about your customer/visitor to your site.
For example, if you own a music store website and someone buys an Oasis album, you could send them a personalised email containing links to records in the Oasis back catalogue, plus any similar bands or music offers. There are numerous scenarios in which ETE’s can be extremely beneficial, whether you have an ecommerce site, an educational or service industry site. The applications are diverse and are rooted to what it is you do or what your goals ultimately are.

Emails are sent out to your website users based on pre-determined events. These events can be anything tangible that you can record, such as someone signing up for a newsletter, or someone leaving a message.  Here are some typical examples of Event Triggered Emails:

Typical Uses for Event Triggered Emails:
Emails can be generated and distributed when YOU alter or add something on your site. Such as:

• A new article is posted to your blog
• New content is added to your site
• A new product page or offer is created for your site
• An email can be sent to a user who has asked to be notified when a page has been created or certain content has been added to the site.

Emails that can be generated when the USER does something on your website:

• Purchase An Item Or Save A Basket
  This is a perfect opportunity to not only acknowledge the users order but also bring their attention to other customer service features they may not have read about, give them the information they need to contact you should they need to, and importantly you can use this as a perfect up-sell / cross-sell opportunity  to promote similar or related products.

• Shopping cart triggered emails
  If your users are pulling out of the shopping basket process at certain times, then an email could be generated to ask them why they made the decision they did, ask for feedback to improve their user experience, or even just display them offers to entice them back.

• Behavioral triggered emails
  You can generate targeted emails based on how your users use your site, or what they show interest in. For example if you have users who click on products in the “traditional English pottery” section of your store and seem to keep away from the “modern kitchen products”, then it’s quite obvious what kind of pre-defined email offers you will be sending those users. But likewise, the logic behind your users behaviour doesn’t need to be gathered covertly. Ask them out-right what they like, use short polls to quickly gather intelligence on your users tastes, include product reviews, forums and look in to what your customers are saying and respond positively to it.
• Enhanced Customer Service
  One of the key areas that makes successful businesses excel away from their competition is customer service. This is an obvious statement but by using automated event triggered emails this process can be so streamlined and effortless that it will reduce the labour time and expense on your customer service team. It can also automate many mundane processes which are vital to the success of any business, such as purchase notices, delivery statements etc.

Use Google Analytics To Keep Track

Through the use of tools such as Google Analytics it is also possible to track the traffic that has been generated by your targeted emails and thus show tangible results from your automated campaigns.

This can done by looking at data from you email delivery service, seeing what emails have been sent when and then looking at the correlating data in Analytics to see what the traffic did on the dates/times the emails where sent.

For a basic example, if you see from your email delivery reports that you had delivered 40 “thank you for your purchase” emails on Friday (you’ve obviously made 40 sales), and you know that on that email you have included a link or feature area that promotes say, your very latest product which is on page X, you can then use google analytics to see how many hits on that page actually came from your email, or how many were from normal site traffic, Pay-per-click advertising etc. If, over a period of time you find that YOUR customers aren’t reacting well to this kind of approach, you can adapt your links to include links that aren’t so sales targeted and instead ask them to join your forum, for example. Then through Google analytics you can check to see how well that has worked.
Conversely negative data can be analysed to determine where or how the marketing strategy can be re-deployed in order to create better results. But the practice of looking and reacting to these results is a good one to adopt and has been proven to yield results.

Conclusion
There are lots of various applications for Automated and Event Triggered Emails, and it all depends on what your business is, and what your aims and objectives are. ETE’s are a great, effortless way to benefit your site whether they are geared to include marketing campaign strategy or work as customer service response material. They are proven to increase profitability, customer retention and brand loyalty.