Listrak - improve your marketing with triggered emails

Improve Your Marketing With These Trigger Email Best Practices

Send your customers the right message at the right time with triggered emails.

Are you looking for a new way to reach your customers, improve engagement, and boost sales? 

Then look no further. Triggered emails are exactly what you’ve been searching for. They provide customers with valuable information that they want and need and in turn provide you with the metrics you want to see. 

From increased open and click-through rates to an impressive return on investment, trigger emails are a perfect solution for businesses looking to up their email game. The best part is that your customers actually want to receive these messages. 

Here’s a sneak peek at what we’ll cover in this article: 

  • What a trigger email is
  • Why you may want to use triggered emails
  • Share a few best practices to help you nail your triggered emails

What is a trigger email?

Trigger emails, also known as transactional emails, are messages that are sent to customers based on a specific action or behavior. They provide customers with relevant information that is sent to them at the right time. 

Listrak - boost your marketing with triggered emails
Transactional emails will not only increase your metrics around click and open rates, but they will also help increase your ROI. On top of that, your customers want to receive these types of emails, it’s a win-win for everyone. Image courtesy of Smart Insights

Because these emails are so specific to the needs of your customers, triggered emails have the potential to boost revenue by 33%. That’s because your customers want to receive these types of emails. 

Here are a few different kinds of trigger emails:

  • Order confirmation emails
  • Shipping and delivery emails
  • Abandoned cart reminder emails
  • Price drop emails
  • Welcome email campaigns
  • Retention email campaigns

With the help of technology, like predictive analytics and machine learning, you can continue to refine your triggered email strategy. The opportunity for personalization and real-time content is endless when you have the right tools. 

Why use trigger emails? 

Beyond the benefits we’ve already mentioned, there are a number of other reasons why you’d want to use triggered emails. From improving lead nurturing to building trust and retaining customers — you can’t go wrong with trigger emails. 

Here are a few additional benefits to using triggered emails: 

  • They provide an automatic response to customers
  • You can nurture leads more effectively
  • It will increase brand awareness
  • They can help build trust 
  • You can set trigger emails to help retain inactive customers
Listrak - improve marketing by triggered emails
Trigger emails provide impressive stats across the board. From a decrease in bounces to an increase in open and click-through rates, they’re worth the investment. Image courtesy of Neil Patel

Triggered emails can provide your customers with a great experience while providing you with higher engagement and conversion rates. When compared to bulk emails, triggered emails average 74.9% higher open rates and 161.9% higher click-through rates. 

Try These Trigger Email Best Practices

To see success in your triggered emails, you’ll need to know where to start. To help you get started, we’re going to take a look at a few best practices to follow when starting to use triggered emails. 

Have a Goal in Mind for Each Email 

It can be easy to go overboard when you start to see your triggered emails working, but you need to keep goals in mind. Every email you send should have a specific goal it’s meant to accomplish. 

Goals will help keep your content in line with what you want to accomplish and keep you from deviating from your original plan. That doesn’t mean you can’t build on to your triggered emails in the future, but you’ll always want to keep your overarching goals in mind. 

Let’s take a look at a few types of trigger emails and what the goals associated with them may be: 

  • Abandoned cart emails are meant to bring customers back to complete a purchase
  • Retention emails are meant to turn an inactive customer back into an active and engaged customer
  • Welcome campaigns are supposed to warm customers up and begin to build a relationship
  • Confirmation emails let customers know that their order was received 

Each type of triggered email has a specific reason for being created. Don’t lose sight of what that reason is. Especially when you’re just starting out, pick one or two triggers to focus on and spend time really building out your goals and customer journey. 

By keeping your goals in mind, you’ll also have a clear idea of how successful your campaign was, or where you may need to adjust for future emails. 


Listrak - improve your marketing with triggered emails
Abandoned cart emails are a great example of trigger emails. They are triggered by someone adding an item to their cart and leaving the site. Sending a quick reminder email about that product can bring customers back to your site and increase sales. Image courtesy of CoSchedule

Make Sure Your Email Provide Value

When you think about the experience you are providing your customers, you need to remember that these emails need to provide them with something of value. If you’re sending emails based on a customer’s action, it needs to be relevant to that action and provide them with something they need. 

A useless email will not only get deleted, but it may also cause the customer to ignore future communication from you. Especially if you’re continuously sending trigger emails that don’t apply to their needs.

To ensure you’re providing customers with value, you need to anticipate what the customer will need at this stage of their journey. Answer any questions they may have and provide them with what the next step is. That could be leading them back to your website to read more about a product or reminding them that a product will be shipped to their home in the coming day. 

No matter what the communication is about — just always remember to take a minute and think about what your customers need. Put yourself in their shoes and really think through what would provide them with the most value at this point in their journey. 

Use Personalization to Make an Even Better Experience

Personalization is so important in today’s marketing world — and that’s true for triggered emails as well. In fact, by combining the power of triggered emails with personalization, you’ll expect to see even higher conversion rates. 

Here are a few stats to prove that adding personalization to your triggered emails is the right move: 

Listrak - improve your marketing with triggered emails
Personalization alone can increase open and click-through rates. But when you bring these two email tactics together, you can expect to see even higher metrics. It’s a match made in heaven and is something you should consider when using trigger emails. Image courtesy of Statista
  • Personalized subject lines experience 26% higher open rates 
  • They improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and improve conversion by 10%
  • Personalized emails can increase transaction rates by 600%
  • Marketers see an average of 20% sales increase when personalizing customer experiences 

Together, triggered emails and personalization can be your secret weapon. 

There are a few different ways to personalize your triggered emails. Here are the two ways we’ll talk about in this article: subscriber segmentation and using predictive analytics. 

Subscriber segmentation will help you know your customers better. There are a number of ways to segment your customer list including location, age, gender, and purchase and browsing history. If you can collect the data, you can create segmentation groups around it and start providing customers with more relevant and personalize email communication.

Using predictive analytics is another solution to improve personalization. This means taking the data you already have on your customers and using it to predict what they will need next. 

Predictive analytics uses advanced artificial technology and machine learning to understand your customers on an entirely new level. With this knowledge, you can begin to hyper personalize their experience and know exactly what content each customer wants to receive. 

In the case of triggered emails, using predictive analytics could look like product recommendations based on a previous purchase, or sending remarketing emails about a product the customer was recently browsing. 

Start Sending Your Customers Triggered Emails

So there you have it. Triggered emails are a great resource for companies and will improve your metrics across the board. If you take the time to set goals, understand the needs of your customers, and implement personalization into your strategy, you too can benefit from sending your customers triggered emails. 

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