A simple email can do so much. It can raise brand awareness, drive sales, engage new customers and re-engage past customers or even identify unknown shoppers to build an accurate customer database. What’s more, email typically has the lowest marketing spend at just 3.3% of a retailer’s annual digital marketing budget but brings in 25% of the total online revenue.

Email is certainly the workhorse of your digital campaigns but did you know it could – and should – be doing even more? Batch and blast messages still make up 96.2% of all email volume while automated triggered campaigns are a meager 3.8% of volume. But automated campaigns drive a significant amount of revenue with one-third of email revenue being attributable to these triggered messages.

Automated email messaging offers many benefits, including:

• Open rates that are four times higher than broadcast messages, on average
• Click-through rates that are 152% higher than broadcast messages, on average
• Revenue per email that can be 46 times higher than that of broadcast messages
• Efficiency in message creation, saving time and resources
• The ability to personalize every message to every subscriber, making emails more contextually-relevant
• Additional opportunities to engage shoppers
• Boost in deliverability and inbox placement

Following, we outline seven different triggered messages that will greatly enhance your email marketing strategy, bringing in more revenue while reducing design time, resources and stress. We noted both the benchmark statistics retailers are seeing with these campaigns plus the stats that the best in class campaigns are generating.

1. Welcome Messages

Automated welcome messages are powerful, automated, revenue-driving, customer-engaging machines. Triggered upon signup and deployed immediately, these messages reach customers at the exact moment when they are most interested and engaged and typically have such high open rates that we recommend sending two, three or even more welcome messages in the form of a series while suppressing shoppers from promotional sends. Seize the opportunity to learn more about your shoppers and drive them to a preference center while promoting your new merchandise, top selling products or even personal recommendations based on the shopper’s browse behavior. With the average revenue per email just under one dollar, automated welcome messages generate 18 times more revenue per email than the average broadcast message and may account for up to 20% of your total triggered campaign revenue.

Benchmark

Best in Class

Open rate

37.0%

70.3%

Unique click rate

7.8%

15.6%

Revenue per email

$1.01

$5.37

2. Online Browse

Sending automated, personal messages to shoppers who browse your site but don’t add items to their carts or checkout greatly expands your audience. Browse and abandon campaigns have come a long way from their origin as creepy, big-brothery messages. With the addition of personal product recommendations based on the category, sub-category or product the shopper viewed, these messages are now contextually-relevant, timely and useful. And, when done correctly, they generate eight times more revenue per email than broadcast messages.

Benchmark

Best in Class

Open rate

31.7%

47.6%

Unique click rate

6.9%

13.2%

Revenue per email

$.38

$.93

3. Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment messages have also come a long way since their premier. Retail marketers send a variety of cart recovery messages to customers who started but didn’t complete a transaction. These automated campaigns range from a single triggered message to a complex series of four of five messages that include additional personal product recommendations, varied timing and offers and social proof in the form of customer ratings and reviews. These messages are vital to your success as they can recapture 30% or more of your lost sales with very little effort or cost. Shopping cart abandonment campaigns can generate 46 times more revenue per email than broadcast messages, making them one of the highest performing campaigns in your email arsenal.

Benchmark

Best in Class

Open rate

29.8%

55.8%

Unique click rate

8.1%

13.4%

Revenue per email

$2.81

$6.18

4. Loyalty

Post purchase emails come in many varieties. From transactional messages, such as order and shipping confirmation, to loyalty, re-engagement and winback campaigns, post purchase messages are designed to keep shoppers engaged and buying from you. Post purchase loyalty messages generate eight times more revenue per email than broadcast messages and, by including personal product recommendations, you can easily turn a first time buyer into a loyal customer and brand advocate.

Benchmark

Best in Class

Open rate

29.1%

43.6%

Unique click rate

5.7%

9.8%

Revenue per email

$.62

$1.87

5. Replenishment

If you sell consumable products, like health and beauty supplies, office products, or even running shoes, an automated replenishment campaign will keep your customers buying these products from you over and over again. With conversion rates averaging over 30%, these campaigns generate 22 times more revenue per email than broadcast messages, these messages have some of the highest performance metrics because they are timely, personal and relevant.

Benchmark

Best in Class

Open rate

21.1%

35.8%

Unique click rate

3.6%

8.6%

Revenue per email

$1.31

$3.84

6. Back in Stock Alerts

Back in stock messages take personalization to a whole new level as shoppers sign up to receive these specific notifications. Simply telling customers you will notify them when items are restocked prevents many of the shoppers from buying the merchandise elsewhere – plus it has the added bonus of additional sales as shoppers sometimes purchase something else the day they sign up. And you have the ability to promote additional items to them while you’re waiting for the product to become available. These campaigns generate 32 times more revenue per email than broadcast messages, making them the highest performing automated message.

Benchmark

Best in Class

Open rate

52.7%

60.1%

Unique click rate

25.3%

30.2%

Revenue per email

$6.41

$7.37

7. Recurring Automated Campaigns

The newest automated messages to make our list of seven triggered campaigns every retailer needs to send is our Recurring Automated Campaigns. These messages are similar to broadcast messages as they are scheduled to go out to a large segment of your list at a specific time each day, week or month. But these campaigns are 100% automated, pulling in personal product recommendations based on each recipient’s past purchase or browse history or inventory considerations, such as new markdowns or top sellers. The early metrics from these campaigns show that they perform as well as broadcast messages, but the secret of these messages is the automation. Once set up, they require zero design time and maintenance – they just run in the background adding incremental revenue to your bottom line. Some ideas to think about as you set up these campaigns:

• Monday Markdowns
• Tuesday Trends
• What’s New Wednesday
• Thursday Top Sellers
• Friday Faves
• Saturday Steals
• Social Sunday
  

Simply adding one or two of these automated messages to your deployment calendar will greatly increase your email revenue. Note - because these campaigns are so new, Best in Class performance metrics are still being determined.

Benchmark

Open rate

9.9%

Unique click rate

3.3%

Revenue per email

$.05

What are your favorite or best performing triggered messages? Let us know in the comments!