What is a triggered email? Definition, examples, and best practices

Personalization has proven to be one of the most effective ways to deliver better customer experiences and increase revenue. In fact, customers have come to expect personalized experiences from businesses.

According to research by McKinsey, 71% of customers expect personalized interactions from brands. Moreover, brands that excel at personalization see 40% more revenue. 

Triggered emails are one of the best ways to personalize customer experiences. Triggered emails are deployed in response to specific customer behaviors. This allows you to send personalized communications in a timely manner. 

The result? Increased engagement, better customer experience, and more revenue for your brand.

In this article, we’ll show you seven triggered emails you need in your campaigns and the best practices to follow when running these campaigns. 

What is a triggered email?

A triggered email is an email sent to a user when specific conditions are met. These emails are sent in response to specific user actions, which are also known as email triggers. For example, the email may be deployed when a user signs up to your email list, abandons a cart, or fails to engage with your emails after a certain duration. 

One of the key differences between triggered emails and promotional emails is that triggered email campaigns are sent on a one-to-one basis. These emails will be sent to each user independently as and when the set conditions are met. On the other hand, promotional emails are usually sent in bulk to users, and the email marketer decides when they’re deployed. 

Triggered emails also tend to be confused with drip emails. Both triggered and drip emails take advantage of automation to send specific emails to users. However, the difference is that triggered emails are only sent in response to a particular user action. They’re also sent only once.

Meanwhile, drip emails can start in response to a specific user action, but the series of emails will continue to be sent long after that initial activity. For example, the initial onboarding email will be sent when the user joins your platform. However, follow-up emails will also be sent after that first email.  

Importance of triggered emails

Triggered emails play an essential role in an email marketing strategy. These emails will benefit your brand through: 

Higher engagement

Triggered emails enjoy some of the highest engagement rates of any email campaigns because they are timely and are sent in response to specific user actions. Most users also expect these emails.

A good example is welcome emails, which have the highest open rates of any email campaign, at 83.63%, according to our benchmark report. This means triggered emails give you a unique opportunity to engage your users and pass a crucial piece of information or get them to complete an action that can benefit your business, e.g., resuming their checkout process. 

Better customer experience

Triggered emails improve the customer experience by helping you pass crucial information in a timely fashion. 

These emails are sometimes referred to as transactional emails. That’s because they can be sent in response to transactional activities like users confirming an order. They help keep your customers in the know, and this enhances their experience interacting with your brand. 

Improved loyalty and higher retention

Triggered emails can also boost customer retention and loyalty. This is especially the case with certain triggered email campaigns like re-engagement, milestone, and feedback emails.

Re-engagement emails will help you re-activate customers who may have gone quiet or become disengaged with your brand. Meanwhile, milestone emails show customers that you keep track of their major milestones (e.g., birthdays and anniversaries). This can strengthen their relationship with your brand, boosting customer loyalty. 

Lastly, a feedback email campaign gives your customers a voice. And if you act upon their feedback, they’ll know that your brand values their input, and this increases their loyalty.

Increased revenue

Triggered emails enjoy the highest open and engagement rates. These emails are also very timely, sent almost immediately after the e-mail triggers or conditions are met. As a result, the emails find users when they’re most engaged, and this increases the chances of conversions.

Moreover, a triggered campaign like cart-abandonment email campaigns helps you recover sales and revenue you would have otherwise lost. We’ll talk more about these emails below.

Time-saving

Lastly, trigger emails save your marketing team time because they’re automated. You can set and forget these campaigns for as long as the messaging remains relevant. 

Your email marketing automation platform will keep track of user behavior and actions and ensure the emails are always deployed on time.

Examples of triggered emails 

Let’s now look at seven of the most common triggered emails and their role in your overall email marketing strategy. 

1. Welcome emails

As the name implies, welcome emails are sent immediately after a new user or customer has signed up for your email list or become your customer.

This is one of the most important emails you can send as it gives users the first impression of your brand. You want the email to be warm and inviting. You also want it to be personalized and tell the recipients exactly what they can expect from your brand. 

Check this out. 

This is a welcome email we send to our customers when they first sign up for our platform. First, you will notice that the email is very brief. We don’t overwhelm readers with too much information. We keep this email focused and share the most important information users will need. Everything else can come later with follow-up emails.

Next, we personalize our triggered welcome emails. It opens by mentioning the recipient, and we proceed to share details about the specific product they’re interested in, i.e., sending emails.

Finally, we give the readers an option to get in touch with our team in case they have any additional questions. 

You will need a similar welcome email for your brand. The best part is that you can use marketing automation platforms like GetResponse to do this. Our solution lets you set up your welcome message and trigger, and we’ll make sure to deploy those emails every time the trigger is activated. 

Plus, you can add additional conditions and create a drip campaign from these emails. 

2. Cart-abandonment emails

Cart abandonment emails are a must-have for every eCommerce business. Check this out

Cart abandonment emails get an open rate of 39.07%, almost double the average email open rate. These emails also get a 23.33% click-through rate. It doesn’t stop there. 

Ecommerce businesses that send cart-abandonment emails can recover 10% of revenue that would have been lost. 

You must set up a triggered cart-abandonment email to minimize lost revenue. This is another area where you can combine the triggered email with a drip campaign. So, instead of sending just one cart abandonment email, you can automate several more emails to be deployed at specific intervals, depending on whether the user completes their purchase or not. 

Here’s how you can easily set it up:

The best practice is to have a total of three emails. 

Timing is also super important here. Send the first triggered email campaign within 1 hour of the user abandoning their cart. You can then send the two follow-up emails after 24 and 72 hours.

Also, you may want to include some incentives like free shipping or a discount code to encourage the users to complete their purchase. Something similar to what these folks have done.

Such incentives can be instrumental in recovering the lost revenue.

3. Transactional emails

Transactional emails build customer trust and ensure transparency. These emails are sent when a user places an order, changes account information, or makes a payment. 

So, a few good trigger email examples here would be a purchase confirmation or an order confirmation email, an order delivery email, and a password change email.

Transactional emails can also be deployed when conditions like an order getting shipped or the order being out for delivery are met. 

These emails help keep your customers informed about their crucial interactions with your brand. That’s why you must use a reliable platform to send transactional emails. You want a platform with a high deliverability rate to ensure these emails make it to the user’s inbox. Remember, your customers will be expecting them. 

Check out how GetResponse’s transactional emails service can help you automate these emails to maintain stellar customer relationships.  

4. Re-engagement emails

Re-engagement emails are sent to reactivate users who no longer engage with your newsletters or email communications. You can also use these emails to target users who haven’t engaged with your business in a while. 

Here is an example. The subject line for this email is “We Miss You!”

Different brands will have different ways of defining disengaged users. You can tag users as disengaged if they haven’t engaged with your emails or business within a certain duration, like 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days. 

You may also pick disengaged users based on the number of emails they haven’t engaged with. So, instead of waiting for a specific number of days, you can mark subscribers as disengaged if they do not open x number of emails in a row. 

You must have a re-engagement email campaign to ensure your subscribers continue engaging with your business. 

Even more important, re-engagement emails will help you identify users no longer interested in your newsletters. This is great as it helps you maintain a clean email list and reduce complaint rates that can hurt your sender reputation and ability to interact with customers who actually want to hear from you.

5. Milestone emails

Milestone emails are a great way to make your customers feel seen and valued. These emails are date-triggered, meaning they get deployed on a specific date to mark a particular occasion.

For example, you can get relevant information from your customer database and use it to send birthday emails. You can even throw some freebies to go with the emails and make your customers celebrate the occasion in a special way.

Milestone emails can also be deployed to mark anniversaries, like when the user first became your customer. SaaS brands can also take this a step further by tracking how customers use their platforms and setting specific milestones to celebrate. 

For example, an email marketing platform could send a celebratory milestone email when a user sends their 10,000th email. 

6. Notification emails

Notification emails are typically sent to pass across vital information related to the user’s account with your business.

For example, brands may send a notification email when a new sign-in is detected. The emails can also be deployed when a suspicious activity is detected. For example, when your system detects that a user has suddenly tried to sign into their account from an unfamiliar IP address.

Notification emails work a lot like transactional emails. They are not promotional in nature, but they are very crucial in keeping your customers informed. 

7. Feedback emails

You can create automated customer feedback emails to collect feedback from your customers after a specific interaction.

For example, you could send a feedback email a day or so after a customer’s order has been delivered. The goal of the email is to collect data on the customer’s experience buying from your store. 

Another trigger you could use for these emails is after a customer has interacted with your customer support team. Use this email to see if the customer’s issue was resolved successfully and what their experience was interacting with your support team. 

You can also automate these emails to be deployed after a specific duration. This would work well for software companies. So, you can send the emails after x number of months. 

The trick with feedback emails is making sure they’re timed perfectly. Give your customers enough time to experience the product before asking for feedback. Just as important is making sure the process of leaving feedback is easy and fast. A few quick questions are all you need, like what Decathlon has done here.

Triggered emails: Best practices to follow

Follow these five best practices to run successful triggered email marketing campaigns. 

Collect behavioral data

You’ll need to understand your customers inside out to create effective triggered email campaigns. 

You must know the journey they take from discovering your brand to making a purchase and afterward. This knowledge will help you position your triggered emails strategically for the most impact.

Start by collecting data like demographic and psychographic information. You can capture some of this data on the signup form, during onboarding, and in a survey after the users have joined your list.

You can also get more insights by analyzing your database. Then, use that data to identify the most critical touchpoints in your sales funnel where a triggered email can either help you take the customer experience to the next level or increase your revenue. 

You’ll also need that data to create personalized triggered emails that resonate with the recipients.

Set campaign goals

You need clear campaign goals to create effective triggered emails. A clear goal will also help you know whether your triggered campaign efforts are working or not. 

So, if you want to start sending cart-abandonment emails, think about the objective of those emails. It would help if you could create SMART goals so you can know the numbers you need to hit for the campaign to be considered a success. 

Personalize your triggered emails

We started by saying that 71% of customers expect personalized brand interactions. To meet this customer expectation, you must collect customer behavioral data and use it to personalize your campaigns. 

The best part is that you don’t have to personalize your campaigns manually. A marketing automation platform like GetResponse can integrate with your tech stack to track user activities and deploy personalized triggered emails when your set conditions are met. 

Our platform connects with eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, and Magento to facilitate transactional emails and cart-abandonment campaigns. You can also use Zapier to connect GetResponse with other platforms.

Offer value

Just because a user has done something on your platform doesn’t mean you should automatically send them an email. Unless that triggered email shares valuable information, it’ll only be seen as a nuisance. That will make your business look bad, and it can hurt your ability to connect with the user in the future.

Therefore, make sure every triggered email you send has something valuable for the user. The welcome email must share helpful information that the user needs to know. It could include a product tutorial video, for example. 

You also want to keep these emails concise. Don’t cramp too many details into that one email. Only share vital information related to the specific action the user has taken. If you need to provide more information, consider using a drip campaign to send follow-up emails.

Test, analyze, and pivot

Finally, test your triggered emails, analyze the results, and make any necessary adjustments to ensure optimal ROI from your campaigns.

Run A/B tests on the email subject lines, content, send times, CTAs, and other critical elements. Then, track your open and engagement rates to see what changes resonate the most with your audience.

You must also monitor your campaigns over time to see whether they’re still relevant. So keep an eye on email marketing metrics like unsubscribe rate and engagement to pinpoint triggered campaigns that might be falling flat.

Send your triggered emails with GetResponse

Triggered emails are essential for keeping your target audience in the know and ensuring a pleasant customer experience. Campaigns like cart-abandonment emails can also benefit your bottom line tremendously if executed well. 

But you’ll need a reliable email platform for these campaigns. A platform that can automate personalized triggered emails and ensure they’re delivered on time for optimal open and engagement rates.

GetResponse has been delivering triggered emails for over a decade now. Our platform guarantees a 99% deliverability rate. We also have plenty of triggered email templates you can customize and deploy within minutes. That’s why brands like Red Bull, Eveline Cosmetics, and Zendesk use our platform. Get started for free today here.