There’s no need to be confused with difference between trigger emails and regular emails – We’ll explain what you need to know. We’ll throw in ‘automated’ emails for good measure, too.
So, let’s begin –
What is a trigger email?
A trigger email is an email automatically sent by an ESP (Email Service Provider) or by a website’s CMS (Content Management System). In plainer English, it’s an email that gets automatically sent by a system, usually without the need for a human action, such as clicking a send button. They’re easy opportunities to keep in touch with your customers. Set them up, then sit back and relax…or just focus on other areas of your business.
Common uses of trigger emails
- “Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter” emails – Yes, you should be sending an email confirmation after someone subscribes! We’ve given a quick low down on how email subscription confirmation emails should look here
- “Thank you for downloading our PDF” – Hopefully if you have a PDF, whitepaper or case study you want someone to download, you’re capturing their email address and maybe even emailing the link to them through a trigger email. If so, make the most of this new, valuable data and send the downloader a trigger email to show yourselves off a little bit more
- “Your order confirmation” – A pretty email with pictures of the products the customer has ordered, along with pricing, delivery info and maybe even some related products
- Latest blog update – You’ve worked hard collecting a list of contacts. You’ve worked hard writing enticing blogs. Join up your experience by sending out a trigger email to your contacts as soon as you publish a new blog. Pro tip – Monitoring the people who click on the links on this trigger will show you who is really interested in your company
There are plenty more you could add to this list, but these above are the top priorities to get in place.
What we mean by “regular” email campaigns
In a nut shell (sorry, the boss made us do it), these are the marketing email campaigns you may be sending every week, other week or once a month, to show off your latest products, news and offers. These marketing campaigns, also known as e-newsletters, you’ll probably be sending out to your entire database in a completely manual process, i.e. you’re writing the content for each email, then manually scheduling and sending the email itself.
And so to our Easter Egg –
A quick explanation of email automation
This does overlap trigger emails slightly, but it also crosses into email segmentation territory too. Email automation is the process of setting up an email, or a chain of emails, the send automatically based on a user action or a period of time.
As an example, when someone subscribes to your newsletter, you can set up a trigger email to say “Thank you for subscribing”. You could then send another email 7 days later to show off what’s great about your company, in a not-too-salesy way. If we use a luxury handbag retailer as an example, the email 7 days later could be: “Ever wanted to see how handmade leather is really made”. We’re not saying “Here’s 90% off for 24 hours”, this is a softer sell, but we digress. The point is, that email is automated. You could even do a third email 14 days later – “Where our leather comes from”, for example. Again, that’s an automated email.
Set these automated emails up once, schedule them to go to any subscriber in the set time frame and that’s it. Your work here is done.
That wraps it up for this blog. If you want some help getting these emails in place, please feel free to get in touch.