When Lifecycle Messaging Goes All Wrong
As an email marketer, you can't live by the "set it and forget it" mindset. You must instead monitor the emails you send to your consumers and understand their impact.
As an email marketer, you can't live by the "set it and forget it" mindset. You must instead monitor the emails you send to your consumers and understand their impact.
When it was a new medium, email marketing was approached from sort of a “spray and pray” mentality. In the past few years, there has been a noticeable shift to a behaviorally driven, lifecycle messaging program. For all intents and purposes, behaviorally driven, lifecycle messaging programs are exactly what the industry has been talking about for years; achieving relevance via a series of automated, action-based email triggers – talking to a customer at a moment in time that is relevant to them. However, without careful management, this approach could swing wildly out of control and we could find ourselves in the “spray and pray” days again.
During the course of the last few months, I have consulted with brands that have seen a steep decline in engagement metrics. All the right questions were being asked – is our content relevant? Are we sending too frequently? Is our messaging going to the right target? The problem was that they were not considering all of their email traffic – only their ad hoc “promotional” traffic. Because their “transactional” or triggered messaging was sent from a different platform, their view into the volume of messages a single subscriber received was murky at best.
As one of the brands shared the lesson they learned, we started examining the logic in the lifecycle messages that was coming off their transactional platform. The messages were all very behaviorally driven – some triggered based on positive site and email actions (clicking through email, opening, purchases, inquiry, etc.), others triggered due to negative actions (no account log-in activity for a period of time, no email engagement over time, and others). The logic for their transactional messaging seemed to make complete sense (and SHOULD have worked). So why wasn’t their transactional logic working? They realized one very critical thing – they had no suppression logic in place.
Suppression logic is a critical part of automated campaigns and needs to be included in the view of the entire email ecosystem. Your customers see your organization as a sum of its parts – not by channels or divided by platform as many organizations view themselves. This means that you have to treat your marketing messaging, including your email messaging, in the same manner.
When it comes to crafting suppression logic, there are a few key steps to consider:
I know that the brand I referenced earlier isn’t the only one without suppression logic in place, and lacking visibility into just how much email it was sending a single customer because it was using multiple, disconnected platforms. After some spot-checking, and before the suppression logic was implemented, the brand found that some customers were receiving as many as 18 messages from them in a single day, though the average was seven to 10 messages – still way too much email! The organization now has the proper suppression logic in place and its engagement metrics are on the mend. But it’s important to remember that when establishing lifecycle email marketing campaigns, you can’t merely “set it and forget it.” You have to monitor the campaigns and understand their impact on your recipients. No matter how much your customers love your brand, chances are they, too, will stop engaging with you if you send them 18 emails a day.