6 Ways to Review and Improve Your Automated Marketing Emails – CMSWire

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As a slogan to promote automated emails, set it and forget it has been disastrously successful. Thats because, while it spurred marketers to create lots of triggered campaigns, it set horrible expectations for how to maximize their effectiveness.

The truth is that these are living, breathing campaigns that need ongoing care and nurturing for as long as youre running them. Thats why I call these emails review and improve programs in my book, Email Marketing Rules.

Here are six ways you can take care of your automated campaigns so they do the best job of taking care of your prospects and customers (and your bottom line):

Its hard to take care of your automations if you dont know how many you have, what theyre triggered by and their goals. One of our clients did an inventory and identified nearly 300 active automated emails, which prompted an effort to consolidate and improve the management of these campaigns.

Keeping a running inventory also helps you identify gaps in your automations. Use this checklist of more than 110 Automated Campaign Ideas to help you identify opportunities. After you know the automations that you have, its time to do

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This most basic health check should consist of at least looking at:

Depending on your business and your automation goals, some of the more bottom-of-the-funnel metrics may not be applicable. There may also be some additional metrics that make sense for you to track.

Looking at these metrics regularly can alert you to major problems. For instance, if your welcome email send rate goes to zero, then thats a sign the trigger for that email has likely broken. Or if your double opt-in confirmation request emails click rate drops to zero, then thats a sign of a broken confirmation link or a failure to record that confirmation properly.

Performance reviews can allow you to identify major breakdowns in your campaigns, but if you want to hear the squeaking and clanging of rundown campaigns, then you need to do regular

The email inbox isnt a static environment. Code support and rendering changes routinely across mailbox providers and almost always without notice. Your website, mobile app and other landing pages arent static either. URLs change and new pages get launched, among many other changes. Plus, your image library and other assets are constantly turning over, too.

All of those changes can lead to problems, such as:

Those kinds of issues are likely to degrade the customer experience and performance, but not in such a dramatic way that overall performance will be clearly affected or that will cause customers to reach out to your service reps to complain. These are soft failures rather than hard failures. Other soft failures can be missed if youre not doing regular

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Anytime your brand updates or modifies the look and feel, styling or messaging of its website or mobile app, that should prompt a review of the design and messaging in your triggered emails. And, of course, anytime the templates for your broadcast emails are updated, your triggered campaigns should be as well.

When this doesnt happen, brands end up with automated campaigns that have outdated:

Adopting modular email architecture and using partials makes it much easier to keep your brand image and messaging consistent. Modular build systems also make it much easier to do

The sad truth is that automated campaigns are dramatically under-tested compared to broadcast campaigns. Thats despite the fact that automations deliver much higher performance, which means that even a small percentage boost in performance from an A/B test can lead to big absolute gains.

In addition to typical A/B testing targets like subject lines, hero images and CTAs, also consider testing:

Another element to test that deserves its own callout is

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Most brands have seasonal events that are relevant to their brands, whether its the winter season of ski lodges or the summer season of summer camps. So its surprising how few brands take the time to contextualize their automated emails within each of their major selling seasons.

In terms of email design and messaging, consider:

Beyond that, also consider adjusting the timing of triggers, as well as the duration and pacing of triggered series. For example, shopping decisions tend to be made rapidly on Cyber Monday, so shopping cart abandonment emails should be triggered more quickly than usual.

For all of those reasons, I recommend that brands review their triggered emails at least quarterly. Some brands already generate the majority of their email marketing revenue from automated campaigns.

If youre anywhere near that, then youll want to spend even more time reviewing and improving your automation. And if youre not anywhere near that, then its key to start doing these reviews with an eye on identifying gaps and opportunities to grow your stable of triggered campaigns to address all the moments that matter in the lifecycles of your customers.

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6 Ways to Review and Improve Your Automated Marketing Emails - CMSWire