Have you ever wondered how to drive your visitors back to your website after they subscribed to a newsletter or registered as a new user? Or if there is a way to increase the open rate of a typical marketing email? And how you can increase the possibility of people clicking on a link in the email?
Sending marketing emails can be a challenge. Recipients might be busy, annoyed by the frequency of the emails, or just not currently interested. The open rate of these emails is usually around 20%, and if you consistently keep getting over this number, you can be proud of yourself!
So, is there a way to increase the open rate of the emails? Is there a way to prompt recipients to return to your website and buy your latest product? Yes, there is—the transactional email!
Transactional emails are sent as a confirmation of a recent action, change, or status. Because of this, they are usually expected by the recipient. Even more, there is an increased chance that such an email will be opened because the recipient is interested in the information in the email.
When someone subscribes to your newsletter and receives the confirmation email, they will most likely want to open it to check everything is correct. The same applies to a user registration. When someone creates a new user account on your website and receives a confirmation via an email, they want to be sure that it was created with the correct details and without mistakes.
The open rate of such emails can easily be over 30% and, in many cases, over 40%. What about you? Have you ignored an email that was sent to you as a confirmation of your registration? Maybe yes, but the chances are you have not. And that is the reason why they should not be overlooked.
This is the exact time when Kentico’s Marketing Automation functionality comes in handy. It can be set up to achieve many marketing goals automatically, but let’s just focus on its capability to send transactional emails whenever needed.
Automation processes are not limited by their complexity, but usually less is more, and most outcomes can be achieved with just a few actions steps.
You just need to create a marketing automation process that sends a transactional email, and then set up a trigger that will start the process whenever needed.
Let’s have a look at the following scenario: We want to increase our sales and overall traffic by offering a discount to everyone that registers as a new user. Therefore, we need to create an automation process that sends a transactional (confirmation) email with all the user details, but at the bottom of the email, there is a link leading to a discount coupon that can be used in our online store.
So, what is the solution to this? How can the automation process be set up? Well, we would only need one action step (yes, just one!) called “Send transactional email”, and connect it to the “Start” and “Finished” action steps so the automation process can be correctly executed whenever triggered.
The automation process can look like this in the Marketing Automation application:
As you can see, it is a relatively simple process and doesn’t need to be overly complicated. However, we need to configure the “Send transactional email” step properly so it sends a transactional email in the correct format. For that, we just need to double-click it, and create the body of the email, including a subject and the sender’s and recipient’s email address.
Because the automation process is triggered for each relevant contact, we can use “Contact” macros to retrieve the email address of the contact easily that we want to send the transactional email to. We just need to use the following macro for that purpose: {% Contact.ContactEmail % }
So, the configuration of the action step could look like this:
Of course, the text of the confirmation email will always vary depending on the situation. In the case of a user’s registration, we could remind them about our blog or FAQ section so they get the latest updates or sources of information—effectively increasing traffic!
In the case of a newsletter registration, we could tell them about our newest product that is related to the newsletter’s point of interest.
There are no boundaries, so let’s get creative!
As a last thing, we just need to ensure that the process is started by the appropriate trigger. Kentico offers many kinds of triggers, most of them being activity dependent. And that is actually the type of trigger we would use in our automation process. So, whenever a visitor registers as a new user, the automation process is triggered and sends the transactional email. This is how the setup could look like:
From that moment on, if Online Marketing is enabled on our site, whenever a visitor registers as a new user, a confirmation email (with a discount link) is sent to them.
This approach has the advantage of being very flexible. You can adjust it to send (an) additional email(s) to someone else in your company, or start another automation process to nurture the lead further and hopefully make it hot!
As you can see, it can be adapted to many scenarios. You can use it to send a confirmation email to those that registered for an event, webinar, or became your new customers. The possibilities are endless!
If you want to make the automation process even more sophisticated, you can use a “Condition” step to branch the process even further. It could be used to send transactional emails with different links according to contact location, date or age (if known).
Marketing Automation in Kentico is a very powerful tool. The same can be said about transactional emails as their open rate is way above the average of marketing emails. Therefore, make sure you push both of them to the edge whenever possible!
Let us know in comments about your Marketing Automation setups!