Timing is Everything
How do you strengthen your relationship with your customer by speaking to them one-on-one? How do you send them the right message at the right time? How do you increase your brand value in the eyes of your customer? One way is with Date-Triggered Mailings. A date-triggered mailing is an email that sends itself automatically based on a specified date in the customer profile. It’s an easy way to target your customers with a relevant message.
Life-cycle emails.
Life cycle marketing exploits the idea of timing in order to reach customers in a more personalized manner. It’s about communicating with your customers one at a time. It takes into account an action and sends an email to the customer based on that action. For example, using the sign-up date as the trigger (or action), you can send a welcome email the day after the sign-up date to your new subscribers.
In fact, based on the sign-up date, you can send a series of emails to new subscribers while they’re new and their interest in your company is high. Within a few days or a week after the sign up you could send: an email asking for updated profile information (especially if you collect sign-ups through a sign up box); an email with more information about your company; or an incentive email to make a first purchase on your website or to take some action to become more engaged with your company.
Birthday and Anniversary emails.
Special events in your customers’ lives are a great opportunity for you to stay in touch, send a relevant and well-timed email, and offer a special discount or incentive you might not be able to send list-wide. One often sees “birthday clubs” in the food service industry where members are sent a coupon for a free item in participating restaurants. Birthday clubs can also be very effective for building your list, too—signing up to the email list can be incentivized by the promise of a birthday “gift.” If a birthday club doesn’t fit into your business model, think about all the other events that can trigger a mailing, for example: anniversaries, graduation dates, the expiration of a membership, or the closing date of a new home purchase.
For birthdays and anniversaries, you might want to send an email on the actual date or even a few days in advance if you’re including a special offer to help celebrate the event. You might have a series of emails around a graduation date where you send before and after the event offering both congratulations as well as relevant deals.
For time-sensitive dates, such as expirations, you’ll want to send a notification email before the date passes. And some events, such as mailing on the anniversary of the purchase of a new home, might just be used to stay in touch and say hello.
Date-triggered mailing is a great addition to your email enterprise. It’s also one of the easy to use features of Mustang List—all you need are some subscribers and dates, and you can get started right away.