Behavioral Email Marketing 101: Create High-Converting Email Campaigns

Remember when J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller suggested making a hydrogen bomb and their own team wasn’t fully on board at first!

Fast-forward to today! Much like Oppenheimer’s grasp of the formula prior to creating the bomb, imagine knowing what your customers are up to and hitting them up with just what they need – messages and deals that resonate with them.

Just like Oppenheimer changed the game, emails that resonate with your audience can revolutionize the inbox game!

That’s the essence of behavioral email marketing!

Behavioral email marketing is about honing in on what your audience is doing – what they’re clicking, opening, and even what they’re ignoring.

It refers to the automated and personalized emails you send to your audience, depending on how they engage and interact with your brand. This can include things like pages they’ve visited on your website, products they’ve viewed, or items they’ve added to their cart but not purchased.

In this blog post, let’s dive deeper into the types of behavioral emails, its importance, and how to create an effective behavioral email marketing strategy.

Types of Behavioral Emails With Examples

Behavioral email is all about sending emails based on user preferences.

For instance, Airbnb sends an email to customers a day after they check out a property but don’t book it. The email includes the property they looked at, along with similar options in the same price range and area. This helps prevent abandoned bookings by offering a personalized reminder for customers to return and complete their booking.

This is a classic example of sending emails that are relevant to the subscriber’s interests so that you can increase open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

Let’s look at a few types of behavioral emails with examples.

Welcome/Introduction Emails

The primary objective of these emails is to extend a warm welcome while providing essential information about the advantages of collaboration. For instance, sending out a friendly ‘hello or thank you’ when someone joins your list, signs up, or sets up a profile.

Why not strike up a conversation and discover their preferences? Ask them what topics pique their interest or how often they’d like to hear from you via email. It’s all about setting the stage, building a relationship, and getting them excited for future emails.

Conversion Emails

These emails can be sent when someone takes action like signing up for an event, subscriptions, sign-ups, downloads, and opt-ins. Their primary purpose is twofold: to express gratitude for the interaction and to provide complete transaction details, enhancing overall credibility.

Post-Purchase Emails

You can use your customer’s order confirmation emails to promote other things they might want to buy next time. To enhance the impact of these emails, consider customizing the receipt by suggesting relevant products, all while maintaining central emphasis on the completed transaction.

Importance of Behavioral Email Marketing

37% of marketers consider behavioral marketing as highly effective, however, only 20% of marketers are currently employing behavioral marketing strategies⁽ⁱ⁾.

Behavioral marketing is like a magic wand, however, to truly unleash its full potential, you need a sprinkle of know-how, a dash of expertise, and the right tools.

Let’s explore how behavioral marketing can supercharge your entire marketing game.

Understand Your Customers’ Needs

By analyzing user behavior, you unlock the secrets of what your customers really want. Armed with this knowledge, you can serve exactly what they need, right on cue.

Boost Email Open Rates

By sending behavioral emails, you have the power to gently nudge, guide, and remind your users of their previous interactions with your brand. This not only makes them more eager to open your emails but also leads to a boost in open rates, a surge in subscriptions, and an increase in website traffic.

Enhance the Buyer Journey

Marketing’s golden rule: make the buyer’s journey a breeze. Well, that’s what behavioral emails do. With each email triggered by user actions, you’re practically holding their hand through every step. They’ll be eagerly awaiting your next move.

Boost Revenue

Focusing on user behavior helps you deliver what your customers want. As a result, your customers become repeat buyers, and newcomers transform into brand advocates. This gives a significant boost to your overall revenue.

How to Get Started With Behavioral Email Marketing?

Emails are more effective when they are relevant and contain useful information. The use of behavioral emails allows you to craft customized messages for your subscribers, leading to increased engagement and sales. However, you might be unsure how to get started with it.

Well, here are a few steps to implement behavioral email marketing into your marketing strategy.

Gather Information About Your Target Audience

To effectively engage your audience through emails, gather detailed insights about them by tracking their actions and using these behaviors as triggers for sending them personalized messages. Pay attention to their engagement with your website, app, and social media accounts, and consider using surveys for further understanding.

Crafting emails based on observed behaviors guarantees enhanced engagement and ensures that your emails not only land in their inboxes but also shine among the competition. Additionally, maintain a clean email list by using data cleansing tools to eliminate incorrect addresses, safeguarding your sender’s reputation.

Segment Your Audience Based on Their Actions

Dividing your audience into distinct groups according to their behaviors is essential for effective behavioral email marketing. Once you have organized your contact list into segments, you can tailor your emails that fit each segment better.

Here are some user actions you should watch closely and send emails for.

• Send a welcome email immediately post-registration to new subscribers.
• Share relevant information with new subscribers via email.
• Rekindle the interest of inactive users with emails containing special offers.
• Maintain a steady stream of reminder emails showcasing valuable updates, such as, product releases and free trial notifications.

Identify Key User Actions

Behavioral emails are effective because they’re triggered by user actions. They start because of users, not marketers. And that’s why, it is crucial for marketers to know which user actions to react to.

Here are a few of the common user actions that you can react to.

• When someone fills out a form for an ebook or content, send an email confirming the download.
• When visitors engage with specific aspects of your website, send out relevant content to them via emails. For instance, if they explore case studies, send out a few of your popular case studies/customer testimonials to them.
• Send emails even when they are showing less interest but have engaged with your content previously. Give them offers, coupons, recommendations, or more to reengage them.

Other triggers could be things like looking at prices, being active on social media, or subscribing to your blog. Knowing your contacts well is important here.

Create a Behavior-Based Email

Now that you have all the information on your target audience, start creating an engaging email, so you can start a conversation with the user based on their behavior. You can set up a system where emails are automatically sent based on what people do.

You can spend time creating email templates and customize them to make these templates really personal. You can use marketing automation platforms like Oracle Eloqua, Marketo Engage, HubSpot, Account Engagement (Pardot), and more to get pre-built email templates and customize them according to your needs.

Evaluate and Upgrade Your Techstack

For behavioral email marketing, you’ll need a robust tool to automatically send emails, like an email autoresponder. This tool should be able to send out emails when your users do something specific.

After you’ve decided which emails you want to send based on user behavior, make sure that the email system you’re currently using can automatically send these emails. You can also look at what technology and services your competitors are using to get some ideas.

Conclusion

Email marketers are always on the hunt for ways to ramp up their open & conversion rates, and give revenue a boost.

That’s where behavioral email marketing jumps in – a real game-changer.

It pays attention to how people act and uses that information to send them emails that they would find interesting and helpful. And what makes it even better is, mixing it with your demographic or firmographic data to whip up emails that attract, engage, and convert your potential customers.

Ready to Implement Behavioral Emails Into Your Email Marketing Strategy? Talk to Us!

Statistics References:

⁽ⁱ⁾ SocialBu