Best Email Marketing Campaigns For Customer Journey Engagement

By Tim Yeadon

Posted January 18, 2022

Email marketing continues to be an extraordinarily versatile channel able to inspire action across the customer journey. On average, email drives an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent, higher than any other channel. So it’s a worthwhile exercise to understand the path your customers may take, allowing you to map and prioritize what you believe will be the most effective messages for driving purchases and engagement.

In this article, we’ve surveyed the email customer journey, from pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase (plus transactional messages), to suggest email campaigns you may try within the following stages:

Pre-Purchase Emails

• Awareness

• Consideration

• Engagement

Purchase & Post-Purchase Emails

• Onboarding

• “Nonboarding”

• Advocacy

• Winback

Transactional Emails

• Triggers

• Error handling

Pre-Purchase / Awareness

New Subscriber Welcome

Every new subscriber needs to receive a welcome email that gives an overview of your products or services, and brand values. On average, new subscriber welcome emails generate 4x more opens and 5x more clicks than regular campaigns, per InboxArmy. 

Here’s a great chance to serve up a handful of products or topics to a subscriber, and once they show an interest in a type of content, you can personalize future sends to them. Subscribers in this situation are highly engaged with your brand, and in turn will be open to learning more about your products and services. (In fact, they’re requesting this information!)

Additionally, as much as you want the recipient to internalize your brand and value prop - the welcome email also serves the equally important purpose of helping validate that it is a real address. Monitoring bounces and unsubscribes on this initial send are critical to ensure good deliverability down the line. 

Email Newsletter

Email newsletters are great places to tell stories while building product and brand awareness. While you can sell here, we don’t recommend it. Instead consider using the newsletter to A/B test a variety of content types to see what resonates among your subscribers.

Here’s a proven strategy - tag your content so when your subscriber chooses to read a specific item you can serve up personalized product-focused content in the future. And once you know what your subscribers are interested in, you have a much greater chance of delivering relevant content.

Pre-Purchase / Consideration

Is it a coincidence that the three email campaign examples we have below are all triggered automated emails? No, not at all. Once someone indicates they’re ready to buy, let’s help them make an informed decision.

Lead Nurture Drip Campaign

Consider posting a piece of gated content (ebook, white paper, video webinar, product demo) in which someone needs to give you their email address to download or access the content.

Once done, you can send a series of follow-up automated emails based on that subject.

Many brands execute their lead nurture drip campaigns across multiple channels. Omnichannel customer engagement strategies like these can include email, SMS, direct mail, and even phone calls (blerg).

1: Landing Page / Sign Up

2: Landing Page / Download Now

3: Gated Asset (PDF)

4: Email Drip Campaign

Abandon Cart Trigger

These are highly effective follow-up emails for shoppers who have left the check out process before completing their purchase, abandoning a product in their cart. In fact, Statista reports that nearly 88 percent of all carts are abandoned.

How quick should you send the abandoned email trigger? The sooner the better, reports Rejoiner, who found that sending a trigger within an hour of abandon results in an average conversion rate of 16%.

You may also consider triggering an abandoned cart based on app behavior, as you’ll know exactly who viewed what (and when).

You can also trigger an abandoned cart based on how deep a customer made it into the checkout process. For instance, you could create different messages for people who just carted items vs. those who bailed after seeing shipping costs, or even those who left just before entering a credit card. Consider creating a special offer to resolve those concerns.

Additionally, you may also trigger an email to a shopper after they exhibit specific behaviors that you’ve specified (abandon browse). It’s possible to send an abandon browse trigger to people who are registered and logged in on your website. Also a great idea for app users who may have browsed content and left midstream during a checkout process.

 Pre-Purchase / Engagement

Here’s the ongoing stream of newsletters, promotional product updates, anniversary emails and service announcements. Since engagement emails occur after a purchase has been made, you should be able to leverage their first party data that you’ve collected over time to deliver personalized, relevant content.

Check out Leveraging First Party Data for ideas on how to get started.

Keep these emails simple and to the point. Readers of email usually only give us 3-5 seconds to get our point across, especially when they weren’t expecting your message.

Purchase & Post-Purchase / Onboarding

Purchase

The true start of onboarding and retention begins the moment of purchase. It can also be considered a transactional email, making this a great time to send a receipt along with a “mini onboarding” or cross-sell opportunity. Also, because this is a transactional email, here's a great moment to ask the recipient to opt-in to the onboarding series.

New Product Onboarding

An onboarding series is the perfect method to make sure a person has a great experience in getting started with a new product or service. Onboarding ought to start right after Purchase occurs. Since this is a promotional email, the subscriber will need to have opted-in. A few things to consider when planning an onboard series:

• give people clear direction on how to get started

• offer resources if they have questions or need help

• create cross-sell opportunities by following up with product extensions that will help the reader get more from their products

• see if you can get the user to tell you more about themselves and their interests, either via a poll, or survey, or by offering curated content that when clicked reveals additional relevant interests of the user.  

There’s no perfect number of touches for an onboarding series, though I often start with three. (Coupled with the Purchase receipt, that’s four total onboarding emails.)

Touch 1: Welcome / Congrats - here’s the first things you need to know.

Touch 2: How can we help? Have you considered these accessories?

Touch 3: Mimicking a newsletter, offer up content that would help you personalize future promotional emails. For instance, if the user purchased a mirrorless camera, offer how-to articles on audio, lighting, video skills, and photography skills. Based on what they read, you can personalize future emails.

“Nonboarding”

Here's another way to handle onboarding – don’t send an email onboarding series at all.

Instead, get your subscriber right back into the engagement flow and looking at more products. If you want, you could add in a useful onboard module or two (“How’s Product X Working For You?” or “Watch Video: See How To Use Product X”).   

Over the years, we’ve noticed that while onboarding has its benefits it is unlikely that your subscribers will look at each and every onboarding message you send. One more reason to keep your series simple -- and hurry to get your subscriber back to looking at your products or services.

Post-Purchase / Advocacy

Referrals and word of mouth have always been among the most effective marketing methods for attracting new customers. Here’s a few ways to encourage your happier customers to become brand advocates.

Offer friend and family discounts to your highest engaged subscribers. Yes, it’s the hardworking friends and family discount. I’m always a fan.

Share user generated content by encouraging your customers tell their own victory stories about how they use your products and services. Then share those stories out via your own email newsletter. While you’re at it, include links to social channels in your newsletters. If you can, add a bite of content from each channel – especially if it’s user generated content.  

While some marketers may encourage their subscribers to forward your emails to others – we don’t. We’d prefer that only people who ask for our emails receive our emails. Forwarding emails to a friend is generally frowned upon by email marketers who want to avoid SPAM or other nuisance reports.

Post Purchase / Winback

Everyone has lapsed subscribers. These are people who used to open or click at least occasionally, but their engagement has dwindled over the time. It’s up to you to decide what these parameters will be for your company. For instance, it could be “no opens for one month, and/or no clicks for two months.”

The Winback Welcome

Once you’ve identified lapsed subscribers, our suggestion is to start back at Step 1. Your strategy will be to find out what won their heart to start, and then try it again.

Here’s an idea - send the Winback version of a Welcome email. In it, let them know you’re so happy to know them, offer a quick tour through your values, and ask how you can help.

Deadwood / Lapsed

However, once an email subscriber is fully lapsed - then it’s time to send a more direct message that acknowledges they haven’t opened or clicked in a while, and ask if they’d like to continue receiving messages. Let them know that you fully understand interests change, and that you don’t want to bother anyone. This is called “list hygiene,” and it’s better to clear deadwood off your email lists than continually send emails to people who ignore you.

An honorable thing about email marketing is that we only send messages to people who have asked for it. By monitoring their non-action of ignoring you, we need to understand and accept that they don’t want our notes anymore. So do the right thing and remove them.

Too many lapsed subscribers on your lists can also impact deliverability rates, as email services recognize which email senders get high engagement rates and which do not.

Transactional / Triggers

These triggers occur throughout the customer journey. They include the vast collection of receipts, calendar notices, registration confirmation, billing statements, and delivery notices that email marketers are allowed to send without needing an opt-in from a subscriber.

The point of the email needs to be labeled as a transactional message, and in fact primarily be a transactional message. You may, however, leave a small amount of room at the bottom of the note for a promotional message. CAN-SPAM guidelines allows marketers to add a small message or promotion to the bottom of each email.  Limit the message to less than 20% of the overall size of the email and you’ll be fine.

A few examples of these small, additional promotional messages might include cross-sell product or service suggestions, warranty or service information, or even describing the value of opting in to receive promotional messages from your company.  

Transactional / Error Handling

Examples include “Your credit card payment failed” or password reset messages. Like other transactional emails, the recipient does not need to be opted in for promotional emails. But unlike most transactional scenarios, we suggest avoiding any additional messaging or light promotion.

People are often frustrated when they receive an error message, and your objective should be to solve your customer’s problem in a satisfactory way in order to get them back to using your service or product. Instead, offer links to guidance to solve a problem.  

In Conclusion

As you can see, there are many spots across the customer journey where email can deliver impactful messages, further building loyalty and increased engagement with your customers.

To get started, we recommend working through your own customer journey to decide where you can make the most impact right now. After, you can work to methodically build and improve your messaging across the journey.

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