When the topic of email automation comes up, many non-email marketers think of the good old cart abandonment email (“You’re so close to getting a great product!” ). Yes, email automation is particularly interesting for e-commerce brands. But they’re also useful for brands in almost every other vertical, including CPG and B2B.
Below are some of my favorite automations for non-ecommerce brands:
The welcome series. Requests for post-purchase opinions. “Where to buy.” Post-coupon engagement. Quiz follow-ups. Nurture leads. Re-engagement.
Before we dive into each in more detail, let’s remember that automations work best with, and often rely on, audience segmentation and personalization. If you’re not sure whether your CRM’s audience segmentation is clear and distinct, prioritize this initiative before trying automation.
1. The Welcome Series
A well designed welcome series will give you lots of information about your user. Use your welcome series to introduce different themes to see which ones are most interesting to the user, then tailor your follow-ups accordingly.
For example, if you’re a CPG toothpaste brand, consider implementing modules to help users communicate their relevant interests to you. Think tartar control, teeth whitening, children’s toothpaste, etc. Use these interests to create audience segments with their own email journeys.
I’ve seen many brands that use welcome emails but keep them generic. This doesn’t do much for the brand or the user. People will almost always respond better to more personalized emails.
2. Post-purchase product review requests
When it comes to products, it’s much easier for e-commerce brands to track purchases than it is for FMCG brands, but FMCG brands can get strong customer interest metrics. products: for example, the user navigates to a particular product page on the brand’s website.
In these cases (and especially if the page is visited more than once), we have managed to set up automations that activate around two weeks after these page visits, asking users to write a review about the product .
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3. “Where to buy”
For CPG brands or franchise retailers without an e-commerce component, “Where to Buy” automations are excellent follow-ups that provide value for users viewing product-specific pages or content.
4. Post-coupon engagement
One trigger I recommend for brands leveraging coupons in their email campaigns is to set up “where to buy” or review inquiry emails for an appropriate amount of time (which may vary by product) after that people interacted with or redeemed a coupon on a site or in an email.
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Again, unless you use third-party offline data to know if a customer made a purchase, you can’t be sure that a coupon was used. However, it is an extremely powerful indicator of purchase likelihood.
5. Survey or quiz follow-ups
Using quizzes or surveys, especially as part of the welcome series to gather information about your new subscribers, is a great way to engage users from the start.
It also provides excellent hardware for automating follow-ups. If, for example, you’re a CPG outdoor clothing brand, using a product page trigger to send a personalized survey (e.g., “Tell us about your perfect fishing day” to someone who visits a waders page) can give you another layer. information about your users for other relevant mailings.
For example, if someone says their best day of fishing is ice fishing on a Minnesota lake and you sell cold weather gear, you have plenty of material for great trigger-based automations touting the benefits of your products in winter.
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6. Lead management
This does not necessarily have to be specific to B2B. This can apply to big-ticket items that require a lot of thought and don’t normally happen online (think: buying a vehicle).
Depending on the different lead statuses in your CRM (MQL, SQL, visiting a “make an appointment at the dealership” page, etc.), you can trigger the sending of emails based on the product or of the service that interests you.
Make sure you work with your sales team so they have enough time to do outreach before handing it over to marketing. We’ve seen cases where a cold sales prospect reactivates months later with an automated email to test their interest. This is a signal for the sales team to get involved again.
7. Re-engagement
These days, with Gmail and Yahoo anti-spam guidelines in place, I recommend get aggressive in removing unengaged subscribers – especially news – from your active campaigns and placing them in their own non-engagement list.
With these guidelines in place, it’s easier (and more justifiable) to create self-directed re-engagement journeys. The trigger could be as simple as “X days after they were added to the unengaged list” – and in this case, that interval is a number you’ll want to test to see what gives the best results.
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There’s no bad time to start setting these up in your ESP. Also, be sure to develop a testing strategy to catch any potential issues before rolling it out to your subscribers. My hunch is that once you develop your automation skills, you will discover other valuable use cases for your business.
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