How the email marketing journey helps your business?
With 4 billion email users worldwide, email marketing is an opportunity that businesses can’t afford to ignore. An email marketing journey can drive sales and revenue, increase brand awareness, keep customers engaged, and nurture long-term customer relationships.
Implementing an email journey can do all of the above – with very little effort required.
Developing an email marketing journey allows businesses to create a sequence of relevant, targeted emails that nurture a customer exactly where they are in their overall customer journey.
Brands can segment their audience, create personalized messaging for each, and automate the entire journey. And when the most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns are subscriber segmentation (78%), message personalization (72%), and email automation (71%)… It’s easy to see why businesses need an email journey.
In this article, we will review everything you need to know about the email marketing journey: what it is, why businesses need it, and how to implement your own email journey strategy.
What is an email journey?
The email journey is a series of targeted marketing emails that a customer receives in response to a preset condition called a “trigger”. The sequence of emails provides small nudges at critical touchpoints for the customer. The email journey guides a customer toward a desired action, onto the next stage of their customer journey, or toward some other goal.
Definition of an email journey:
An email journey (or an email marketing journey) is when marketers send a predetermined series of emails over time based on a specific trigger.
The goal is to nurture customers and gradually increase the conversion rate by moving them toward a desired action or into another stage of their overall customer journey.
Examples of email journey triggers:
- Submitting a contact form
- Completing a purchase
- Abandoning a cart without purchasing the items
- Browsing a website without completing a purchase
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Downloading a lead magnet
- Not opening 3+ emails in a row (for a lead)
When a customer triggers one of these scenarios, they will receive a predetermined sequence of emails created to address the stage, behaviors, and needs of that particular segment. This journey – from the first email in the sequence to the last – is called the “email journey.”
Customer journey vs. email journey: what’s the difference?
In short: the email journey is one part of the overall customer journey.
The customer journey includes all touchpoints that a customer encounters while interacting with a brand. This includes online, offline, social media, in-store, and other channels. Outlining this entire series of touchpoints is called “customer journey mapping.” By understanding the customer journey, brands can tailor the customer experience to improve conversions, move customers further along in the funnel, develop loyalty and repeat purchases, and more.
The email journey is just one part of the customer journey. An email marketing journey uses email marketing to improve user experience, provide value, nurture leads, and promote other goals of the overall customer journey.
It’s important that brands invest in robust customer journey mapping. By better understanding customer needs, behaviors, and other factors through the customer journey, marketers can develop targeted email journeys.
Benefits of using email journey mapping
Mapping the email journey and developing specific campaigns for the email journey have become critical tools for any marketer. Benefits of implementing an email journey marketing strategy include:
More targeted email strategies
The email journey provides tailored, personalized content aimed at addressing a particular trigger. Not only does this help solve pain points that are unique to that segment or audience, but it provides a more responsive, positive customer experience.
Increased email performance
Customers are more likely to open personalized emails that are relevant to them, which directly contributes to keeping customers engaged. By creating tailored content that meets customer needs, brands can improve metrics like open rates and click-through rates while reducing unsubscribe rates.
Improved lead nurtures + conversions
The email journey helps businesses maintain a lead or potential customer by providing relevant, valuable content. Targeted campaigns maximize the potential to turn abandoned carts into purchases or convert one-time customers into repeat buyers.
Reduced customer churn
Similar to nurturing leads, investing in personalized, targeted content builds loyalty. The email journey delivers valuable content that addresses customer needs, solves their problems, and provides what customers need when they need it. Responsive marketing builds trust, fostering a long-term relationship between customers and a brand.
Streamlined, more agile operations
Email marketing journeys use automation to roll out their campaigns. By automating the process, businesses can streamline operations, free up their workforce, create personalized and responsive campaigns, and provide a more positive customer experience at scale. Automation also allows businesses to integrate the email journey within other components of their MarTech stack, utilizing tools like predictive analytics and AI to anticipate and respond to customer needs more effectively.
Higher return on investment (ROI)
The benefits listed above lead to one major benefit: increased ROI on email marketing (and on marketing in general). In fact, email continues to be one of the highest-performing forms of marketing. By reducing customer churn, targeting emails to maximize efficacy, and streamlining operations, developing an email marketing strategy helps businesses improve their bottom lines.
How to implement an email marketing journey
Designing and launching an email marketing journey will vary based on a number of factors. For example: what customer data do you already have? How much marketing can your team and resources realistically support?
While the answers to these questions will determine the details of your launch, implementing an email journey will follow the general steps outlined below.
1. Establish your trigger
Determine what is triggering these series of emails. Did someone purchase your software? Have they stopped opening your emails or interacting with your brand? Did they put something into their shopping cart and then leave without completing the purchase?
Establish your trigger so you know:
- What customer needs you will address
- What outcome you want to achieve
2. Collect customer data and segment your audience
Collecting customer data and leveraging customer feedback will inform the strategy behind your personalized email journey, allowing you to fine-tune the products or services you promote. By collecting data, you can understand customer behavior, marketing persona, pain points, and other factors. By segmenting your audience, you can further tailor the messaging to ensure marketing is targeted for maximum efficacy.
Don’t know how to segment your audience?
Check out our ultimate guide to email segmentation for everything you need to know.
3. Put it all together with email journey mapping
Now that you know the issue or need you’re trying to address, what your segments need and how best to connect with them, and the outcome you hope to achieve… you need to put it all together. Map out every stage of the email journey. How can you guide the customer through those stages towards your desired goal? What messaging and content will you need at each touchpoint? How can you tailor the content to each respective segment?
4. Automate the email marketing journey
With the content developed, it’s time to automate the customer email journey. Using an email automation tool ensures your customers receive relevant, tailored content when they need it. Create your campaign, determine its specific trigger, and launch the live campaign. Your customers will enjoy a customized experience and your team will enjoy a streamlined, easy process.
5. Measure the email journey success
Regularly monitor the performance of your email journey. Track metrics like click-through rate, open rate, and how many users subscribe or unsubscribe. Watch the data to see which campaigns are performing well and which need adjustments to maximize their performance.
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Examples of an email journey
The email marketing journey can address any segment, trigger, or goal – which is part of what makes it so beneficial to businesses of all sizes and capabilities.
Examples of an email journey:
- Welcome email sequence
- Abandoned cart or abandoned browsing campaigns
- Drip email campaigns
Welcome email sequence
When someone first engages with a brand, the welcome email series is a chance to make a great first impression. By providing a welcoming, engaging sequence, brands establish immediate trust, bring value to the lead, and begin a positive customer-brand relationship.
Abandoned cart or abandoned browsing campaigns
These email journeys, often triggered at the consideration stage, are initiated when someone has either browsed products or services on a website or placed items in their cart, only to leave the page without completing a purchase. Messaging in these email journeys will remind customers about what they were browsing, reaffirm the benefits of those products, and aim to get customers back to the website to complete their purchases. These campaigns are designed to recover sales or re-engage a potential customer.
Drip email campaigns
The most diverse of the email journey types, drip email marketing can be tailored to any segment, trigger, and goal. Drip emails might not have customer-centric triggers (like someone completing a purchase) and might instead be triggered by anniversaries, how long someone has been a customer or a subscriber, if they’ve moved to a new stage in the sales funnel, and more. Goals for drip campaigns can include re-engaging with a lapsed customer, building brand loyalty and establishing trust, or moving customers to the next stage in the sales funnel.
Leveraging the email journey for marketers
According to recent trends, businesses are taking email marketing seriously: 87% of brands say that email marketing is critical to their success. The email journey offers businesses a way to capitalize on the power of email marketing. By personalizing messaging and automating delivery, brands can create a responsive, relevant customer experience that generates maximum results with a fraction of the effort.
