7 Strategies to Make Your Lifecycle Emails Work Smarter For You

One of my favorite learning moments this year was hearing from StatusPage.ioCEO Steve Klein how getting your lifecycle emails right can increase your conversion rate and revenue to the point where you gain the breathing room to concentrate on other priorities.

In this tinselly time of year for reflection and resolutions, I’m reviewing our own lifecycle emails here at Customer.io and thinking about how we can make them work smarter for us. What better time to dig through our posts from the past year to round up our best tips and strategies for creating lifecycle emails that drive customer engagement and happiness.

1. Use the Princess Bride formula for the best welcome emails.

Welcome emails are your chance to create a positive first impression and secure the trust that will fuel a long-term customer relationship. All you have to do is follow the lead of that fictionally famous swashbuckling swordsman Inigo Montoya.

Every welcome should have a greeting, an explanation of who you are, and set up what comes next:

• Hello — the Greeting
• My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. — Who you are: a name and identifying information that provides the context required to make a connection (what you do, your interests, cares, and concerns)
• Prepare to die. — What’s next for the reader? What should they do?

More about how to use The Princess Bride Formula or catch up with our whole class on how to create welcome emails.

2. Get smart about segments.

Stop hollering your message at whoever is out there — and communicate with specific people who are most ready to lend an ear (or eyes) with smarter segmentation. It’s the smarter way to email — cutting a shorter path to better engagement, deliverability, and revenue.

Modern platforms like Customer.io can segment people based on real-time activity and customer lifecycle. If you have a business where your customers are logging in with accounts, there’s no reason to get stuck on static lists that require constant upkeep and syncing or guess at engagement by looking at email opens and clicks.

You have the best chance at relevance when you can respond directly to individual context — so that your message feels personal and relevant rather than random shouts in the dark.

Get inspired with our collection of segmentation recipe ideas at “33 Ways to Personalize Your Emails at Scale.”

3. Don’t just send one email per goal.

People are busy and have more important things to do than deal with the loads of email flying about out there — which means there’s a really good chance that someone will miss your carefully crafted lifecycle email. And even if they do open and read you message, they might not heed your call to action.

If you only send one message for each goal you have, you’re greatly reducing your chances of success.

Send a series of drip emails for important goals that stop once people have taken action. Check out the drip series for iDoneThis, which aims to remind and convert free trial users to upgrade to a paid subscription. It takes more than one try.

The smartest marketers understand that persuasion takes time and follow-up and will not only implement behavioral drips for their conversion goals, but also try different tactics in different emails. For instance, if you’re trying to nudge someone to complete a key activation step, you can send a series of behavioral drip emails that employ different persuasion principles.

Catch up on targeted behavioral drip series in “What You Can Learn from Abandoned Cart Emails to Boost Sales” and different persuasion tactics you can use.

4. Use loss aversion.

Speaking of persuasion, there’s a pretty powerful psychological principle called loss aversion. People hate losing stuff — so much that they’re motivated to avoid it. If your product has a free trial, you can rely on the psychology of loss aversion to motivate people to reengage and convert to a paid subscription.

Here’s a striking example from Mention, a social media monitoring tool.

Mention prompts people to act after a period of inactivity by proposing the suspension of your account altogether. It’s a powerful tactic that both spurs new users who want to avoid that loss to make a decision while filtering out user segments who were probably never going to activate.

More on loss aversion: “The Psychology of Upgrade Emails: Make Something to Lose”

5. Use video to activate and onboard users.

Video and email are a powerhouse combo when it comes to engaging and teaching people. Video can help you improve clickthrough rates, fast-track activation, and make stronger emotional connections. StatusPage.io even boosted trial-to-paid conversion rate by 2.4x by sending onboarding emails with video to get people to try key features.

A quick best practice tip for incorporating video into your emails: don’t embed the video itself into the email since email clients don’t all support it. Instead, use a screenshot or thumbnail with a play button laid over the image and link that to the page with your video.

For more tips and examples, check out “Why You Should Use Video in Onboarding Emails.”

6. Sound like a real human being.

Just because you’re automating messages or represent a business doesn’t mean you can skip out on the actual communication part and sound like a robot. Emails, like all types of great, effective content, take work!

Write like a normal human being, tell stories instead of commanding readers to do your bidding, and show who you are as a brand and an organization.

The comedian Louis C.K. does a great job of sending emails in his voice. It feels personal and resonant, all while promoting his business. He accomplishes this by telling stories, deviating from stock email scripts, and using a super simple, readable text-only layout. Here’s a a quick example:

Learn the complete Email Marketing Lessons from Louis C.K., plus how organizations use similar tactics to get through to their readers.

7. Treat Email as Part of User Experience.

People are checking email way more often than they’re using your product. That’s why behavioral emails are so powerful. As Olark’s Sunir Shah reminds us, what’s paramount is the entire flow that people go through to complete their goal in a product or app.

Once you can reach out to people based on their activity and interactions with your business — you can make that flow a better experience. Your emails are part of your product and user experience.

• Check out 7 examples of retention emails
• Learn how Instacart uses email successfully as part of a broader user experience.
• Why behavioral emails make your job easier.

Have any favorite tips that you’ve incorporated in your lifecycle emails this past year? Share with us in the comments!

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4 Simple Ways to Make Automated Emails Feel Personal…AND On-Brand

There’s no doubt about it: automating your marketing can bring incredible efficiencies to your business, allowing you to scale your efforts without losing precision. But you don’t want your automated messages to feel automated – you want your marketing to feel personal, to build connections, and you also want it to amplify your brand.

After all, it’s widely accepted that it takes at least seven positive marketing messages to make a brand stick in a potential customer’s mind. That means that every single message counts – especially until you’ve “stuck.” If your communications are not consistent with your products and company values, or are insensitive to information you’ve already collected, you may lose some of your highest quality leads.

Unfortunately, many companies are not effective enough during this delicate phase. Their brand messages aren’t building their credibility, or resonating with the audience receiving them.

Consumer brands like Coca Cola, on the other hand, are excellent at this – they have comprehensive, enforced brand guidelines to control every marketing message across all channels. They can justify huge spend on media like TV, radio, and print, and they enlist the help of high-profile celebrity endorsers, to simultaneously resonate with consumers and their personal values. They’re conscious of how brand voice, narrative, and imagery should all tell a consistent story.

B2B marketers generally have less money to spend and fewer channels to leverage than consumer marketers, but they also control a large proportion of brand transmissions in your emails. Luckily, automation can actually make your marketing more personal, and can also help you remain consistent in your messaging across every channel.

Here are four easy ways to create more on-brand emails which resonate with your prospects, using marketing automation, your data, and a little creativity:

1. Sender Personalisation and Brand Ambassadors

As people, we are hard-wired to crave connection with others, which is why, as marketers, we want to introduce our brand as authentic and personal. Despite this, many B2B marketers are still sending emails from “marketing@mycompany.com”, or signing emails with “Sincerely, Your Marketing Team.”

In other words, they’re simply begging for unsubscribes – who wants to be reminded that they’re on a marketing list. Instead, make sure you’re sending your emails from a real person – one who represents the values of your product or organization, and who fits with the message you are trying to convey. Choose brand ambassadors wisely. To give a widely publicized example, Coca-Cola chose Taylor Swift as the face of Diet Coke last year, which, due to her controversial, polarising persona, many blamed for a drop in Diet Coke’s sales.

If possible, send emails from a person who is highly relevant to the message – ideally, an expert in the subject matter discussed. Include an e-signature, links to Twitter, LinkedIn… whatever you decide will demonstrate authenticity. You might also include a photo of the sender in the email’s signature – try a little A/B testing to find out what drives the best results.

If you’re using marketing automation, you can tailor your “from” names to appeal specifically to each email send’s audience – you might use your own name, include contact information, or use the name of someone in your company (with their permission, of course!). This is where knowing your brand comes in – do you have a charismatic CMO whose name you’d like to highlight? Or do you position yourself as friendly practitioners? You can dive a little deeper into these options with our ebook, Creating Your Email Marketing Subject Lines and From Names.

2. Segmentation and Geographic Relevance

Nothing encourages an express opt-out like a message in the wrong language, or an event invitation from the wrong continent! These messages are highly irritating, and are guaranteed to result in unsubscribes. If you’re marketing globally, an incorrect geographic filter can even have legal implications.

That’s why we recommend segmenting the audience you send emails to. Beyond geography, you might also consider segmenting your audience by gender, age, job title, company size, industry, interests, and more. Marketing automation makes segmentation easy to implement, helping you avoid this major (and surprisingly common) faux-pas.

3. Use Your Data to Find Other Data

Data has a way of hiding right under your nose. Often, marketers will waste time gathering info, only to discover only that they’ve had what they needed all along.

For instance, some industries and countries require you to address potential customers formally – typically with both a salutation and last name. If you don’t have this information for every prospect in your database, you might be daunted by the idea.

But if you’re looking for a last name, these are often included in email addresses…can you pull from there? If you’re looking for a prospect’s gender, can you discern it based off of first names? Both country and state can often be derived from contact fields.

You can also derive a prospect’s interest in a product based on behavior, which marketing automation can help you track. In short, don’t re-invent the wheel – take advantage of automation to cleverly embellish your data with information you already have.

With a little creativity and the help of automated campaigns, your database will rapidly fill up with the personal details needed to make emails feel individually tailored.

4. Create Resonance with Scoring

And finally, use lead scoring – an essential, but often overlooked marketing tool that is used to qualify and pass along leads to sales. If you’re using marketing automation, lead scoring presents a ready-made yardstick to measure how responsive new leads are to your content.

First, marketers define levels of buyer interest (i.e. early, mid, and late stage), and then set parameters to determine a lead’s qualification for each level. As each lead progresses from one stage to the next, the messages they receive can be adjusted in turn.

You know how interested a lead is in your product or services, so you can be sure you’re communicating in a personally relevant (but still automated!) way, sending the right content at the right time. Remember those first, most crucial seven touch points? Carefully plan your content streams for the most resonant results. This is often the difference between a marketing message that results in qualified leads, and a marketing message that results in an unsubscribe.

So how can you measure success? Your response rate!

You know you are making personal connection with the right brand messages when someone responds to an automated email. Honour this with a response whenever you can. And congratulations! It’s not easy to achieve.

So those are my four most effective tactics to make automation feel both personal and on-brand. Any questions about putting them into practice? Want to share a few successes of your own? Let us know in the comments below.

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