Behavioral Email Marketing – from Tools to Rules

Despite the popularity of social media darlings like Instagram and Snapchat, email remains a vital tool for every marketer and behavioral email marketing may be the most powerful of all. Unlike the brief and fleeting instances of communication on those platforms, email allows for deeper engagement on a more personal level. Historically, email has been used has a method of one-way communication using regular email blasts. often to announce a company’s current promotions. Yet over time we’ve witnessed improvement in these marketing tools, changing the nature in which email is used to more of a behavior-based activity.

Choosing tools for behavioral email marketing campaigns

• A platform should integrate with other applications like payment gateways, shopping carts and CRM systems for behavioral email marketing to be effective. With so many possible touch points, inter-platform communication is the best way for an email app to understand how a customer engaged with the company.
  
• Whatever platform you decide to use, the key to making this work lies in the ability to apply tags to subscribers based on their actions. An action could be someone visiting a web page, clicking on an email link, buying an item, or any other event. We like Drip, a newer behavior-based email app that offers visual workflows to manage all the possible paths within a complex campaign.
  
• It’s this point of integration with other apps where things start to get interesting in behavioral email marketing. Witness the arrival of Center.io, which bills itself as a “marketing command center.” Like many others, Center offers the ability to integrate with a variety of apps. What’s unique is the way in which it provides marketers with visibility into what customers are doing in all their apps that the company employs.

Determining rules for behavioral email marketing campaigns

Once you’ve refined your tools figure out the rules you need to apply depending on your marketing stack. Fortunately the rules necessary to make behavioral email marketing work don’t require deep programming knowledge or the use of precious development resources. For example, let’s say you’re a marketer using a simple tool stack consisting of an email platform like GetResponse and a payment processor like Stripe, and you want to improve retention. These apps provide a list of rules you can employ to achieve your goal of better retention. You could, for example, choose a rule to send emails to customers who haven’t purchased recently. GetResponse and Stripe can now work together to apply that rule, and help you increase your retention numbers.

Here’s another example. Perhaps your marketing stack consists of Drip, Infusionsoft and Paypal. Maybe this time the evaluation phase of your sales funnel is cause for concern. In this scenario, there’s a rule to coordinate all three apps so each visitor to your pricing page receives an email with a special offer. That offer helps move more of your potential customers from the evaluation phase, to an actual purchase.

Behavioral email campaigns don’t have to be complicated to be effective. Nor do they require heavy programming knowledge. Determine the step in your sales funnel (or buying cycle) you wish to improve, improve and use rules to design the simplest campaign to achieve your objective. While the tools in your marketing stack affect the implementation of your campaign, the strategy remains the same.

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