What is a behavioral email?
Simply put, a behavioral email is a type of email that is sent out based on a specific action taken by the recipient. It is designed to help businesses improve their conversion rates, customer retention, and customer engagement.
If you wish to learn more about this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: How important is behavioral email?
Behavioral email is important because it can help significantly improve your open rate, click through rate, and conversion rate.
It works because unlike ordinary emails that may or may not be relevant to your customers, a behavioral email is not only guaranteed to be relevant, but is also actually expected by the recipients because it is sent out as a response to something they did.
But that is not all behavioral emails can do for you. You can also use them to easily get valuable feedback and insights from your customers and continuously improve your products, services, and business processes.
Question #2: What are the different types of behavioral email?
While there are a lot of different types of behavioral emails you can send out, they can generally fall under three basic categories: registration, conversion, and social or site activity. Let us take a look at each one in more detail:
Registration behavioral emails consist of welcome emails, onboarding emails, FAQ emails, getting started emails, and any other type of email designed to welcome a new user or customer and inform them about the benefits of choosing to do business with you.
Conversion behavioral emails, on the other hand, are triggered by customer actions such as purchases, sign ups, downloads, opt-ins. They are designed to thank the customer for taking the desired action, confirm the success of said action, and summarise its details.
Finally, social or site activity behavioral emails, as the name suggests, are triggered by specific actions a prospect or existing customer takes on your social pages or website. Examples would be:
- Viewing a product
- Abandoning a cart
- Posting a comment
- Sending a chat message
- Sharing a post
- Watching a video
Their goal is to convert demonstrated interest into a successful conversion. The idea is since the user has already engaged with your brand via your social media or website, they are already more likely to make a purchase, sign up, download, or do whatever it is you need them to do than someone who has not.
Question #3: How does behavioral email work?
As we have seen in the previous section, behavioral email gets sent out based on predetermined user actions (a.k.a. triggers). This typically happens automatically, and the emails themselves are also already pre-written, with only the recipient’s details getting changed—also automatically—prior to sending.
This means that you only need to set everything up once. There is no need to do anything else after that—at least not until you decide to make changes or identify a completely new trigger that requires a completely new behavioral email.
Fortunately, setting up a new behavioral email sequence or revising an existing one is extremely easy, thanks to the host of advanced email marketing tools at your disposal, such as MailChimp and SendPulse. They are designed to help you create highly effective sequences even if you do not have advanced tech skills or coding knowledge.
Question #4: Can I send behavioral email manually?
In theory, yes, you can send behavioral email manually. In reality, though, it is nearly impossible to execute unless you are expecting, say, fewer than 10 total customer interactions a day.
Keep in mind that for you to be able to send out behavioral emails, you will need to closely monitor everything that happens on your social media and website and immediately respond to each trigger with the right behavioral email. There is just no way you keep doing this once your business starts growing.