At the risk of sounding like the subject line of yet another spam email, wouldn’t it be wonderful if your online marketing could automatically generate income for you without you having to do anything? Believe it or not, a number of our customers over here in the UK are actually pretty close to reaching that Holy Grail by using scheduled, or triggered, e-mailings.

Consider these two scenarios:

1) Your Web analytics system has shown that there are a number of customers who click through from an email and select products, but then they don’t complete the sale for some reason. Perhaps their boss came into their office to ask a question, or the doorbell rang at home, who knows. Whatever happened, you reckon that some kind of offer - free delivery or something like that - might just remind customers what they were up to and bring them back to your site.

2) Or perhaps you’re running a charity and you want to send a follow-up to everyone who made a donation to your new campaign telling them how much you appreciate their support and asking if they might consider making a regular gift.

In both cases you could create a new email every day and send it out manually, but what’s even better is to set up an email that goes out at a certain frequency - perhaps every 10 minutes in the case of the basket (cart) abandonment, or every week in the case of the charity follow-up.

And so you sit back and watch the cash roll in every time the mailing goes out. Who wouldn’t want some of that?

In my experience there are two main hurdles to overcome. The first is to convince marketing people that they don’t need to be fiddling with the creative every time a mailing goes out. It’s a much better use of resources to invest time upfront to set up a triggered campaign that can run on its own for a while.

But more often than not, the main problem is with the data - a topic that I propose to return to in my next post. Although it seems to present huge problems, fortunately we have a wealth of great case history that marketers can use to help convince their colleagues to pull their fingers out and make the data feeds happen.

One of our customers is making several hundred pounds every time their basket abandonment email goes out - money that would probably have been lost without such a campaign. Needless to say, they’re now looking for other triggered mailing opportunities so they can repeat that success!

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About the Author

Kieran Cooper is senior manager of support services for Lyris' international operations. Located in the Lyris UK office, he is responsible for account management, implementation and support.

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