Trigger Mails 2.0 – Intelligent Flows

Build intelligent flows, normally based on a date, action or missing action. Add to that a number of filters that allow to achieve very accurate targeting of the automated campaigns.

This is what Trigger Emails function in MarketingPlatform is about.

When we, in the following text, describe a campaign, that can be both an email and an SMS campaign. A Trigger can also add or remove the contacts that fulfill the action of one or more lists.

Happy Birthday emails

Originally trigger based campaigns where developed for birthday messages. Therefore, many still call the function by this name. In MarketingPlatform all data fields can be used as a benchmark for sending one or more campaigns. It is possible to control the broadcast by time, hours, days or weeks before, on, or after the date of each contact.

Especially for birthday greetings, we have developed a feature that looks at the date, cleaned for the year, and allows automation on all annual occurrences of month and day – a greeting every year on the recipient’s birthday.

The unique with date fields and their use

A date field is a custom field of the date type. Date fields in the Trigger function allow, in addition to the described birthday email, a large number of follow-ups from the date of each contact in MailPlatform.

Many customers use the field type for the last date of purchase or contact. In this way, the follow-up can be systematized and automated.

Let us look at an example from a customer in the fashion clothes industry. The customer sells in 3 categories: Women, Man and Children. The information is stored in another type of field – Checkbox, which can contain multiple simultaneous choices – the buyer of womens and childrens clothes is most often the same person. In addition, the company has a number of product categories in each segment. Let us keep the example relatively simple. A woman has bought womens clothes 10 days ago. The date is saved in a date field in MarketingPlatform – and the main category ‘’Women’’ in the respective field. The customer has set up a Trigger campaign that says date + 10 days with a filter on women to send this campaign.

Read more about how to create your own fields here.

An active action releases a trigger campaign

When a contact opens a sent campaign or an autoresponder, the trigger can react. By reaction, we mean that a new campaign (SMS or email) is sent and the recipient is either added or removed from a contact list.

It is not possible to register the open action in an SMS. The format simply doesn’t allow it. All links are also tracked in SMS campaigns, so it is also possible to react to these actions.

The active action can also be a click on a particular link in a campaign. This allows targeting to be very specific to, for example, people who clicked on the news in the latest newsletter, or in a more B2B-like context, the sales process and the costly follow-up can be targeted to contacts interested in a particular product.

Here it would be of a great value to move the contacts that clicked to a new contact list which could be called seller-follow-up.

Additionally, all of the above options can be spiced with a ‘filter by’ option on all available Custom Fields.

A missing action releases a Trigger

When it comes to Triggers, the missing action is equally interesting as the active action. Again, both a campaign or click on a specific link applies. The difference here is that the recipient does NOT take an active action.

Your company sends a newsletter that contains a subject line that focuses on the features with something new. That appeals to certain recipients, while others respond to an attractive price. Therefore, you set up a Trigger, which automatically sends a variation of the original campaign to those who did not open the message, two days after sending the original campaign.

The same can also be done with a missing click on a specific link. It is possible to react to links in SMS campaigns, but it is not possible to react on whether an SMS campaign is being opened or not.

Opportunities with filters

Adding a filter will limit the group of recipients. This is similar to a segment, that also finds a specific subset of a contact list. Used in a Trigger, it will act as a filter on either a contact list and a data field, or an active or passive group related to an action.

It is possible to filter both by standard fields and own fields – the, so-called, Custom Fields.

For example, by putting a filter on a Women, Man or Children category (the example mentioned earlier in the text), you can do a series of Trigger campaigns that respond to the same action or same data field, but only to each target group.