Now that you have an idea of what email journey mapping is, you may be wondering how to set it up.
It’s pretty simple to do and doesn’t take too long. If you’ve already created some email marketing materials, you are already well on your way. Should you need any help with any aspect of email journey mapping, feel free to fire me an email over.
As with a marketing campaign, email journey mapping requires planning. By having a plan in place, you will know what you are trying to achieve and how to go about achieving it.
Collect the Right Data
Before you get to making your email journey mapping plan, make sure you are collecting data from your customers and subscribers with which you can actually make an email journey.
If you are not collecting data, then rectify this by optimising your website and/or email subscription forms to include more data fields.
Birthday, reminder and other triggered emails require you to have some data on your customers and subscribers. Some useful pieces of data for email triggering are –
- Date of birth
- Gender
- Student status
- Location (country or town)
- Industry or profession
Figure Out Your Goals
When you have got data collection sorted and you start having valuable information flooding in, your next step is to decide what your goals are for your email journey.
Do you want to use your email journey map to convert non-customer subscribers into customers, or would you like to remind your current customers of key dates and deals? Perhaps you would like to re-engage long-lost customers instead, or have your current subscribers spread the word about you.
Deciding on the right goal(s) for your email journey map is to have them meet your marketing plan’s goals. Take a step back and see how your goals for email journey mapping fit in with your marketing and then go from there. The end-result is to deliver valuable content to your subscribers no matter what your goals are.
Start Drafting Content
With your goals clearly defined and data flowing in, you are in the right position to start drafting your content.
Trying to convert subscribers into customers? Try with email content which welcomes them to your brand, thanks to them for subscribing and offers them some form of a discount on their first purchase or another special offer.
Trying to encourage repeat customers? Send emails which demonstrate some of your newer products and explain what’s being going on behind the scenes recently. You can also offer a special offer here, too, if you wish.
Trying to increase your exposure? Entice your subscribers to spread the word about your business or brand through the use of social sharing buttons and high-quality actionable content which promotes an emotive response and is worth reading.
Plan out the content of your email journey in the context of your goals and the data which you are harvesting. By doing this, you will only be creating emails which are focused and drive results.
Define Your Triggers
Now that everything else is in place, you can define your triggers – the events which will cause your automated emails to be sent out.
Your email triggers define your email journey and cause the emails to automatically reach your subscribers. The specifics of each trigger will depend on what the goal of each email is, and so the rules relating to each trigger will slightly differ.
To go back to our example of your goal being to convert subscribers into customers, your trigger would be a new subscriber joining your email list through the subscription form, and the rule would be to send the welcome email to that subscriber. These triggers are not complex, and they are totally customisable, providing you with complete creative control over your brand’s email journey.
For a date-orientated email, the trigger would be the date and the rule may be to send an email a few days prior to the date in question (i.e. a birthday) to give its recipient the chance to look at your website before their big day. Another example may be to send an email to a customer a few days prior to a subscription or service starting or renewing, such as a car insurance policy or an annual subscription to a magazine.
Deploy Your Email Journey!
When everything is set, set the wheels in motion and see how your email journey performs. Keep optimising it by making tweaks and adding extra content, data points and triggers to benefit fully.
The results from your email journey will not be instantaneous, though, so be patient and check your email analytics after around a week or two, if not longer. By their nature, email journeys take longer than typical pieces of email marketing to be interacted with.
Believe me when I say that you will notice when the results start coming in! So long as you are patient and persistent in your tweaking and addition of new content, there is no reason why an email journey cannot have a significant impact on your conversions and sales in the long-term.