Triggered emails are messages you prepare in advance but only send to individual email recipients when the time is right. Is the time right for you to implement triggered email automations for your business? Here’s what you need to know to decide. 

Preview: What are triggered emails? 

A few years ago, my family and I moved into a new home which has triggered more than a few moments of nostalgia for me. I had to think about what to pack and what to keep as well as consider how we’d decorate our new abode. 

I always wanted a room with a pinball machine. I’m old enough to remember a time before game consoles and VR rigs. Back in the day, installing your own pinball machine that you and your friends could play anytime for free was the coolest. 

Pinball machine game mechanics combine predictability and chance to make each game exciting. 

Even a novice player can enjoy playing pinball. A practiced expert can rack up a high score by anticipating and responding to the pinball’s movements, pushing the actions buttons at just the right moment to send the ball where they want it to go. 

Triggered emails are your path to racking up a high score for your business. 

When you understand your customers and the levers that propel them forward on their buyer’s journey, and activate those levers at just the right moment, revenue follows. 

Triggered email workflows allow you to push those levers automatically. Everything is set up in advance so that you’re sending the right responsive message to every subscriber, every time. 

If you’re still a novice at using triggered emails, this article is for you. I’ll introduce the words used to describe this subset of automated emails, how they work and why your email marketing program should include triggered email campaigns. 

What are triggered emails? 

Triggered emails are email messages sent using an email automation function that applies a set of rules to identify when to send a designated email template and who to send it to. 

Triggered emails are possible because of email automations that integrate data about your email contacts with other system, customer, user or subscriber information. 

To create a campaign, you’ll define a condition or set of conditions that serve as the activation “trigger” using your email automation software. When the software detects the trigger, it activates the email campaign which may be a single message or a message series. 

Triggered series can be customized for a particular recipient using automation rules that change the messages included in the series, when each message is sent and when the series ends and by adding dynamic content insertions to the campaign templates. 

Triggered emails vs mass email automations 

Triggered emails aren’t the only type of automated email senders can use to save time and keep the emails flowing. Email automation is also used to send the same message to multiple list members on or about the same time. 

Automated mass or bulk emails are prepared in advance and can be a single-time blast or a regular newsletter. The messages may be sent to an entire subscriber list or selected segments and be customized by adding dynamic elements, just like triggered emails. 

The primary difference is that mass emails are sent on a date of your choosing. 

Regular automated emails aren’t responsive and therefore are less likely to reach each subscriber at their personal best moment. 

While a mass email can’t be distributed with the same precision as an individually triggered campaign, using today’s email sending software, you can choose from several timing options for mass sends. 

Senders can choose to launch time-sensitive emails to every recipient simultaneously or schedule a newsletter to arrive in everyone’s inboxes at a specified hour in their individual time zone. 

A high-volume send can be split into smaller batches spread out over hours or days to reduce strain on your infrastructure. (Some enterprise email sending services allow senders to distribute high-volume sends across multiple SMTP servers to optimize resource use and deliverability as well.)

Other email automations make life easier for email marketers too. 

Email marketing software may include features that automate tasks at every stage from validating new subscribers’ addresses to preparing performance reports. The automations available to you will depend on which apps you’ve assembled in your martech stack. 

Types of triggered emails and the words used to describe them

Triggered emails take many forms and go by more than a few different names. 

Some of these names relate to the event or trigger that activates one of these emails. For instance, because triggered emails are sent in response to some event (the trigger), they are often called autoresponders. 

A responsive email may be called an auto-reply when the triggering event is the receipt of an email message. 

The out-of-office or vacation responses email users can set up for their personal or professional inboxes using Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail and other mailbox service providers are examples of auto-reply triggered emails.

Bulk sending software supports more triggered email options 

Individual mailbox users have limited options for tailoring their auto-replies. 

Senders who use an email service provider or email marketing platform to send their messages have more ways to build and customize triggered messages, including assigning different message templates and triggers to use for varying purposes. 

One of those purposes is to send purchase confirmations, account updates or other transactional messages. 

These messages are built using pre-designed and standardized templates and set to be sent when a specific event such as a cart checkout or the receipt of transport information from a third-party shipper. 

Transactional messages may have little to no customization or include personalized details relevant to each recipient. 

The subscription confirmation email from EA Insider picture below appears the same for every recipient. The email’s send time, send to address and a unique URL attached to the ‘Verify Now’ CTA button are its only customizations. 

Wholesale/retail store Sam’s uses dynamic content to personalize its automated shipping updates, adding details and images about the items purchased. 

This message introduces individual touches in the subject line, where it references one of the items purchased. In the message body, the order number, customer name and address, and purchase details are all added using code that fetches dynamic content. 

Triggered emails can be prepared in advance then customized and sent individually at the moment of greatest impact. These characteristics inspire the alternate names of conditional, contextual or dynamic emails for triggered emails. 

Marketing and sales teams have other names for triggered emails, too. In these contexts, you may hear a triggered email referred to as a drip campaign or series, a waterfall, or an email flow.

Email automations that send a series of messages once triggered is the inspiration for these alternative names. These series or flows can be set up so that each message follows one after the other at a designated cadence or in response to the recipient’s reaction to the preceding message. 

A welcome series that delivers information to a new subscriber over a five-day period is an example of a defined cadence flow. 

Email marketing platform Sendfox offers users pre-built flows for a variety of purposes, including the automated welcome series workflow pictured below. 

This made-for-you flow uses templates that the app automatically customizes with the sender’s email address and other elements. The initial trigger for this series is a new email sign up after which each subsequent email is sent after a one-day delay. Senders can modify this cadence by adjusting the wait between messages or adding other conditions. 

If that welcome series includes onboarding steps that the recipient must complete to move forward, then the sender might use a conditional flow that delays sending further instructions until the preceding step is complete. 

This type of series is also an excellent candidate for a branching flow. Instead of holding off on sending next steps indefinitely, a branching flow would shift non-responsive recipients to a separate message branch sending reminder prompts. 

Finally, triggered emails are often called lifecycle emails because they are designed to send messages at key stages or touch points across the customer lifecycle. 

Lifecycle campaigns are triggered by the contact’s behavior or other data that indicates where they are in their customer journey with the intention of moving them forward on that journey. 

Below is an image of the account sign up welcome message from craft retailer JoAnne. This email welcomes website visitors who create an account with the brand’s online store. 

Along with welcoming new account holders, the message includes navigation tips and other useful information for new shoppers. There’s also an invitation to sign up to receive marketing emails from JoAnne. 

In case you were wondering…

Why would a company that already has someone’s email address ask them to subscribe? 

The welcome email example from JoAnne that I shared invited recipients to subscribe to the retailers email list. But why ask someone to sign up if you already have their email address? 

The answers are compliance and customer experience.

People share their personal data, including their email addresses for specific reasons. Someone who provides their email address to open an account isn’t consenting to the use of their data for any and every purpose. 

Some data privacy and anti-spam laws require senders disclose how they will use someone’s email and attain express consent for that use prior to sending the person email messages. 

In Canada and the European Union, for example, senders must have express consent before sending someone a marketing or commercial email in most situations. 

US anti-spam laws permit senders to contact someone via email without obtaining express consent as long as the message includes a method for the person to opt-out or unsubscribe. 

Mailbox providers also discourage businesses from sending mass emails without first obtaining their recipients’ consent. 

Although there are exceptions to these various rules, the safest practice for businesses sending messages with commercial intent is to get consent. 

⚠️ Don’t add every contact’s data to your email subscription list automatically. Make sure they’ve indicated that they want to get your messages. Beyond the potential for regulatory fines and penalties, sending marketing emails to people without their consent can earn you spam complaints from recipients and get you in trouble with email service providers. 

Now, about those triggers that make responsive email automations happen…

Three common triggers (a.k.a. events) used to build responsive email flows 

A triggered email is initiated when your email sending software recognizes some change in the data about a contact. This change, called an event, may be related to the passage of time, a specific date, a subscriber’s or customer’s action or inaction, or information related to the sender such as inventory levels, website status or other data. 

Like triggered emails themselves, events are sometimes assigned names related to their purpose or attributes. They may be referred to as time-based, transactional, lifecycle, segmentation, system, behavior or behavioral events, or event triggers in different email marketing systems. 

More important than choosing a label for your triggers, is understanding when to use each type. 

Combining different triggers and message types yields a lot of email marketing options.

Time-based triggers keep an eye on the calendar  

Time-based triggers are defined relative to a specific date or time or the passage of time. 

For example, milestone emails are initiated by a time-based trigger like the occurrence of an anniversary or similar date. A subscriber’s birthday or the date of their first purchase may be the triggering event for these sends.  

Other triggered email campaigns are activated by the passage of a designated period. For instance, triggered replenishment reminders typically launch on a regular interval based on the customer’s purchase history or the average use rate for the featured product. 

In the Sendfox welcome flow I shared previously, “wait for 1 day” instruction (pictured above) is a time-based event controlling the launch of the second and third messages in the series. 

Behavioral triggers are the activator for many triggered emails 

Messages sent in response to an action or inaction on the part of your subscriber are usually categorized as “behavior-triggered” or “behavioral-triggered” emails. 

Behavior triggered messages include the welcome emails you send after a new subscriber signs up to your email list or a new user creates an account for your app. Any action or inaction that you can detect and record about your subscribers can be the trigger for a responsive email. 

For example, abandoned cart or browse abandonment emails are triggered by a subscriber’s activity on the sender’s website. With proper tracking in place, you can trigger a campaign when a subscriber views a website or downloads a document on a third-party hosting site. 

In the image below, I’ve highlighted the behavioral triggers in Automizely’s lead magnet series which include the subscriber’s initial sign up and their subsequent clicks or non-clicks on follow-up messages in the series.

System triggers rely on inside information 

System triggers are events that are signaled by a change in your system. These include most of the time-based triggers as well as events such as moving a subscriber between segments. 

Transactional emails related to a subscriber’s status are system-initiated messages, too. 

The system trigger label may be most beneficial for distinguishing between time- or behavior-based events that activate a responsive email immediately vs those that don’t. 

For instance, back-in-stock or low-inventory notifications about a product a subscriber has recently browsed or purchased in the past are triggered messages based on your internal system data and the targeted recipient’s behavior. 

But unlike a welcome or cart abandonment email, an inventory update isn’t sent immediately following someone’s visit to a product page on your website. 

Instead, the subscriber’s behavior data is stored and used to determine whether they should be a recipient of a triggered message related to the separate low or new inventory (system) event. 

Here’s an illustration of a basic back in stock flow from SmartMail.com. 

Subscribers enter this flow when they sign up to receive back in stock notifications for a specific item. This action may be recorded using a tag or a similar field entry in the sender’s contact database or customer relationship management (CRM) software. 

In SmartMail’s suggested flow, the subscriber will immediately receive an email message confirming their desire to receive the back in stock alert. This one is triggered by the subscriber’s behavior. 

The next email in the series isn’t sent until a second system trigger is recognized. In this instance, the system event is an inventory of greater than one unit of the desired product. 

⚠️ I recommend setting this number higher if multiple people have signed up to receive in-stock alerts. Otherwise, you may have several disappointed shoppers who arrive at your website too late to get the item they’ve been waiting for. 

Most triggered campaigns use more than one data point 

As you’ve probably already noticed, most triggered email campaigns rely on more than one type of event to trigger the campaign’s launch. 

Other examples include re-engagement campaigns that don’t launch until two events, the subscriber’s non-engagement and the passage of time occur and low inventory warnings which are only sent to someone who has expressed interest in the referenced product when system data indicates the unit count for that product is low. 

Your email software solution, data availability and data integrations will influence how many conditions and dependencies you can use when building a triggered email workflow. 

Why send triggered emails?

Setting up automated responses takes the right software and knowledge of how to use it. So why bother? (You probably gathered a few reasons from the previous section, but humor me. I have more.)

The leading reason to use triggered emails is convenience. You can set these messages up in advance and they run on automatic, keeping you in touch with your subscribers and customers without requiring your 24/7 attention. 

As an operational tool, automated transactional emails ensure that your customers receive timely, consistent information about their orders and other interactions with your business. Automated emails create a data trail automatically, too. 

The date and time each message is sent is recorded. Automating your transactional correspondences reduces your manual effort spent on communication and record-keeping. 

As a marketing tool, triggered emails are a precision tool for nurturing new leads or refreshing lapsed interest. Brands using triggered campaigns personalize and contextualize their email marketing at scale.

After selecting the touchpoints and messaging, you can set up the appropriate email flows and ensure that each subscriber receives the message you’ve chosen at the ideal moment on their individual customer journey. 

Timely relevant messages are more likely to earn opens and reactions from their recipients. This can boost your conversion rates, increasing the profitability of your email marketing program. 

Even if your target doesn’t respond in the way you hoped, they’re more likely to open and engage with your future emails because you’ve demonstrated that looking at your (relevant) emails isn’t a total waste of time. 

The more often your subscribers interact with your messages, the less likely it is that your messages will be filtered to the spam folder. That’s good for your deliverability rates. 

Special-purpose triggered emails such as abandoned cart or upselling campaigns can reduce lost sales and increase customer lifetime values. 

Triggered email campaigns also return valuable first-party data about your contacts you can use to inform future strategies. 

Your organization also achieves efficiencies from using triggered campaigns. These tailored, individualized messages can replace some of your massive blast campaigns, reducing your overall send volumes. 

For large-scale senders, a single percentage reduction in sending volume can significantly reduce your program costs. For smaller senders, using triggered emails instead of relying on email blasts can keep your total volume under the threshold for increased fees. 

Which triggered email campaign should you build first?  

There aren’t any hard and fast rules about the types of emails your organization can design for automated sending. But there is one triggered campaign that makes sense for almost every type of business: the welcome email. 

Welcome emails are useful for greeting new account holders, first purchasers, or new email subscribers. And, these emails are expected which makes it more likely that they’ll be welcomed by the recipient. 

This type of message is so essential that most email service providers, newsletter platforms and email marketing platforms provide their customers with the tools to set up this automated campaign. 

Welcome emails tell a new subscriber that you’ve received their email sign up. They’re also an opportunity for you to show subscribers that you value their time and attention and introduce them to your brand. 

Earlier I showed you an email welcoming someone who signed up for a store account. That message engaged new account holders before they made their first purchase, helping to establish a relationship with the customer outside the buying cycle. 

Your new list member welcome emails serve a similar purpose. They establish a connection that you can nurture before and after someone becomes a customer. 

Brianne Fleming welcomes new subscribers to her newsletter, By Popular Demand!, a personal note of thanks. The email (pictured below) also includes links to archived content and invites subscribers to send a reply. 

A noticeable element in this automated message is a bright pink button saying “confirm your subscription here!” This button and the invitation to reply encourage new subscribers to interact with the email message which signals to their mailbox provider that they want to engage with Fleming’s messages. 

This action also tells Fleming that the email has reached its destination and the person who received it intended to subscribe. 

Why ask for confirmation? 

This is another step some senders take to ensure they’re only sending to people who want to receive their email messages. Some senders, like Fleming, ask for confirmation as part of their welcome flow. 

Others use a separate transactional email called a double opt-in request to get confirmation. This transactional email precedes any marketing contacts, including the welcome message. When a sender implements a double opt-in automation, only those who click to confirm are added to the sender’s active subscriber list. 

The email from John Deere pictured below is an example of a double opt-in message. Its design is simple, and it doesn’t include any promotional content. 

The text explains why the reader received the email and why they’re being asked to confirm, and makes clear that recipients not responding won’t receive future promotional content from the brand. 

Double opt-ins improve the quality of your email list by ensuring that only real, active email recipients are getting your emails. But because anyone who doesn’t confirm their intentions is removed from your active subscriber list, you may also lose some potential subscribers when using this method. 

The copy and design of your welcome email (or series of emails) can tell your new subscribers a little or a lot about your business. 

Take a look at the contrast between the welcome email sent by a B2B marketing agency and a DTC beauty brand below. 

InboxArmy is an email marketing agency and a source of advice and inspiration for email senders of all sizes. Their welcome email includes a short ‘about us’ summary, links to two getting started articles, and describes the agency’s primary services. Above the footer, this message includes a customer testimonial. 

In contrast to this B2B introduction email, Orly delivers a colorful welcome that puts its product (nail polish) front and center. Orly animates the word “welcome” in its header banner using a simple animated GIF method. 

The email uses pastel color blocking to present Orly’s brand style and displays both product images and manicured nails that show off the results subscribers can expect when they buy the polish for themselves.  

Emphasizing its cruelty-free stance, there’s also a model wearing Orly polish holding a puppy. 

Think about what you want subscribers to learn about you during this first email encounter when designing your welcome email templates. Then monitor how your welcome messages perform and continue to adjust your strategy to get even better results. 

Other triggered emails to add to your email marketing lineup 

I won’t be sharing examples of other types of triggered emails in this article because it’s long enough already. But don’t let that stop you from experimenting with adding other triggered emails to your marketing plan. 

Triggered emails are an excellent way to support customer relationship management and lifecycle marketing. If your journey map reveals an opportunity, create a workflow to capture it. Start by targeting those points on your customers’ journeys that present the greatest potential rewards or shore up your areas of greatest weakness.

Automated post-purchase or free trial onboarding emails can increase your adoption rates by reminding your customers to continue using your product and helping them overcome obstacles to adoption. 

Recovery messages sent when a contact leaves your website, abandons their cart or doesn’t finish filling out a form can prevent you from losing leads that were close to conversion. 

Speaking of leads, when someone signs up to download your content or registers for an event, use a triggered campaign to deliver the requested asset or confirm their registration. Use a series of triggered messages to continue the conversation and build on this new relationship. 

Don’t overlook existing customers and subscribers when creating triggered flows, either. Send lifecycle campaigns to keep your business top of mind between purchase cycles and set up triggered campaigns to update subscribers on their VIP statuses or encourage them to join your brand community. 

Use triggered post-purchase requests to gather reviews and feedback from customers too. Use time and behavior triggers to encourage your best customers to become brand advocates by sharing their testimonials. 

Keep your email lists clear of unengaged subscribers by creating re-engagement campaigns that assess their interest. Use data from the re-engagement campaign to remove non-responsive subscribers from your active sending list automatically. 

This article presents a snapshot of what’s possible to accomplish using triggered email campaigns. I’ll save the next round of tips for a later time. 

I hope I’ve encouraged you to pull the trigger and try using triggered emails to grow your business. I’m confident that with enough time and practice, you’ll become a workflow wizard and take your place on the leaderboard. 

Oh, in case you’re wondering. I do not have a pinball machine in my basement (yet). 

A girl can dream, though.