Last Updated: January 2025
Behavior based email marketing automation is revolutionizing how businesses connect with their audience, offering highly personalized and timely communication that drives engagement and conversions.
Research shows that segmented email campaigns based on customer behavior can result in a 760% increase in revenue, highlighting the immense potential of this strategy. By analyzing actions like browsing habits, purchase history, or email opens, marketers can craft messages that resonate deeply with their audience.
This guide will help you understand the fundamentals of behavior based email marketing automation and provide actionable steps to implement it effectively for your business.
What is Behavior Based Email Marketing?
Behavior based email marketing relies on customer actions, such as certain behaviors (like a website visit, or a specific purchase) to trigger personalized and timely email sends. Rather than static data points, it emphasises triggers such as looking at individual products, leaving carts, or following links.
This method ensures that emails remain pertinent to the interests of the recipient, which in turn increases both engagement and conversions. For example, follow-up emails with products or discounts can target viewers who browsed the products but didn’t carry out the purchase.
By leveraging automation and data, businesses can deliver the right message at the right time, enhancing customer experience and driving results.
Sending Emails Based on Customer Actions
Not every interaction needs an email, so it’s vital to pinpoint the behaviors that are strong enough to deserve one.
Behavioral targeting works best when it targets meaningful actions (or inactions). For instance, if a user signs up for a service but doesn’t fill out their profile or verify their email, a smart company will follow up with a reminder to help them complete the process.
But behavioral email marketing goes beyond just re-engagement reminders. It can also be used to send targeted emails initiated by actions such as:
- Downloading Content: If a form is submitted for a white paper, video, or case study, send a follow-up and thank you with a related resource or offer.
- Browsing Specific Pages: If someone spends time on your FAQ page, consider sending a follow-up email asking if they need assistance or have specific questions.
- Abandoning a Cart: Send a reminder email if a customer leaves items in their cart. Offer a discount, point out limited stock, and/or talk about cart expiration to motivate them to checkout.
The customer is the engine of behavioral email marketing. Their choices and actions drive your responses. You can boost conversion rates, improve profit margins, and build closer ties with customers by interacting with users based on their behavior.
Triggered Email Examples
You can use this data to identify other opportunities for targeted emails based on behavior. It means these emails can point users back towards your service and really drive it. Below is a roundup of the most powerful email marketing formats to get your campaigns inspired:
1. The “Getting Started” Email
This is also known as an onboarding email, that gets sent after account creation or registration. It’s designed to get your users to interact with your service as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Stocksy, a stock photography site, for instance, includes themed images in its emails to inspire design ideas and drive clicks.
2. The Notification Email
Usually, these emails verify your account setup with a username, password or some other basic instructions. Instead, you can improve these by offering a guided tour of your product.
With SaaS, you might, for example, guide users through completing their first tasks like building a playlist, website, campaign, etc. So they have their hands in the service and you have some data to repurpose in the future.
3. The “Icing on the Cake” Email
By surprising customers with these unexpected emails, businesses can build retention.
TurboTax, for example, prompts curiosity about possible refunds. The contents of these designs are focused on consumer benefits, not brute selling, so the tone is kept helpful and engaging.
4. The Reward Email
Everyone loves recognition. Withings, a brand of fitness tracker, sends emails congratulating “achievements,” such as receiving a badge for a day of 8,000 steps. These emails also promote social sharing, making users brand advocates.
5. The Recommendation Email
Provide additional incentives for referrals. Bombas, a sock retailer, offers free socks to customers for referring friends. Your buddies score discounts too which gets both parties invested in brand loyalty.
6. Transactional Emails
Transactional emails (receipts, shipping confirmation, etc.) have an 8x higher open rate than regular emails. Optimize these emails by adding some conversational or value-driven messages. For instance, transactional emails from Slack have links to extra insights like their blog if you feel like poking around further.
Utilising these email types allows you to create trigger opportunities that will drive engagement and help build meaningful relationships with customers.
Pros and Cons of Behavioral Targeting
Through behavioral targeting, digital marketers have been able to ensure that the emails sent are targeted toward specific individuals, based on their actions and preferences. This has been shown to be up to 70% more effective in driving conversions.
Behavioral targeting may lead to improved interaction and satisfaction, but it can also create new issues with privacy and regulation. Its advantages and disadvantages need to be understood to utilize it wisely.
Pros of Behavioral Targeting
Improved Personalization
Behavioral targeting helps you keep your emails relevant to your customer behavior and preferences. This degree of personalization increases engagement, as customers receive content that seems pertinent and relevant.
Higher Conversion Rates
This creates a much higher chance of conversion than if you simply sent out a mass email. Users are more likely to convert if you are addressing a specific need of theirs or a specific behavior that they have shown.
For example, sending a reminder for an abandoned cart. These personalised interactions nudge customers to move forward.
Enhanced Customer Experience
Customers appreciate helpful and relevant communication. Behavioral targeting offers a seamless, user-oriented experience that builds trust and loyalty.
Efficient Use of Resources
The use of automation tools like Saufter for setting up a behavioral email campaign saves time that would be spent handcrafting your emails and is much more efficient than blasting a generic email out to everyone in your database.
Better Insights and Analytics
Customer behavior tracking delivers insights into what consumers like, how they respond, which trends they follow, etc. Which allows you to refine your marketing strategy over and over again.
Cons of Behavioral Targeting
Data Privacy Concerns
Gathering and leveraging data around customer behavior can have privacy implications. Building customer confidence requires that we be transparent when we use data, and compliant with regulations like GDPR.
Complex Setup and Maintenance
Behavioral targeting is a complex procedure that requires powerful tools, reliable data collection, and continuous monitoring. And can be resource-intensive, particularly for smaller companies.
Risk of Over-Personalization
As good as personalization can be, over-targeting might feel intrusive or “creepy,” driving a wedge between you and customers. Finding the right balance is the key.
Dependence on Quality Data
The success of behavioral targeting largely depends on the precision of your data. Poor or faulty data can result in useless emails and poor trust.
Potential for Automation Errors
Automating the process poorly might cause duplicate or wrong emails to be sent, irritating them and tarnishing your brand image.
Consumer Behavior and Marketing Strategy
Understanding your consumer is always the foundation of an efficient marketing strategy, particularly with behavior based email marketing automation. By understanding how your customers interact with your brand, you can find key touchpoints like browsing products, reading content, and cart abandonment.
Then you can leverage those moments to send targeted, personalized email communications. When content is customized for individual preferences, customers feel valued, leading to higher engagement and loyalty.
Moreover, behavioral data used to effectively predict what the customers will do aids in proactive outreach such as promoting relevant products or preventing potential churn by sending them reactivation offers.
Thus establishing your email’s next message flow with customer expectations results in a smooth experience that leads to conversions & strengthens the relationships.
Saufter: Best Email Marketing Automation Software
Saufter is a powerful customer engagement and email marketing platform designed to enhance your user interactions. By analyzing user behavior on your portal or website and identifying their journey stages, Saufter delivers tailored campaign recommendations to optimize engagement and conversions.
For instance, if a user has not explored a particular feature, Saufter may recommend sending a “how-to” article about it. Each week, you receive fully drafted email and in-app campaign suggestions that only require your approval to launch.
Additionally, Saufter monitors your competitors’ activities, analyzing their latest blog posts to suggest content campaigns that keep you ahead.
Key features include:
- Automated User Segmentation: Effortlessly group users into cohorts based on behavior.
- Email Campaign Recommendations: Enhance conversions and reduce churn with personalized campaign ideas.
- SEO Campaign Suggestions: Drive traffic with tailored SEO strategies.
- Churn and Conversion Predictions: Leverage AI to forecast and prevent customer churn while boosting conversions.
Conclusion
In conclusion, embracing behavioral-based email marketing automation can significantly enhance your engagement and conversion rates. Research shows that automated emails based on user behavior achieve 152% higher click-through rates than generic email campaigns.
Platforms like Saufter make it effortless to harness this power by studying user behavior, segmenting audiences, and delivering data-driven campaign recommendations. By integrating tools like Saufter into your strategy, you can create personalized experiences that resonate with your audience, reduce churn, and drive sustainable growth. Now is the perfect time to step into the future of email marketing and see the difference automation can make.
