I just came back from a journey. I adopted a 100-pound standard poodle in Palm Springs, Ca., and drove him back to my home in Dallas. The trip took my co-driver and me 20 hours over two days.
But we didn’t just jump into the car with Luca and all of his belongings and food and point the car down the highway. Thanks to my strategy-first mantra (“strategy before tactics”), we put together a map that showed us which roads to take, which towns to aim for or avoid, which hotels took dogs, and where to take pit stops every few hours.
As we built our travel plan, I thought about how much it was like creating an email journey. An email journey automates repeatable actions. This frees you to focus on other parts of your email program.
Email journeys are the money trees of your email program
An email journey is an automated series of related email messages you set up in advance to send automatically when specific customer actions trigger them.
Your email journeys are the foundation of your email marketing program because they automate repeatable actions and make money for you in the background. As long as you tend to them regularly, they will keep on making money for your company while you work on campaigns and other initiatives – like creating more journeys.
Many of the retailers I speak with regularly say they can attribute 50% or more of their email revenue to automations and journeys. That’s a good motivation for investing in journeys.
From automations to journeys
In the early days of email, we called these series of triggered messages “automations.” They went out automatically, after all. Then Salesforce introduced its “journey builder,” which you would use to set up a complex combination of automated emails. Suddenly, everyone started calling these automated programs “journeys.”
This renaming helped us rethink automation as more than a series of email messages. Instead, we understood it to be a coordinated journey customers take with our brands.
Journeys and automations are similar in general but differ in the details. Each one is a series of emails that trigger automatically based on a specific activity, but a journey is more extensive. It can have several series of emails and depends on data to choose which set of emails to send in different situations.
This list might help you understand the differences:
- Trigger mail: A transactional email that responds to a customer action. Example: Purchase confirmation
- Automation: A short series with one or two emails sent to everyone who triggers that automation. Example: Shipping confirmation/delivery notice.
- Journey: An automated series of three emails or more, each with a function or goal, sent over an extended period. Journey emails often call on customer data to determine automatically which email to send next, which customers to email, and when to send.
Example: Onboarding series triggered when a customer opts in, including emails like these:
- Welcome the customer
- Introduce your customer to your brand
- Show them what to expect from your emails
- Move them along to a first activity, such as a purchase or account registration
We need to understand these distinctions so we can create the best triggers, automations, and journeys.
Also, whenever we work with a client on a request for proposals (RFP), we have to know what our clients want to accomplish with automations so we can be sure the platform will deliver what they want.
So, we clarify triggers, automations, and journeys every time for reporting, setup, execution, and data access.
Set up a successful email journey
Here’s what you should consider when creating or refining an email journey:
1. Specify inclusions and exclusions.
Knowing who should not get an email in your series is just as important as knowing whom you should include. Which customers should get which emails in the journey, whom do you exclude, and who should be on the journey in the first place? You might have one purchase journey for first-time buyers, another for repeat customers, and a third for buyers who are in your loyalty program.
A win-back automation, which you send to customers who have never bought, would be different from one for customers who have stopped buying.
Accurate data is essential here. Loyal customers don’t want to be treated like first-time buyers. Exclusions can be harder to determine than inclusions, but they help prevent sending emails to the wrong audiences.
2. Build your journeys one at a time
Back when I was consulting with Fannie Mae, the U.S. mortgage financing company, I met with the head of their email team. When our conversation turned to email automations, his face lit up and he said, “You have to see ours!”
He pulled out a paper chart, easily 4 feet long, with hundreds of email triggers, automations, and journeys that he had created for the email program.
I was astonished. “How did you get all this done?” I asked.
His answer: One by one over a long time. He started with one automation, polished it, and then went on to the next one. This long building process is essential for creating a successful set of journeys.
You can’t expect to sit down in a strategy session and emerge with a complex set of journeys, each with its own twisting routes of emails and actions that reflect all the ways customers interact with your emails and your brand.
Don’t wait to launch your journey until it’s perfect. That will cost you momentum, not to mention lost revenue and time you could have spent on other projects.
Create a basic journey and launch it. Then build on it. This process of incremental innovation incorporates what you learn from your tests and operations to inform your next move. When you’re satisfied, then move on to your next journey.
3. Check up on your journeys
If I could take back one thing from the early days of email development, it would be the phrase “Set it and forget it.” That’s how we sold the automation concept. We thought we could set up the automation and then let it run without supervision. Big mistake. Big!
Links break, especially if your company changes website navigation. Data goes bad, or the platform loses back-end access to your CRM. Customer expectations change. Templates get outdated. Customer habits change. The world is always changing, and your journeys must keep up.
You don’t run your car without regular maintenance. Your journeys need the same attention. Schedule time to check in on them to be sure they’re running as they should. Test every automation before you launch your program. Then go back and retest regularly to be sure your assumptions are correct.
When I worked for Sears, we had a successful email journey for customers who bought washer-dryer sets without the pedestals that raised the machines to more comfortable heights and included storage for laundry supplies. Our research showed that if we sent those customers a follow-up email promoting the pedestals 7 days after installation, they would buy them.
Later, we discovered that the 7-day period had shrunk. So we tested again (and again and again) and found a shorter period after installation was more effective.
The lesson here: When you assume something based on a single point in time, you will need to rerun your data from time to time to be sure your assumptions are still valid. You can also test other things, like dayparts and message content.
4. Journeys are not linear flows.
As I mentioned earlier, journeys are more complex and rely on more data than triggers or basic automations. Automations are linear flows, with few outside influences determining message conditions.
Journeys account for behavior, purchases, sector influence, and much more. A true journey should look like a map with several series of email automations, like a highway map or blueprint.
I created one for a financial services company that changed the emails customers received according to what they clicked on, what kind of business they were in, how many employees the business had, total sales, and other data.
That’s why you must build in time in your planning process to think through every decision or potential outcome before creating the messages or setting up your triggers.
Wrapping up:
Email automations and journeys have become table stakes for email marketing programs. Marketing automation platforms are more sophisticated and easier to use today. Even the most basic ESPs have some kind of automation built in with the capacity to integrate with your CRM system and other data sources.
I mentioned earlier that many retailers say they can attribute 50% or more of their revenue from email to automated series like journeys.
That 50% benchmark can be a handy guide if you’re thinking about your email program now and wondering whether you have enough automation or need to expand your program.
If you’re below 50%, you have some work to do. As my Fannie Mae client showed me, you can always find another useful automation! And if you’re way above that, contact me so we can produce a white paper together.
No matter whether we’re talking about a single triggered message, a short automated series, or a complete journey, they are more intelligent and effective than batch-and-blast emails.
And in case you’re wondering …
My Palm Springs-to-Dallas trip was a success! Luca and I made it back to Dallas, although the going got ruff – sorry, rough – a few times. But now he’s napping on my office floor.
Of course, we have some things we still need to test for until we launch the journey. Things like “How is Luca going to get along with Pippin, who has run our household single-handedly up to this point?”
If we had waited to work all that out ahead of time, we’d still be back in Palm Springs. So we’re testing a few things and using what we learned – same as you would use incremental innovation to launch your email journeys – to help everyone get along. Now it’s time for a doggie treat!
A version of this column also appeared on Martech.org.
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