Which messages should I send this subscriber today? For many brands, the answer to that question is complex, because some of their subscribers are qualified to receive multiple broadcast, segmented, or automated messages because of their preferences or behaviors. However, sending them a bunch of messages in quick succession tends to create noise, not success.
The solution to this problem is to have a clear message prioritization, which involves suppression and send time decisions around your digital marketing campaigns to ensure you’re:
- Not sending so many messages that your subscriber fatigues or opts out
- Sending the highest value message
- Avoiding taking attention away from your high-value messages
Accomplishing that can involve everything from no-tech to high-tech tactics. It also helps to strategize your message prioritization by dividing your campaigns into three buckets:
- Your broadcast campaigns
- Your segmented campaigns
- Your automated campaigns
Let’s look at the tactics you’ll want to consider.
1. Scheduling Broadcast Campaigns
Most brands use a content calendar to plan out at least their broadcast campaigns, if not their other campaigns, too. And the more campaigns and mailstreams you send, the more valuable this becomes to avoid competing, overlapping sends.
For example, if you’re a B2B brand and send a weekly email newsletter on Tuesdays, then you’d want to send any event messages or product updates or announcements on another day of the week, likely Thursday or Friday to create some separation between sends.
And if you’re a multi-category retailer, then you might want to designate each day of the week for a different category or email type. For instance, you might send a clearance email on Monday, kids products on Tuesday, home goods on Wednesday, beauty on Thursday, and apparel on Friday.
This no-tech approach gives each of your campaigns room to breathe and creates less fatigue than if two or more campaigns arrived on the same day.
Ideally, your preference center would allow your subscribers to select which of your mailstreams they’d like to receive. In general, the more options you give your subscribers to right size their subscription, the less likely they are to fully unsubscribe. Retaining subscribers in this way, reduces list churn and keeps open email as a line of communication.
Understand the four subscriber needs your preference center should address.
2. Sending Segmented Campaigns
If you have one or more days open in your weekly send schedule, then slotting in a segmented campaign into one of those is an easy decision if you’re looking for growth, but concerned about fatiguing your subscribers. But what if some of your subscribers have opt-in selections that have them receiving messages every day? When do you send that segmented campaign?
You have two options:
- You can send the segmented campaign in addition to your regularly scheduled campaign
- You can suppress the regularly scheduled campaign for those subscribers who will be receiving the segmented campaign
With that first option, the risks are two-fold: First, the extra message fatigue leads to additional list churn; and, second, the broadcast message distracts some subscribers from the higher-value segmented message, reducing its impact.
That said, many subscribers tolerate receiving two (or even more) messages a day from brands they engage with often. That’s especially true when those emails are spaced out, such as sending one email in the morning and one in the afternoon. So, sending a segmented campaign on the same day as a broadcast campaign can be low-risk and highly effective if you target your more engaged subscribers and space out the sends into different day-parts.
With that second option, if you’re questioning the financial sense of sending the segmented campaign instead of the broadcast campaign, then your segmented campaign is likely flawed. That’s because, by their very nature, segmented campaigns should outperform most untargeted campaigns, either in the short-term or long-term.
If you don’t think yours will after accounting for the additional production and sending costs, then it’s wise to rethink that segmented campaign and consider taking advantage of a third option: using a dynamic content module to include the message into one of your broadcast emails.
Improve your content planning process by ensuring it answers these 6 questions.
3. Triggering Automated Campaigns
Automated campaigns are the most complicated to handle because they can be triggered at practically any time, and there’s the potential for more than one to be triggered. Let’s break down the approach to handling prioritization with these campaigns by answering a couple of key questions.
First, when more than one automated campaign is triggered, which should you send?
You’ll want to have an automated campaign hierarchy to decide which triggered messages to prioritize. For example, if an email subscriber were due to receive a win-back campaign today because they hadn’t purchased anything in the past 6 months, but before that goes out the customer visits your website and browses a product category, then you’d want to delay the win-back and send a browse abandonment campaign instead. If the customer doesn’t respond to that intervention after a few days, then you send the win-back.
Another example: If a subscriber clicks through your SMS campaign and browses but doesn’t buy, then you’d cue up a browse abandonment email to go out. However, before that email is sent, the subscriber returns to your site and puts a product in their cart and then leaves again. At this point, you’d cancel the browse abandonment campaign and cue up a cart abandonment campaign. However, before that message goes out, they return and midway through checkout, they leave again. Now, you cancel the cart abandonment email and cue up a checkout abandonment email. Not only would you not want the customer to receive all three of those emails, but you certainly wouldn’t want them to get only the browse or cart abandonment campaigns, because neither of them would address the subscriber’s checkout concerns.
The guiding principle here is that the message with priority is the one that’s triggered by the most recent action or the action taking place closest to the point of conversion.
To build a stronger triggered email program, get our checklist of more than 110 automated campaign ideas via a free, no-form download.
And second, should you suppress other campaigns when sending a triggered campaign?
Before answering this question, let’s look at the full spectrum of actions that can be taken in this regard.
First, you could suppress campaigns in the lead up to the trigger of an automated campaign.
Second, you could suppress campaigns that would be sent after the trigger of an automated campaign.
Third, you could not do any suppression and send the automation in addition to other messaging.
Even if you might use suppression in tandem with a particular automation, there may be instances when you wouldn’t want to. For example, you may want to make an exception for your highest value promotional campaigns, such as your Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday campaigns. If a subscriber were to abandon even a high-value shopping cart, you probably wouldn’t want to suppress those campaigns since they are among the highest revenue-per-email campaigns you’ll send all year.
And fourth, rather than triggering an automated campaign, you could include that message in your regularly scheduled campaigns in the form of a dynamic content module. For example, instead of sending a browse abandonment email, you could include a module in your next promotional email to that subscriber that features the product that was abandoned or popular products in the category abandoned.
Use cases like that are a great way to improve relevance and performance of your broadcast campaigns. With our clients, we’ve seen brands experience a significant lift when continuing to incorporate behavioral modules in their broadcast emails for up to 30 days. Given average open rates, this helps guarantee that the subscriber will likely see the module a couple of times. And while a browse or card abandonment or other behavioral event might seem outdated after a week or two, it still tends to be much more relevant than any other content you might include in your standard broadcast stream.
Learn more about using dynamic content in Oracle Responsys and in Oracle Eloqua.
Which of these approaches you use depends on the value of the action you’re trying to drive. For instance, if a subscriber abandons a shopping cart with a $1 item in it, then including a reminder about their cart via a personalized module in your next promotional email probably makes the most sense. On the other hand, if their cart is worth $1,000, then it’s sensible to send a series of cart abandonment emails.
A second factor to consider is the amount of time that’s passed since the first message sent in response to the trigger. Sticking with the high-value cart abandonment example, it would make sense to suppress promotional emails in the wake of the first email in that series. However, you might not for the second or third. And then, if the subscriber still hasn’t responded, you might transition to just including a cart reminder message in your promotional emails for a while. In that way, a response to any given subscriber action might include a combination of two or more of these approaches.
A final issue to consider is the usage of daily frequency caps. Today, these feel like an antiquated way to solve the frequency issue, forcing a “one size fits all” approach when we know that our messaging should match the ebbs and flows of customer interest. However, caps are still used by some brands. If that’s you, then it’s even more critical to have a clear system for delivering operations-critical and high-value messages first, so they’re not suppressed by message caps.
A more sophisticated approach to frequency caps is to use RFM scoring or fatigue analysis to optimize targeting and frequency, so you can determine which subscribers are likely to respond positively to receiving more messages and which are not.
These three tactics for managing the prioritization of your broadcast, segmented, and automated campaigns recognizes that not all emails are created equal. They’re neither equal in the eyes of your subscribers in terms of relevance nor equal for your brand in terms of financial risk and reward. Thankfully, data and technologies exist to maximize the experience for all involved.
—————
Need help with your digital marketing program? Oracle Digital Experience Agency has hundreds of marketing and communication experts ready to help Responsys, Eloqua, Unity, and other Oracle customers create stronger connections with their customers and employees—even if they’re not using an Oracle platform as the foundation of that experience. With a 94% satisfaction rate, our clients are thrilled with the award-winning work our creative, strategy, and other specialists do for them, giving us an outstanding NPS of 82.
For help overcoming your challenges or seizing your opportunities, talk to your Oracle account manager, visit us online, or email us at OracleAgency_US@Oracle.com.
To stay up to date on customer experience best practices and news, subscribe to Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s award-winning, twice-monthly newsletter. View archive and subscribe →