Use this spreadsheet to design and implement triggered email sequences
- Created by: Dave Chaffey and reviewed by Tim Watson
- Last updated: April 2012
- Format: Excel spreadsheet designed to help you summarise and plan the sequence so it can be implemented by a technical team
About the Email contact strategy spreadsheet
Research shows that behavioural email marketing is a powerful technique to automatically follow-up online customer actions to help increase conversion to sale at a low cost. However, the technique is still used by relatively few companies. One barrier to setting up these event-triggered email sequences is the time it takes to specify the sequences if it’s a new approach to the company or agency.
This spreadsheet provides a template for marketers to create a messaging sequence that supports their business for the range of potential event-triggered campaigns including:
- Welcome sequence for a new subscriber or lead to an email list
- Welcome sequence for new customer (onboarding)
- Reactivation of customers or subscribers who lose engagement
- Abandoned shopping cart follow-up emails
- Shoppers browse or search on a site but don’t buy follow-up
- Time to repurchase or replenishment emails
Who will find the spreadsheet useful?
The spreadsheet will help collaboration between a range of people who may be involved with setting up and reviewing behavioural email campaigns including:
- Marketing or Ecommerce managers responsible for creating communications strategy
- Email marketing execs
- Email or digital marketing consultants
- Agency or email service provider consultants
What does the spreadsheet include?
This example template was developed for an event-triggered “Welcome” email sequence based around a brochure download. It’s a classic inbound/permission marketing lead generation approach which can be used for B2C or B2B campaigns where access to content or a trial service is given in return for an individuals details. The template includes 3 worksheets including:
- A grid showing a row for each message in the sequence with 16 columns (some optional) for defining communications requirements, targeting, trigger rules and messaging. 3 Example fields are shown for an email sequence
- Read me explaining how to use each field with an example of how to lay out the creative
- A template of 8 other campaign control issues that must be defined including tracking, testing, unsubscribes and message suppression
You can read more about how to plan email sequences in this introduction.
