The case for sending more triggered messages

You can’t build a great sms or email marketing program without triggered messages. Flows. Automations. Journeys. You need ‘em. You wouldn’t make a bread sandwich and then just eat it, right? What’s the point? You need that meat! Or whatever - you need that vegan meat substitute! And condiments.

When I begin work on any retention program - I do not care if it's SMS, email, WhatsApp, messenger… I want to find ways to send more messages. It’s 50% of my primary goal at all times - how do I send more? To be more specific, how do I send more, as much as humanly (or AI’ly?) as possible while maintaining or increasing the value (revenue generated) per message sent - that’s the other 50% of the goal (this prevents shortcuts).

While I’ve come up with a huge number of methods to do this for brands over the last 15 years, my tried-and-true method is a pretty straightforward one. I look to increase triggered messages.

I spend a massive amount of my time figuring out how to send more triggered messages from brands of all shapes and sizes and audience types. If you sent 5000 emails through a flow or journey last month, you should immediately figure out how to get that up to 10,000 - then 20,000. Campaigns, not so much. You can’t scale them as confidently. It’s a whole different equation.

OK, so why? Why send more triggered messages? I got you. Let’s list three or four main reasons to keep it concise and kind of together here.

List 1!

1 - Deliverability helper (email only): Not all sends are equal. Campaigns are full of segmentation traps, frequency mis-steps, unsubscribe pitfalls, and never-ending content creation, and of course, they are just invasive. Nobody asked you to send that campaign. But we gotta send 'em! We should send them! Your welcome series? Being sent to people who literally just asked you to message them about whatever problem it is your brand is solving for them. The naturally high engagement rates of these types of emails (71% higher open rates and 102% higher click-through rates according to smartinsights) are a clear signal to inbox providers that you’re a good sender and a solid dude, so increasing the frequency of them is very much my type of a mechanical win.

2 - Value per message sent: Again, not all sends are equal. Campaigns fail all the time. Like, all the time - it’s a part of sending them. You’re testing out offers and angles to see what’s going to hit, and that creates volatility. Do you know what’s not volatile? Triggered messages! The audiences are predictable, the setup is beautiful and iterate-able, and it’s ripe for personalization and testing within that personalization - all levers towards predictable revenue growth. And the best part of this bullet point is that you can take anything you learn here and apply it to your campaigns to improve the outcome there as well.

3 - Customer Journey: Triggered messages are the tool you have right now to guide customers along the journey. That’s literally it these days! What else? If you’re an online store, you do not have any other option when it comes to taking your customers through a long-term ascension plan. You’re not going to build a series of Meta ad touchpoints to display specific customer journey-related content to your customers, right? So you’d better figure it out in your audience-first marketing channels. SMS, Email, etc - if someone opted in, they are asking for a better experience than just a website. So do it. Take care of them with your triggered messages

Now that you believe me on the importance of triggered messages, you want to know one thing I’m sure. How can you send more of them? How can you improve the ones you are sending? How can you move to Philadelphia and dedicate your nights to building them? 

Another list. That’s how I’m going to write everything I have to say from now on. It’s all listed, shortened for your benefit.

List 2!

1 - Make sure you are identifying users on your site. This one slips by almost everybody, but it’s the #1 mechanical way I look to increase the sheer volume of outgoing triggered messages to users. 

So the way this works… basically your marketing tools will have a pixel on your site that tracks visitors - when it recognizes a visitor as someone from your opted-in list, it can send them triggered messages if the right event occurs (user goes to your site, pixel recognizes user from previous cookie, user abandons a checkout, pixel informs sending tool that user took that action, abandoned checkout email/sms can be sent).

I literally think of this as another type of deliverability.

Another piece of tech is impacting my ability to send. If you have a platform with a shitty pixel, or a sub-par profile format…. Or a few other elements, you won’t deliver these critical messages, and this false limitation caps all your strategy, personalization, late-nights, good-times, and high-fives.

I’ll maybe write a full article on this topic because there are more ways to look at it, but that’s the gist: If your pixel misses 25% of the users on your site or can’t connect them to your sending platform, you’re already capped at 75% of your full potential. You gotta clean that up if you’re serious about SMS and email marketing.

2 - Cover all your touchpoints: Do you have a cart abandonment flow? Are you sure? Is it in Klaviyo? Check the trigger… make sure it’s actually triggered by “added to cart”. It’s not? You have a mislabeled checkout abandon. All good; it happens to thousands and thousands of brands every day. There are levels to this step, but at the very least, you need the heavy hitters covered: Welcome, Site Abandon, Browse Abandon, Cart Abandon, Checkout Abandon, and Post Purchase. Anything less than this is malpractice! And this list, to me, represents the bare minimum just enough to stay street legal. Like a fake auto inspection sticker. You know all know you can do better, but we can start here.

3 - Check smart sending: Yeah, this setting gets its own little bullet point in the list. I officially recommend prioritizing automated message delivery over campaign delivery (if you must choose) - and ideally, I’d have both running at the same time to the same lists because campaign interaction creates events that trigger the automations! So maybe a sneaky tip here to increase the number of outgoing triggered messages is to send more campaigns. Hmm. I’ll keep it in here as a little easter egg tip.

OK, enough listing. The point is that you should always be looking for mechanical ways to improve your program  - look for methods to automate these mechanics… and then invest in them like crazy because that will allow you to move your focus to the next thing. So, in summary, triggered messages are like superfood; you can find mechanical & automatic ways to improve them. Once invested in and completed, these methods become structural assets for your business.

You’re literally turning pain points into moat. Be proud of yourself.

You rule.