Are you focusing on the right Automation Triggers?

Source: 2017 Email Marketing Industry Census
Sample Size: Respondents 2016: 487 &amp; Respondents 2017: 568
Recommended Resource: Email Marketing Guide

Chart of the Day: What are the most popular automated emails?

Marketing automation is a great way to make email marketing more effective and the email marketer more efficient. This week's chart, that is displaying 2016 and 2017 data, is asking, "Do you send out automated emails based on the following triggers or behaviour?"

The most used trigger, "Subscription or sign-up to website" is at 44%, however, it's down by 2% compared to 2016. The trigger with the highest growth is the "Subscription due for renewal" which has grown to 18%. What's interesting is that 7 triggers were more used in 2016 and 3 in 2017.

So it's fair to say that more than half of these email marketers either don't have these triggers at all or they have to do them manually. I have done manual versions of all of these triggers over the years and it's fair to say that they are a soul-sucking, laborious job. I call these "Fake Triggers" because we are making it seem like they are poorly executed automatic triggers but really aren't.

Let me quickly clarify what I mean by manual/fake triggers. If a client signs up to a website, they will complete the form on the site but will receive no thank you email straight away. In a day/week or so, the data of those who signed up will be pulled, either from their Email Service Provider (ESP), an external source or their CRM and those will receive a generic email - a considerable time later than expected. This isn't just a poor process for the email marketer, but also this is poor client interaction.

There are many reasons why fake triggers are used - time, budget, knowledge etc. But the time and resource used creating these are probably costing more than implementing correct systems or processes.