Behavioral email marketing in Mailchimp

I’ve noticed alot of information recently about behavioral email marketing (also spelled behavioural email marketing). Before someone asks me if behavioral email marketing may be achieved in Mailchimp I thought I should write an article for any interested people to learn more.

What is behavioral email marketing

Behavioral marketing is all about sending relevant messages to people based on their activity on a website or a previously sent email campaign (similar to remarketing). We’ve all seen the banner ads for companies where we’ve visited their website in the past; well that is behavioral marketing in that a behavior (us visiting an advertisers website) triggers the banner ads when we visit other websites (the marketing part of behavioral marketing).

One of the most common behavioral email marketing campaigns that many of us have received is an abandoned cart email (where we’ve added items to an online cart without buying and then we receive an email message advising that we have unpurchased items).

How to use behavioral email marketing in Mailchimp

It is very simple to implement behavioral marketing in Mailchimp. Mailchimp collects data about which subscribers open an email, who clicks links, where people are, their gender and so on.

The first step in setting up behavioral email marketing is to define what content you want to send to which people. This may sound overly simplistic however if you don’t know what your objective is then how can you implement a solution? Here is an example scenario; Kate is about to send an email campaign with a link where people may buy a certain handbag from her online store. She’s decided that she’d like to send an email campaign to all people that click the link with content affirming that the handbag has certain desirable qualities. Here is how Kate will send her follow-up email from Mailchimp to all people that click a link in a certain campaign.

1. Kate sends her campaign with the link to her handbag.
2. From within Mailchimp she clicks Automation then Add Automation under Custom Event Workflow
3. She names the Automation, chooses her list name and clicks Next.
4. She clicks Edit trigger next to the text Trigger: 1 day after subscribers are manually added to workflow.
5. The selector day(s) is changed to immediately and she clicks Update Trigger.
6. She then clicks Edit segment and selects Choose segmentation conditions.
7. Subscribers match the following conditions is selected and change the condition to be Campaign Activity Clicked [campaign name].
   
8. The segment is then saved, the follow up email campaign designed and the workflow started.

What happens in the above steps is that when a contact clicks a link in the initial campaign sent, the follow-up email campaign is sent to the contact.Behavioral email marketing is easy to setup and use in Mailchimp. Keep in mind that the first step in behavioral email marketing is knowing what you want to achieve!