Using Intent Signals to Trigger Hyper-Relevant Email Campaigns

Email marketing is intent-driven, it’s important to leverage intent as a means of connection, particularly in a saturated digital marketing world. No longer will a one-size-fits-all approach get someone to engage via a basic blast; now, marketers need to pay attention to intent signals to kickstart hyper-relevant email blasts that connect more meaningfully with the subscriber base. Intent signals afford marketers the ability to strike while the iron is hot for increased engagement via email, increased conversions, and improved customer relationships. This article highlights intent signals used for altruistic purposes regarding email.

What Are Intent Signals and Why Are They Important?

Intent signals are subscriber actions taken online that let you understand their interest, needs, or purchase ability. When a subscriber visits your e-commerce site, searches for a product, downloads content, or opens an email multiple times, this all shows subscriber intent. Warmy.io helps ensure these intent-driven emails reach the inbox by improving sender reputation and deliverability. When marketers acknowledge such intent signals, they can follow up with appropriately timed, targeted content when a subscriber is most interested, making the email campaign that much more relevant.

How Marketers Can Discover Intent Signals

However, to leverage intent signals properly, marketers need to understand the most relevant activities that serve as the best indicators of interest and intent on the part of subscribers. For example, intent signals are product page views, consistent engagement with your marketed message, shopping cart abandonment, downloads of whitepapers or case studies, and spikes in relevance. When marketers can make something out of these activities, they provide insight into why a subscriber did what they did and what they might need next, making for a much more effective email campaign that requires action sooner than later.

Using Intent Signals With Real-Time Data to Take Action As Soon As Possible

The sooner intent signals can be acted upon, the better. When subscribers take the time to display such high intent behaviors, they’re looking for relevant responses but in a timely manner. When real-time data is aggregated and fed into the email marketing platform through marketing automation, it’s easy for marketers to respond to subscriber intent signal behavior with their own. By sending an email shortly after a subscriber exhibits intent like an abandoned shopping cart or recently searched product you increase your chance for greater relevance, engagement, and conversion. Being able to act upon intent signals in real-time will help you stand out among competitors since you show how much you care about what someone is searching for and how much you pay attention.

Personalizing Emails with Intent

Intent signals offer an additional layer of personalization. While general personalization helps to relate to the audience, intent gives marketers exactly what they need to send the most relevant emails based on what people currently want, need, and have been doing. Whether it’s personalizing email content, subject lines, or CTAs based on recent subscriber actions, the satisfied boxes lead to a guaranteed response. When a subscriber’s intent is acknowledged and acted upon like this through personalization, they are far more likely to respond, leading to higher open rates, higher CTRs, and ultimately, conversions. Intent personalization fosters value and trust from the get-go.

Customer Journey Enhancement via Intent-Driven Emails

Intent-based email campaigns enhance the customer journey by providing the right message at the right time and helping people get through their intent-driven needs. Intent-triggered messages make the expedient and consequent journey down the funnel better. For example, if a subscriber downloads your pricing guide relatively early, you can track that intent and send follow-up emails with product features or FAQs to help them make a decision faster. Intent-based campaigns that get people to where they need to go as long as that intent is truthful create an enhanced customer journey that helps both users and conversion rates.

Intent Signals as Triggers for Win-Back and Reactivation Campaigns

Intent signals are also useful for reactivation and win-back campaigns. When subscribers become disengaged, it’s common. But when they start displaying intent again by returning to your site or opening emails again they are great candidates for reactive campaigns. But the trick is to take action as soon as intent is displayed again. By sending relevant content or promos based on their new signal, marketers can quickly pique their interest again and successfully reactivate dormant subscribers and reignite retention over time.

Apply Intent Signals to Predict for Email Marketing

Intent signals, as well as predictive analytics, empower marketers to get ahead of what subscribers will want and need. Predictive modeling based on past intent data allows marketers to predict what a subscriber will do and get ahead of the intent by providing a timely and valuable email before the subscriber has even revealed their anticipated intent. Subscribed shoppers who usually order at particular intervals can receive predictive nudges or ordering opportunities based on expected supply needs. An intention-driven predictive email is more relevant, timely, and lauded by the subscriber.

Use Intent Signals with a Caveat of Privacy and Consent Requirements

While intent signals can present great opportunities for targeting, it’s just as important to balance this new power with respectful options. Many of today’s privacy laws GDPR, CCPA, etc. require companies to disclose what types of subscriber information they gather and why, intent-triggering action included. Be sure to disclose how intent-based targeting can benefit the subscriber and gain their approval first. Compliance with such privacy legislation encourages respect and trust and hopefully creates an atmosphere where subscribers will feel comfortable sharing intentional information in the future. This would only bolster segmentation abilities and personalization efforts without concern of being unethical.

Test for Success and Optimization via Intent-Based Campaigns

Like any new campaign tactic, intent-triggered campaigns should be tested and optimized for success. Consistent A/B testing of intent-based emails will show higher open rates and engagement, giving insight into what’s best for your subscribers. Investigate intrigue content from the subject line to content body, the rate of intention-based emails sent versus duration of scope, and personalized communications vs. blanket efforts give insight into how your subscribers engage with your library and communicated intentions. Each campaign can be analyzed over time to find what’s best for your audience; therefore, what’s good one day may not be true the next. Ongoing optimization is essential for sustained success to keep relevance, engagement, and ultimate ROI consistent for your intent-based email initiatives.

Educating Your Marketing Team About Intent Signals

To successfully implement intent signals, your marketing team has to understand what they are and how powerful they can be. Ongoing education about identifying, interpreting, and acting upon intent behaviors gives marketers the opportunity to capitalize on new findings. Intent-aware teams will make moves to position themselves to gain access to the best opportunities the moment they become available, streamlining campaigns to be more on-target and successful. The more you educate, the more responsive, creative, analytics-driven, and overall successful team you will cultivate.

Utilizing Intent Signals Beyond Email Marketing and Within Other Channels

Intent signals should be used in email marketing but also extended to other channels for cross-channel marketing techniques. Leveraging subscriber intent in social, PPC, or content marketing further extends your reach and allows your brand to partner with what the user is looking for to create a more seamless experience. Intent is strong everywhere, and intent-based efforts applied across channels can make your marketing efforts relevant beyond one message, one channel, and get subscribers to act while exploring all your brand has to offer.

Evaluating Performance and Success of Intent-Based Campaigns

Intent-based campaigns bring an added value that needs to be monitored and evaluated for justification. Marketers should continuously evaluate open rates, click-through rates, purchase conversion rates, and revenue per email to confirm intent-based campaign efficacy. Furthermore, understanding how your average intent-triggered campaign performed versus non-intent-triggered campaigns will showcase the difference in engagement and ROI, fostering more opportunity for intent-derived strategies in the future while helping intentions grow stronger over time.

Intent Signals and Lifecycle Marketing

Intent signals related to lifecycle marketing give you an even more targeted audience at specific stages of the customer journey. With intent clarity, marketers understand when someone buys for the first time, has browsed two to three times for the same item, or hasn’t opened an email over the past month for several months. Such distinct benchmarks allow marketers to craft targeted lifecycle emails at the proper time and context. Intent signals from a lifecycle perspective allow for the correct person to get the correct message at the awareness, consideration, decision, and retention levels.

Intent Signals to Support Cross-Selling and Up-Selling Efforts

Intent signals allow for cross-selling and up-selling efforts more accurately than ever before. If subscribers are already showing intent, such as searching for other add-ons or seeking an upgraded pricing tier, now is the time to share additional products or recommend upgraded goods. When buyers are willing and able to spend more, let them do so! By quickly identifying such behaviors, you can reinforce that you recognize what they’re seeking, reminding them that it’s only one click away. This not only facilitates additional purchases but fosters customer lifetime value as they appreciate your considerate outreach that fulfills their wants.

Software That Helps You Capture and Utilize Intent Signals in Real Time

To support your success with intent signals, partner with advanced marketing automation systems that support your ability to capture and utilize intent signals in real-time to fully maximize their existence. The best ways to implement intent signals is through automated workflows that notify you upon certain triggers and help you create action immediately via email sends. You don’t want to be the person receiving intent. Having others reach out to you during your inquiries would be very annoying thus, creating email sends based upon trigger actions helps everyone get what they want in a timely manner.

Conclusion

Utilizing intent signals to trigger hyper-targeted email campaigns maximizes engagement, personalization, and marketing effectiveness so that your company can situate itself for further attunement with subscribers. This is because sending email marketing campaigns is often a more antiquated marketing tactic where email marketers apply broad non-targeting strategies or methods for reaching out to subscribers. Unfortunately, this results in lackluster open and click-through rates based on diminished interest from subscribers compounded by a disheartened subscriber experience.

Intent and intent-driven strategies allow email marketers the opportunity to engage subscribers based on clear interest due to new or ongoing activity. By relying upon repeated web visits without a purchase, multiple downloads of similar content, abandoned carts, various hyperlink clicks within other email campaigns marketers can clearly understand a subscriber’s specific interest, desire, and needs.

When intent is accurately assessed, email marketing professionals can create bespoke personalized campaigns where someone sees your outreach when they’re most able to take action. For instance, if a subscriber gives a positive intent signal three times within 12 hours for a specific product hyperlink clicking on the link three different times then an email sent within that 12-hour window is more likely to convert. Intent-driven email campaigns set the stage that your brand is aware of what’s happening and how to proactively and expediently respond with value, building trust and authenticity in the process.

Intent-driven email campaigns evolve for the better through continual improvement based on subsequent learnings from analytics and constant testing. Marketers should continuously evaluate their campaign success and examine subscriber reactions to fine-tune language, timing, and even segmentation to make future emails optimal. Intent-driven campaigns take advantage of the opportunity to learn from each previous attempt so that the next can be better.

Finally, intent signals work well within a larger ecosystem; adding intent signals to the fold provides for greater personalization and automated efforts to trigger specific emails automatically based on intent context so that everyone can get what they need at exactly the right time. Smooth integration across all channels of communication keeps subscribers in the know every step of the way throughout their customer journey with an experience that your brand works with their best interest!

Ultimately the intentional relevance of using intent signals transforms your emailing endeavors from mass communications to targeted marketing engagement efforts. The likelihood for better metrics, greater open rates, enhanced click numbers, upgraded conversion potential, and efficient ROI for campaign success is increased across the board. When intent-driven personalized emails are constant, customer relationships become strengthened to sustainable success over time.