A behavioral email works as an automated email which is sent to subscribers on the basis of their actions and behaviours. Such emails are sent after analyzing a user's interaction with a brand on social media channels, a business's website, email, and a few other channels. 

All in all, behavioral emails are a great way of boosting customer engagement and increasing sales. That's the reason 39% of marketers say that sending emails automatically on the basis of customer behavior is the most effective email marketing strategy. Moreover, with 77% of ROI coming from targeted and triggered email campaigns, it becomes all the more imperative to optimize your email marketing campaign on the basis of your customer's behavior. 

What are the benefits of behavioral emails to a business?

Before we dive deep into various customer behavior ways that would help you optimize your email marketing campaign seamlessly, let's take a quick look at various benefits of behavioral emails.

Gives you a clear understanding of your consumer's needs

By analyzing customer behavior, you can determine your customer's preferences. Simply put, it will help you get a clear insight into your subscriber's needs at different stages of their sales funnel.

Helps you drive better results

By taking behavioral emails into account, you can increase your website and social media activity. As a result, you can easily attain higher engagement, more subscriptions, and so on. 

Facilitates consistent improvement

Behavioral emails let you extract critical information about how to improve your product, services, and customer support. Customer's action might display the weak points of your brand along with their everyday needs, thereby helping you develop your strategy accordingly. 

What are the different types of behavioral emails?

Now, since you know about the benefits of behaviour based emails, let's brief you about the different types of behavioral emails.

The onboarding email

Onboarding email, also known as the welcome email has an average open rate of 82%. So, leveraging it the right way can help you make your brand top-notch instantly. Remember, if you interact with your customers for the first time in an appealing way, the chances of having a positive brand impact increases. 

Hence, send an onboarding email the moment subscriber signs up for your product or service. Also, make sure the email is not only pleasant and appealing but also easy to read and understand. From giving explicit information about your brand to including a robust CTA, make sure you include it all in your welcome email.

The notification email

Notification emails work seamlessly towards guiding your subscribers to use your products and services. For instance, if a customer purchases a product from you and has no idea how to use it, they might end up getting frustrated. Therefore, make good use of notification emails and include every essential information in it. 

The notification email also includes double opt-in email, order confirmation emails, account activation, password recovery, password generation emails, and many more.

The reward email

If you want to retain your subscribers, creating a loyal customer base is the key. This is where reward emails can come in handy. Start by giving personalized and exclusive deals to your most engaged and top consumers. You can use the customer data from the CRM to find out how long he or she has been a part of your brand and design special offers for them.

The referral email

If your customer service is good, the chances of you getting recommended by your customer become high. However, you can go a step ahead and sweeten the deal by offering your subscribers something in return for recommending your brand to their friends and family. 

Transactional emails

Transactional emails have open rates 8x higher than regular emails. Hence, it's a proven fact that transactional emails are a great way of engaging with your customer base. From shipping details to information regarding return or exchanges, a transactional email has it all.

In addition, you can also make way for cross-selling and upselling through transactional emails by using personalized data and offering such products and services that would interest your subscribers.

Various ways to optimize your email campaign based on customer's behavior

The next step is to know about various ways to optimize your email campaign on the basis of the customer's behavior.

Analyze the buying behavior

Keeping a track of the buying behavior of the customer will give you a clear insight into their decision-making process. From the way a customer approaches the purchase decision to the role they play in the overall purchase, analyzing the buying behavior helps you understand it all. In addition, it also lets you understand the hindrance that comes in the way of purchase, thereby helping you create a marketing strategy that best resonates with your customer base. 

Keep a check on their sales funnel position

Sales funnel seamlessly maps out the entire journey of a customer when they are looking to purchase a product or service. So, if you monitor their sales funnel position at every step, you will be able to target them in a personalized way. It doesn't only increase the chances of conversion but also gives you a chance to take corrective measures if there is no purchase progress in a particular stage. 

Identify the usage pattern of customers

If you want to know how well your customers are acquainted with your brand, try analyzing the usage pattern of your customers. It will help you have an idea about your customer's loyalty. From the way they are making use of their product to the frequency of their usage, you can find it all and predict how and when to target a customer. 

Work on segmentation

Segmentation is another great way of understanding customer behavior and optimizing your email campaign. While age, gender, and demographics are the basic segmentation parameters, you can also segment your user base on the basis of their purchase history, psychographics, birthdays, and occasions related to them (For example: Christmas in the USA and Diwali in India). By doing so, you will be able to send the right message at the right time and maximize your sales and profits.

Wrap up 

With 49% of consumers willing to hear from the brand through promotional emails, making use of behavioral email marketing will help you give the best of customer experience to your subscribers. 

So, go ahead, take some inspiration from the above-mentioned tips and tricks and see how you ace your email marketing strategy like a pro. 

Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing PSD to Email HTML coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, custom Mailchimp email templates design and coding. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.