Mailjet’s Marketing Automation News: Anniversary Scenarios

Email automation is, hands down, one of the most useful (and used) features for marketing campaigns alongside segmentation. It helps you easily maintain engagement with your customers in an organic way. In fact, there is no question regarding contacts’ behaviours toward emails: they like to receive targeted and accurate communications. If they do not, they get annoyed. This can trigger email deletions and low open rates (which impacts your deliverability), unsubscriptions, and–more globally–a bad perception of your brand. And nobody wants that.

At Mailjet, we know how important having automated scenarios is for business, so we’ve added one more to our portfolio. Please welcome Mailjet’s Anniversary workflow.

Email Automation at Mailjet: What’s new?

Want to pep up your marketing strategy? Send your customers automatic emails immediately as they perform an action or reach an important process stage.

A successful marketing strategy combines many targeted actions. Creating customer-centric journeys thanks to email automation will definitely help you bond better with your users. You’ll contact them just when it’s the most accurate, increasing your ROI and engagement.

Mailjet’s automation is easy to set up. No matter if you are a new user or an automation expert, you can use one of our scenarios with predefined events that cover essential use cases:

• Welcome / Onboarding: reach out and welcome new customers who join your contact list with one or more customized, personalized emails.
• Date Based Workflow: schedule your workflow based on a date and time you select. It’s useful for special or periodic offers, like a : series of emails to promote summer sales.
• Contact Property Update: send automated emails based on customer interactions (latest purchase, loyalty status, etc.) for continuous engagement.

And in our efforts to help your needs, we’ve recently added a new scenario to our automation engine: the Anniversary workflow.

Mailjet’s anniversary scenario

An anniversary is much more than just a celebration of milestones. It can (and should be) be a reward for every year your users spend with you. Whether they’re new customers or long-time clients, they deserve some credit.

Celebrating milestones can be a great way to strengthen your customer relationship. Here are two ways Mailjet’s Anniversary scenario can help you with that:

• Happy Birthday emails: Sending your contacts a message to celebrate their birthday shows your customers you care about them and bolsters your reputation. Add a freebie or special offer to the email to encourage them to celebrate with you.
• Membership anniversary: Tracking when a user joined your loyalty program or subscribed to your newsletter will allow you to thank them for another year together on that special day. Send them a coupon or show your appreciation by showing them how their trust and support has helped your business over the last year.

Also, a birthday or anniversary means you can reach out to your contacts even when they haven’t asked for anything. It’s a great opportunity to boost your sales and share an unmissable offer. You can show your target audience they deserve a treat, and, additionally, showcase your latest products.

How to set up an Anniversary workflow

A workflow can be triggered by an event or an action. In this case, the trigger will be the anniversary date. To set it up, follow these simple steps:

Step 1: To create a workflow, look at the main menu bar, click on ‘Automation’, then on ‘My Workflows’. You’ll see this screen if you have no workflow created yet:

Step 2: To set up the Anniversary workflow, click on ‘Create my first workflow’ and then select the Anniversary scenario in the ‘Select an automation scenario’ option panel.

Step 3: To be able to trigger this workflow, the anniversary date of each of your users needs to be stored as a contact property, so make sure you collect this information from them. This could be their actual birthday if you want to send Happy Birthday emails, or the date they joined your mailing list if you want to celebrate your time together.

Enter all the details in the fields, choose whether you want to add a specific list or all contacts, extra-target thanks to segments. In our example, we’re going to send a birthday email to our customers in a specific list:

Step 4: Once you’ve filled in all the basic information and defined a list, you’ll be able to define the triggers for your anniversary workflow. This works for any important date or cycle you choose to define: your customers birthdays, subscription or contract renewals, trial periods expiring, etc.

If you want to send an email series, instead of just one email, you can do it by adding additional emails to the workflow. For each email in the workflow, you can decide if you want a delay (immediate, minutes, hours, days, months):

Step 5: Once all the automation workflow information is set up, it’s time to build your actual email. You can design your campaign in our email builder, Passport, using one of our predefined templates or creating your own from scratch.

Remember to define the sender details, including a recognizable ‘From name’ and catchy subject line that helps your email stand out in your contact’s crowded inbox:

Step 6: Don’t forget to review your workflow before saving it! Once it’s set up, Mailjet will automatically send the emails to your customers, so make sure to triple-check your workflow!

Every year on or around the anniversary date (depending on how you set it up), the workflow will activate for your contacts and they will receive your emails. As easy as that.

Segmentation for optimal results

Anniversary messages should feel unique and personal. Creating segmented anniversary emails will help you offer a more tailored experience and will show your contacts you know them and you really care. Who doesn’t want a free bagel at their local store or a discount on some well-chosen products from your online shop?

Automation is all about taking care of your customers, so make sure to refine your targeting using segments based on your contacts’ profile, location or behaviour in order to offer them the best experience possible.

Now it’s your turn: Create your own anniversary workflow

Automating your emails means you can stay involved throughout your entire customer lifecycle.

With this new development, you’ll have everything to strengthen your interactions with your audience. All you need is some inspiration and some creative thinking about your sales-boosting strategy. It’s important to create personalized emails and interesting offers to make the most of your anniversary workflow.

Interested? Mailjet’s Email Automation, including the Anniversary workflow, is available on Premium Plans. Sign up for an account or upgrade your plan within your Mailjet account. Once you are set up, check our comprehensive documentation for step-by-step guidance.