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Just-in-time Marketing: Are you automating emails to your users?

Last year I came across the idea of Just-in-time Learning: having access to knowledge just when you need it.

In the digital age, as soon as an individual is curious about a topic, they can ask a question and get an answer in the context of the curiosity. This leads to higher learner satisfaction and greater knowledge retention.

What if we were to apply this concept to our community engagement strategies. What if we were able to amplify the value provided to our customers by leveraging 'Just-in-time Marketing'?

To achieve this, one of the techniques we have been utilising at Protolyst is trigger-sending emails based on user behaviour and events. This tactic has amplified our website marketing efforts, highlighted new opportunities, delivered value to our customers and only requires a dash of web know-how.

User Triggered Email From Website HTML Marketing Example

We can't talk to everyone all the time. Sending emails automatically from your website enables you and your users to stay in touch asynchronously. You can start conversations, notify users, send invites, generate leads, congratulate your customers and give feedback without having to be at your computer.

Marketing platforms such as Mailchimp come with a number of email automation tools to manage audiences but can be a little restrictive in scope and are often tied to mailing lists.

For us, we wanted to step up our automation game and leverage behaviour-based email marketing. Users don't always want to sign up for a newsletter, so why let our email engagement efforts stop there?

To send entirely bespoke emails from sites with minimal work or costs, we use Google cloud functions. Cloud functions are simple to setup and cheap to run; in fact you'd have to be sending a lot of emails to exceed the free tier. Once you have them up and running, it becomes quick and easy to create new email triggers. You need a sprinkle of html on your site and the final ingredient is an email address for the user.

If you're interested in a tutorial on setting up your cloud functions, let me know!

Building a community is no easy task. For us, Just-in-time Marketing has unlocked new work, new partnerships and new insights over the past few months. If connecting with other people is the goal, let's get creative with the ways in which we automatically facilitate engagement between ourselves and our communities.

My question for you:

💌 If you're already utilising cloud-based user initiated email marketing, how and what for?

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    How is what you created different than Mailchimp which you referenced?

    I'm not understanding how you are using your Just-in-time email system differently than one would use Mailchimp or a similar service. You mentioned people not wanting to sign up for a newsletter but you still need their email address with your system as well, so I don't see the difference there either.

    1. 1

      Hey @TopDog!

      Thanks for the comment. Very good point, I should have expanded further in the article.

      This really starts to shine if the user is logged in. If you already have their email, you can send emails when they complete a task, you can enable them to send emails to their friends (invites), and you can send emails to yourself as a form of notification (sometimes analytics doesn't cut it).

      If you require them to input an email, then this enables one-time comms (to, say, send over some resources) without the bloat of adding them to a mailing list.

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