Marketing automation: Evelyn email automation use case

BestInvest considers registrations (or onboardings) one of their most important success events. With that, we’ve worked with them to try to increase the number of successful registrations on their portal. 

To do this, we’ve enabled automated emails to be sent out to people who begin the onboarding journey, and don’t complete (‘complete’ in this case means they didn’t see the success page, they didn’t see the verify bank details page and they didn’t see any error pages).  

In order to deliver the email to the people who don’t complete, we need to make sure they get far enough into the application that we can capture the email address. We also want to make sure that the user has definitely left the process and doesn’t necessarily plan to come back so as to not spam.  

Audience creation was done using Tealium AudienceStream via Tealium IQ. We used the DotDigital connector in AudienceStream to share any users who were added to the audience and were still in the audience 2 and a half hours after their visit ended (30 minutes after the last interaction). So, after a total of 3 hours of inactivity, if the user is still a part of the ‘onboarding abandoners’ audience, their details are shared with a custom address book in DotDigital, and an email is immediately sent to them. 

This all happens automatically. After initial setup, there is no additional work required. So, this automated email works in the background to try to improve overall conversions through the onboarding journey.  

Technical solution details and definitions

TealiumIQ handles the additional data capture to share with AudienceStream. This is: 

• Adding email address to the Tealium Collect payload 

• Ensuring each step fires a utag.view and contains the page title and page URL in the payload 

AudienceStream contains the audience definitions. These are: 

• User has started the onboarding journey. 

• User has reached the end of the create profile part of the application. 

• We have an email address available for the user as part of their application. 

• The user has not seen any of the following pages: 

  • Onboarding success. 

  • Verify bank details. 

  • Onboarding error. 

The DotDigital connector is configured in AudienceStream, this contains: 

• The API auth details. 

• The custom address book ID (for onboarding abandoners). 

• The data to pass (email address in this case). 

• Data sharing delay 

  • this means that we wait 2.5 hours after visit end. When that time is over, if the visitor is still in the audience, their information is sent to DotDigital. 

In DotDigital, we: 

• have a custom address book configured for onboarding abandoners 

• have an email template, configured to send when someone is successfully added to the address book 

While this use case sounds specific, it’s actually one that is applicable to many journey types including ecommerce checkouts, finance or insurance applications, flight bookings etc.  

You can get a lot more granular than this, too. For example, if there are other forms across your site where someone might enter their email address, we could add them to an audience (and therefore a specific address book). This could be based on the pages they view, content they download, products they’ve added to cart as some basic examples.  

So, you could have an address book for someone who’s looked at blog pages in the loans category, looked at some loans product pages, and then signed up for a newsletter (or indeed have already signed up in the past). Given we know their interests, we could send out an email, with some relevant content for them, as well as some product information (provided they opt in, of course). 

For us, email automation isn’t just a trend to look out for in 2023, it’s a highly effective tool that we’re already using to our clients’ benefit.