Triggers: The most underutilized Streamsend tool?

Recently, I was invited to speak at one of Maxhire’s recent online marketing webinars. Maxhire has integrated Streamsend into their already effective toolset, and wanted me to speak to their users about Triggers, which they felt weren’t being utilized as effectively as they could be. A recent Streamsend user statistic report also showed that the feature was grossly underutilized among our own clients, so I thought I’d include a transcript of the brief Triggers overview I shared during the webinar…

Triggers are a really useful tool built into the interface that allows you to send customized emails to certain subscribers on a scheduled basis. Set up messages and specify criteria for receiving them and let the system take care of the rest. For example, a very common usage I see are triggers set up for birthdays. A user can upload a birthdate as part of the subscriber data, any sort of date would work for this, but once the birthdate's in place, they'd set up a coupon or birthday related promotion. They'd then set up a trigger that would send this promotion email out the day before a subscribers birthday, and each day the system would scan the database and would an email the coupon out to anybody it applied to.
That would be an example of a Relative Date trigger, which tend to be the more popular of the two available; the other type are Database update triggers.

Database Update triggers are activated by a specific criteria change in your subscriber’s information. It's a lot harder to use these sorts of triggers effectively, but I have seen some pretty creative configurations. Some users will set up a subscriber field called 'Offer Code', which will be added to every subscriber profile, but will be blank by default. They then distribute the code, let’s say it's CODE123, outside of the system. At that point, a Database Update trigger is configured to be sent out any time someone enters Code123 into the Offer Code field, which would sent out a promotional email any time this occurs.

Again, most users will want to stick with the Relative Date triggers which can be extremely useful for keeping in touch with your subscribers.

The most effective method of using these would be to schedule a series of relative date triggers that would send out information every few weeks. This method is referred to as drip marketing.
Any time a subscriber is added to your list, the system will add a timestamp to the contact labeled Subscribe date. This can be the basis for sending your series of emails to a list of passive candidates you're working with. For example:

Trigger #1 could be set up to send the first email to your passive candidates 2 weeks after being added to your list.

Trigger #2 could then be set up to send out 6 weeks after the subscribe date.

Trigger #3 could go out 3 months after the subscribe date, and so on.

Every day, the system will determine which users fit the criteria, with everyone who applies receiving the automated messages at the appropriate intervals. This will allow you to constantly keep in touch with all of your passive candidates with very little effort.
Thank you.

Robert Rodriguez,
Streamsend Account Manager