The Challenge: Manual Meant Misses
In our email subscriber preference center, we allowed people to reduce the frequency of emails they received to monthly or biweekly. In order to implement this preference, we manually removed a suppression from every version of the email campaigns every 2-4 weeks on Monday, historically our highest revenue day.
This manual process was hard to track and often forgotten, so subscribers weren’t emailed as often as they should have been. Not only did we lose potential sales, there was also the possibility of forgetting to put the suppression back on when the campaigns were copied, resulting in customer complaints.
The Solution: Automation Is (Usually) The Answer
- I created a lifecycle optimizer program in Sailthru to automatically added a variable to a custom field.
- This triggered another lifecycle optimizer program to add people to a list based on the variable value.
- There was a waiting period of 2 weeks or one month, depending on their preference.
- When the day for the send came around, I did a final check to ensure the person still had that value in the preference center.
- Then they were removed from the campaign, reassigned the variable, and the cycle started over again.
The Results: We Set It & Forgot It
We no longer needed to worry about editing suppressions, saving us valuable time and brain space. Subscribers were emailed as often as they requested, and we didn’t miss out on potential sales.
