AIBasedEpiserverAlways offering customers exactly the product they want—ideally at the exact moment when they want it—is what every company is dreaming of.

Marius Kahlert, Business Consultant at Episerver, has put together four hacks on how you can improve your trigger campaigns and drive your personalization measures with AI-based personalization solutions such as Episerver Personalization. With his help you can increase the relevance of your dialogue marketing and the performance of your campaigns.

Hack # 1: Give another push to special onsite campaigns with trigger mails

Special events are often featured on a large scale with individual campaign landing pages, although these landing pages usually have a limited temporal relevance and go offline again after a while. Nevertheless, these pages are more suitable for trigger campaigns in email marketing.

Visiting a landing page is often an indicator of interest in the topic in question: if a landing page is visited more often per session, the relevance of the content is even clearer. Visitors who have called up a certain campaign page (multiple times) but have not converted can thus be easily recorded via a downstream trigger email. That way, you can pick up your subscribers with an email that is thematically tailored to the landing page. Use this trigger mail, for example, to communicate further content, to advertise suitable products, or maybe even to promote with the help of a voucher.

Hack # 2: Leverage popular searches for your highly personalized trigger campaigns

Search queries are perfect for the use of downstream trigger campaigns: if a website visitor is actively searching for a product, a brand, or a combination of both, using the search field, you can assume that there will be increased interest.

There could be a variety of reasons for not making a purchase: for example, the product did not meet the expectations (price or design) or the searcher was distracted and canceled the session. In any case, it's worth staying on the ball here.

At best, a trigger campaign picks up the canceled search and sends an email that picks up on the search again in terms of content and design. The subject can already refer to the search term and the mail can be customized from the header to the footer.

Episerver recommends using this search trigger only for your most voluminous search terms in the online shop. According to the long-tail principle from SEO, they assume that granular searches with several terms deliver better performance; however, these small-scale searches show lower traffic figures and thus, probably lead to very limited dispatch volumes. A preliminary analysis with colleagues from e-commerce is therefore advisable to define the strongest search queries.

Hack # 3: Trigger a push message instead of a newsletter

The notification preferences of your customers are very different: if customer A is happy about your regular newsletter, customer B would prefer to receive push notifications via the app, and customer C surfs a lot in the browser and wants to be informed about news via browser push.

So, don't just rely on the email channel, rather try out trigger campaigns via push messages or browser push. This is particularly exciting if you want to add push messages to your dialogue marketing to be able to reach a larger audience.

Hack # 4: Trigger messages only for specific product categories, brands, or other attributes

If you want to specify that certain triggers are only activated for defined products, categories, or brands, define criteria for your triggers that a product must meet so that in-session and daily triggers are controlled. The trigger is only triggered for those visitors who viewed products during the session that meet the extended criteria.

This option allows you to further narrow and refine the triggers. You can, for instance, use it to implement a session termination trigger for a specific brand. Website visitors, who are interested in products of this brand, can be picked up with a strongly branded newsletter. You can also trigger a price alert for certain product categories or set up a post-purchase mailing for products that are re-purchased at regular intervals.

As you can see, with the right triggers you ensure that you always address your customers with relevant content at the right time—automatically and without you having to do additional work.


By Daniela La Marca