Automated messages to customers

Automated messages to customers are the highest-value automation and the one with rules attached, because a message that arrives at the wrong moment or without permission costs more than the time it saved.

The ones worth sending

1. 01Acknowledging an enquiry, immediately, saying when a real reply will come. Removes the worst moment in the whole experience, which is silence after reaching out.
2. 02Confirming a transaction, with the details they will want to check.
3. 03Telling them the state changed: dispatched, booked, ready, scheduled, delayed.
4. 04Reminding them of something they would want reminding of: an appointment, a renewal, an expiry.
5. 05Asking for feedback once, after the thing is finished rather than during it.

Those five are almost entirely transactional, which is the point: they relate to something the customer has done, so they are both welcome and, in most jurisdictions, outside the consent regime that governs marketing.

Where the line sits

Jurisdictions differ in detail and agree on the shape. A message about something the customer asked for is treated differently from a message promoting something they did not.

• In the European Union and the United Kingdom, unsolicited commercial email generally requires prior consent, with a narrow exception for your own similar products to an existing customer who was given the chance to opt out when their details were collected and in every message since.
• In the United States, commercial email does not require prior consent, but it must not mislead, must include a valid postal address, must offer an opt-out, and must honour it promptly.
• In Canada, commercial electronic messages generally require express or implied consent, with identification and an unsubscribe mechanism.
• In Australia, commercial electronic messages require consent, identification of the sender and a functional unsubscribe.
• Several other countries, including Brazil, India, Japan, Singapore and South Africa, operate consent-based or registry-based regimes of their own. If you send across borders, the strictest applicable rule is the practical standard.

Automating a marketing sequence does not change which category it falls into. Automation only changes how fast a mistake reaches everybody.

Making them read as written by a person

• Send from a real address that accepts replies. A no-reply address on a message asking how it went is the most common self-contradiction in this whole category.
• Say less. The automated message that works is three lines; the one that fails is a formatted newsletter about a dispatch.
• Use the detail you have. The specific order, the specific date, the specific thing. Generic personalisation that gets the name right and nothing else reads worse than no personalisation.
• Do not pretend. A message that says I was just thinking about you, sent by a scheduler, is the thing customers resent most about this whole practice.

Before switching anything on

1. 01Send every message to yourself and read it on a phone.
2. 02Trigger each one from a real test transaction rather than a preview.
3. 03Confirm the exit works: do the thing the sequence is chasing and check the rest stop.
4. 04Check the unsubscribe actually unsubscribes, and that replies arrive somewhere a person looks.
5. 05Check the timing. Messages that fire at three in the morning in the customer's own time zone undo the goodwill of sending them at all.

Timing and how many

• Send the acknowledgement immediately and everything else at a civilised local hour. A scheduler with no time-zone awareness will wake somebody up.
• Cap the total. Four messages about one transaction is the point at which useful becomes irritating, and the fourth is rarely the valuable one.
• Space them by the thing they relate to, not by a fixed interval. A reminder two days before an appointment is useful; the same reminder on day three of a schedule is noise.
• Count everything the customer receives, including the ones sent by your payment provider, your booking tool and your dispatch service. People forget these and send a fifth.

Choosing the channel

Email is the default because the rules are familiar and the cost is near zero. The others are not interchangeable with it.

Text messages and messaging applications have consent regimes of their own, generally stricter than email, and in several jurisdictions marketing by text requires prior express consent with no equivalent of the existing-customer exception. Messaging platforms additionally impose their own rules through their business terms, including which message types may be sent outside a window after the customer wrote to you, and they enforce those rules by suspending accounts rather than by writing letters. Use them for transactional messages the customer is waiting for, and treat anything promotional as requiring separate, specific permission.

Keeping the record

Where consent is required, the defence is the record: what they agreed to, when, how, and what they were shown at the time. Keep it with the contact rather than in a separate place, and keep it after they unsubscribe, since that is precisely when you need to prove they had agreed. A list imported from somewhere with no record attached is a list you cannot lawfully use in most consent-based regimes, however it was obtained.