When it comes to CRM campaign effectiveness, triggered campaigns (e.g., abandoned cart, subscription renewal, lesson or workout complete messages, etc.) typically get the highest engagement and conversion levels of all messages sent.

That said, there are a few small tweaks that can greatly increase your campaign engagement and effectiveness. Here’s how to do it:

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How to determine the most impactful events to build triggered campaigns around:

When setting up triggered campaigns, most CRM teams tend to focus on the same small group of events: purchases, subscriptions, renewals, abandoned carts, wishlist adds, etc., but from our experience, these events typically aren’t the most impactful ones.

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To find the events that are the most impactful, first run a propensity model on your event stream

For example, here’s a propensity chart of an app’s top 20 and bottom 20 events influencing retention and churn:

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• The far left column for each table shows the event name
• The columns to the right show a user’s maturity in the app (first day, first week, etc.)
• The percentages in the boxes show if a user does that particular event, what the odds are that they will still be using the app after a month.

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If the percentage is high (dark blue box), a user doing the event has a high likelihood of still being on the app in a month. This event is a high indicator of user retention.

If the percentage is low (Dark red), a user doing the event has a high likelihood of not being on the app in a month. This event is a high indicator of churn.

‍Note: There are some events we can’t influence through messaging (e.g., notice that showing a “What’s New” modal to a user on their first day is highly likely to cause churn), but this would be a great example of a simple product improvement that could greatly improve user retention.

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When we’re deciding what campaign to write, we want to focus on driving engagement towards events that generally correlate with retention and driving focus away from the events that tend to lead to churn.

For this example, we’re going to focus on driving engagement in these two events that have a high correlation with retention:

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Logically, it makes sense that both of these events can be correlated to retention — Sharing your workouts tends to lead to higher support and accountability, and connecting your devices (e.g., an Apple Watch) means you’re integrating your workout program deeper into your life and your daily routine.

These are both good actions to encourage. Now, how do we encourage more people to do them?

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Building the triggers:

The first thing we’re going to do is open Aampe and navigate to the trigger menu. (Note: if you haven’t imported your events into Aampe, it’s a very simple process via API. You can learn more about it here.)

By default, Aampe imports ALL of your events, so you don’t have to pick and choose which events you can use:

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Now that we have our events selected, I’m going to set up two triggers.

The first trigger is for users who have completed a run but haven’t done a share event in the past week:

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The second trigger is for a user who hasn’t connected their Apple Watch:

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Now that we have those triggers created, we’ll move on to writing the messages:

First, we’ll go into the Aampe message editor (I picked a push notification, but we could also compose an SMS message, WhatsApp message, in-app notification, or a banner).

We’ll give it a title and attach our “Encourage Share” trigger:

(Note: I could restrict this message to a particular audience, but there really isn’t a point, as this message could be applicable to all users.)

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Here’s the first message I wrote to encourage use of the share button:

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Note that I added multiple alternates to the base message (on the lower right) that appeal to different personas and motivations (e.g., “Get encouragement from friends and family” for users who care about sharing for encouragement and “Can your friends keep up?” for those users who are competition focused).

(With Aampe, it’s easy to write thousands of messages in minutes. Here’s a quick video overview that shows how to do it.)

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Here’s a second message I wrote to encourage connecting an Apple watch (using the Apple Watch trigger we created in the last step):

Here is the actual message. Notice again that I included alternates for a couple of different personas (competitive and accountability), although I easily could have added more:

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Then we just hit “Start Sending,” and our messages are live!

…but where do I schedule my send times and journeys?

If you looked closely, you may have noticed that I didn’t set any specific send times or build any user journeys.

That’s another key advantage of Aampe — you dodge the dreaded orchestration problem.

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Orchestration: A leading cause of user churn

CleverTap recently found that 28% of users uninstall apps because they report getting “too many ads and notifications,” and the cause of this is typically orchestration.

Take the two use cases we discussed: sharing a workout and connecting a watch.

Both of these campaigns are likely also applicable to users who are new to the app, and they may also be applicable to users who have just completed a run — two events that may also have campaigns attached to them.

This means by using traditional user journeys and timing sequences, our user could potentially be getting SMS messages or push notifications from four different campaigns at the same (or very similar) time, which again is a major cause of user churn.

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Also, we can’t discount the importance of sending messages at the *right* time. Messaging timing is often more complex than we give it credit, and we’ve actually found that message timing can even have a bigger impact on engagement than the actual content of the message.

Therefore, when you write campaigns in Aampe, our AI takes care of the message timing, sending the right message to each user at the time they’re most likely to engage while respecting individual user message limit preferences.

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*Note: As part of Aampe’s message orchestration process, we also determine on which channel each user would like to receive their messages (So, you can load in messages on various channels — SMS, Push, WhatsApp, In-App, etc. — and we’ll ensure each user gets the best message at the best time on their most preferred channel.)

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Of course, if you prefer, you can choose not to use Aampe’s message AI message scheduling and just send specific messages at specific times:

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So, how do you increase the effectiveness of your triggered CRM campaigns?

There are a few ways:

1. Make sure you’re focused on the right events with the highest propensity to lead to your desired actions (retention, conversion, etc.).

2. Write messages that effectively appeal to each individual user’s desires and motivations.

3. Use Aampe’s AI to orchestrate your messages, ensuring each user gets the most applicable message for them individually and that they don’t get bombarded with multiple messages from multiple campaigns.

If you have any questions or would like to see your most impactful events, please drop us a note at hello@aampe.com.

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