• by Dianna Dilworth , May 4, 2013

PaperStyle.com sells very personal invitations, so they wanted their customers to have a personal experience and last year they set out to create a behaviorally targeted automated email program.

"Strategically if you are going to be involved in an emotional decision with a personal product it doesn’t make that much sense to be so impersonal with email," explained David Grocer, SVP of PaperStyle.com in a keynote at the Email Insider Summit on Saturday. "It doesn’t make sense to migrate in that direction."

A little less than a year ago, the company began digging into its data to categorize their shoppers and established about 10 different categories of prodcts that they sold and then identified behaviors based on these categories. From the data, they decided to go after brides and brides friends and created a series of triggered emails for these people based on their online behavior.

"We looked if they had clicked on the wedding tab on the wbesite or in an email and if they had, we would send them an email to find out which tree they would flow down," said Grocer. 

A bride will get a series of emails that last about three months. It begins with an email about invitations, about six weeks later, they'll get an email highlighting wedding favors, followed by an email reminding them to get gifts for the bridal party. Finally, the company sends an email remnding them to get thank you notes. The email series for a customer who is a friend of the bride will get a series of emails reminding them about wedding showers, bachelorette invitations and wedding gifts. 

Unlike, the company's bulk emails, these triggered emails don't include offers or coupons. But the targeting makes them highly effective. These triggered messages generate an open rate that is more than triple the company's bulk mailings, has double the click rates of its mass mailings and these emails generate almost 4x the revenue of the company's bulk mailings.