Measure Flow Effectiveness with Goals - Setup and Examples

Summary

When you create an email marketing campaign you should have a specific intent in mind, fon an action you want your customers to take.

Your campaign goals should represent this intent with using user properties that should be updated or events that should occur.

For example, if you want trials to convert to paying, you should use an event based goal that is hit if the trial purchases your product.

Unlike other platforms, Encharge has taken a different approach to setting up goals. Generally, goals are defined as part of the automation settings rather than being part of the automation itself. With Encharge, you're able to use goals as part of the automation steps.

How to add or define a goal?

In your flow, look for the Goal step inside the steps menu under Actions and place it in your flow.

Then, you need to define your goal by connecting it to a trigger step. The trigger logic represents your goal definition. Depending on the trigger conditions, different people will achieve the goal. For example, if you want your app users to perform an Action, you can use an event trigger to hit the goal. In this case, registrations will receive an email after 10 minutes if the action hasn't been performed. If they do perform the action, then they will hit the goal and count as a conversion.

What happens when a customer hits the campaign goal?

When a contact hits your campaign goal they won't exit the series by default. If you'd like them to exit the campaign, double-click on the goal step and activate "End the flow for a person if they reach this flow".

In the Flow metrics tab you'll see the percentage of people who entered the campaign that met the goal:

You can also see a full list of every individual that hit the goa by clicking on "View People"

If you haven’t set up any Goals or Exit Rules for your Series, then we won’t show these in the overall flow metrics by default.

Let’s break down a few examples where you might want to use goals in your marketing campaigns.

Goal: Convert trials to paying customers

For this example we'll use as simple onboarding sequence as shown below.

Place the goal step inside your flow and consider what trigger you may need to define your goal. In this case, a simple Event based trigger might be best suited for the job.

Note, if you're not using Stripe as your billing provider, you can replace the trigger with any event that represents a Purchase.

Goal: Convert leads to trials

Just as the previous example, you need to the Goal step by choosing the correct trigger. More often than not, trial signups are created in Encharge using an API event. The moment Encharge receives the API event can be used as a trigger point to define our goal. The difference this time is that we'll need to add a check step before users can hit the Goal Step.

The Event trigger adds new signups to the flow and the Check Email Activity ensures only those who received the first email can hit the goal. This is because people can register for a trial without any prior interaction with your business.

Goal: Perform in-app action

One of the most effective ways to utilize email marketing for your SaaS is to create Behavior Based campaigns. These are emails that push users to use your product and receive value. Adding goals to such campaigns will help you measure their effectiveness. The right behavior email can be the difference between a purchase and churn. Here's how you can do this:

The left side of the flow sends an email out if new trial signups have not performed a key action after 3 days.

The right side of the flow defines the goal as follows: Whenever the user performs the desired action, trigger them towards the goal. However, we want to make sure there are no active paying customers or people who did not receive the nudge email hit the goal.The two additional checks ensure that.

Note, you can combine the trigger and 2 checks into a Segment and use "Entered Segment" trigger instead if you feel you want to keep things less cluttered.

Goal: Booked Calls

In this example, we'll look at how to track Conversion rate for booked calls.

In order to define the goal, we'll need a condition that tells us a call has been booked. If you're using Calendly or HubSpot, then you can directly use the available triggers.

If not, you'll need to send the data to Encharge. Depending on how you send the booked call data to Encharge, you'll need to adjust your trigger point.

How to track multiple goals per flow

The current flow mechanics allow only 1 goal per flow. If you have more than 1 distinct goal in your flow, you won't be able to distinguish the conversion rate between each goal. However, there's a trick you can use.

In the sequence below, we send an email with the intent for trials to perform an in-app action. However, we also offer them the option to book a call with a member of our team. Having two distinct goals means that we'll either have to choose 1 goal to track, or use a small trick.

In the main campaign, choose 1 goal to track. In this case, we are tracking the Goal: Performed Action.

Notice the "Add Tag" step at the top of the sequence. We will use this to push people into another flow.

The flow goal conversion rate is calculated as follows: Total number of people who reached the goal / Total number of people who entered the flow * 100. Knowing the formula, you can use the tag to send people to another flow and count the 2nd goal separately. In this case, the booked calls goal was outsourced to another flow.

When people get tagged, they will be triggered into the new flow which will give you the metric: Total number of people who entered the flow.

Then, add the Booked calls trigger to define the goal, this will give you the metric: Total number of people who reached the goal.