How to Design Gamified Lifecycle Emails With Trophy

Email is one of the foremost channels used by consumer-facing mobile and web apps to keep  users engaged. Emails are often broken down into three types:

• Transactional, e.g. password resets
• Marketing, e.g. product updates
• Lifecycle, e.g. monthly recaps

While transactional and marketing emails are common practice, lifecycle emails are often overlooked. Yet when successfully implemented, lifecycle emails can provide a meaningful boost to retention and user engagement and prevent churn.

What is lifecycle email marketing?

Lifecycle email marketing consists of all communications with users after they sign up and start using your product that are aimed at encouraging repeat engagement.

Lifecycle emails are highly personalized and relevant to each user’s unique journey, and when implemented successfully can meaningfully boost retention. Examples of common touchpoints in lifecycle email marketing campaigns include:

• Celebrating the first milestone or achievement
• Recaps and progress updates
• Reactivation ‘win-back’ emails after a period of inactivity
• Customer referral encouragements
• Testimonial gathering

How to automate lifecycle email marketing

While lifecycle email marketing can be a powerful asset for product marketers, it often requires complex custom code to track user behavior and ensure email campaigns are highly personalized and delivered to the right users at the right time.

However, platforms like Trophy provide tools for designing and sending lifecycle emails without months of dev time. Engineers can add one line of code to start sending users’ engagement data to Trophy, and then product and marketing teams can design and configure personalized emails making use of that data.

Lifecycle email marketing with Trophy

Trophy is a gamification platform that allows product teams to design beautiful and highly-personalized lifecycle emails driven by real user interactions.

Trophy makes it easy for teams to set up metrics to model user interactions, achievements to track user success milestones, and streaks to track and encourage consistent usage. It also has a no-code block-based email builder that allows marketers to build personalized lifecycle emails easily using powerful Smart Blocks like progress charts and streak calendars that can’t be found on other email sending platforms.

Trophy also optimizes email engagement by sending emails to each user individually based on their local time zone.

Here’s an overview of the different types of Smart Blocks Trophy’s lifecycle email builder supports:

Key Points

• Trophy has a block-based email builder that supports designing lifecycle emails using your own branding and can send emails from a custom email domain.
• The email builder supports a number of basic blocks including paragraphs, headings, buttons and cards, all using inbox-friendly native HTML.
• Trophy has 4 powerful Smart Blocks that support common lifecycle email use cases, with more coming soon:
  • The Achievement Progress Chart motivates users by displaying a summary of their progress against achievements.
  • The Achievements Unlocked block congratulates users by showing them newly unlocked achievements or milestones.
  • The Progress Chart block further motivates users showing a summary of their recent historical usage.
  • The Streak block encourages habitual usage displaying users their current streak, its length and any periods they missed
• All email blocks in the Trophy email builder use native HTML not images, a common pitfall of lifecycle email marketing, reducing the chance mailbox providers will flag emails as spam and making sure all email clients can view these blocks.

Try Trophy

Trophy provides a powerful no-code email builder designed for marketers to build highly-personalized lifecycle email campaigns backed by zero-party user behavior data.

Create an account and send unlimited emails for free up to 100 monthly active users.