Coming up with triggers for your automated (a.k.a trigger-based) email marketing campaigns is a great place to start thinking about email marketing in general.

Focusing on triggers forces you to think about your business from end-to-end. The first step in this process is to consider you funnel. Your funnel is a diagram of the individual steps a customer takes from landing on your website until conversion. For most businesses this is either purchases a product or upgrading to a subscription.

Once you have clearly defined your funnel you should look at each step and review how email marketing can help customers get from step A to step B.

Here's a typical eCommerce funnel:

Arrives on site -> Views product -> Adds product to cart -> Views cart -> Begins checkout -> Completes checkout.

There are some obvious places we can use email marketing here:

1. We could encourage customers that regularly view a product/product category but never checkout to come back and do so.
2. We could email customers that begin checkout but do not complete it.
3. We could email customers that add products to their cart but never view the cart itself.

Once you have scoped out where email could be used you should start to write down the basic ideas behind each email you'll send. The attached worksheet makes it relatively easy to start to slot emails in along a basic timeline.

After you've come up with some basic campaign ideas you will now have a worksheet with the core, important emails to drive customers along your funnel (the most important aspect of your online business) and you will also have a good idea of the goal of each email (very important).