Marketing effectiveness - and a great customer experience - is often a matter of timing. In the perfect world, we'd all communicate with customers at just the right moment. "Trigger" campaigns are one way of working towards this ideal.
A triggered or event-triggered campaign is a campaign that is automatically launched when something happens.
Some of the simplest triggers are things like:
- A purchase - An online retailer can run a trigger campaign that sends new computer buyers an offer of additional software.
- Attendance at an event - A stockbroking firm may have a trigger campaign that sends seminar attendees an offer of a one-on-one consultation.
- Lapse of time - A trigger campaign can be set to run ten days after a purchase.
- There can be customer-variable dates such as birthdays, and there can be fixed dates such as Public Holidays.
Increasingly, marketers are turning to triggered campaigns to achieve the level of relevancy needed to compete. Their success depends partly on timing and partly on content.
When the marketer gets them right, trigger campaigns can deliver the information and offers that customers want, at the precise time in the buying cycle that works best.
To produce quick wins when implementing a trigger program, consider these ideas for your business:
- Welcome programs
Welcome programs can achieve real impact with dynamic, multi-stage and multi-channel messaging.
- Abandonment programs
Trigger campaigns work for both shopping cart and application abandonment activities. And it's still viable if your company has a small audience size but high sale value.
- Retention program
If customers will buy replenishments or second purchases within a specific time frame, then triggered efforts can drive this action and reduce attrition.
If you are considering a trigger campaign, to optimise results, and foster your relationship with your contacts, keep these three tips in mind:
- Be thorough in writing business rules to guide the program
This is not easy, for there are so many things to think of, but you don't want the wrong campaigns going out at the wrong time. Your software guys have to be alert in order to advise you of all possibilities and you have to brainstorm with marketing colleagues.
- Remember to set frequency limits
No one wants multiple copies of your campaign no matter how brilliant it may be. The result will be a once respected brand trashed in the mind of the victim.
- Don't forget about recency
If you are selling an item that people usually only buy once, then the program rules have to ensure that when people buy, they do not receive a campaign offering that product again. They must be offered something else. Sounds basic? Yes, I agree, but it is a fundamental that some companies miss out on.
Like most great email marketing ideas, the best tip of all is to start small and slow.
Instead of creating a huge, complicated program that will be difficult to execute and hard to get resources for, start small. Figure out a common behaviour that would be easy to trigger a message off. Then create that message and get started.
And don't forget to measure the results. If you have got it right, you may well have a response-driving, trigger-based program that can just keep going with little effort from you.