Event Triggered Marketing Campaigns Move Beyond Traditional Email Marketing

Event triggered marketing campaigns are typically underutilized by many marketers, who tend to employ them as a one-time tactic usually limited to email, such as when a customer abandons an online shopping cart or experiences a technical glitch. However, there are far more possibilities with event-triggered marketing.

As marketers now have even more channels of communication with customers, from print to web to phone to SMS, their dated event-triggered practices must be updated as well. Simply mining a large database is no longer sufficient to drive new revenue.

Current event-triggered campaigns require two things: a way to track and capture previous customer interactions across all points of contact, and a way to use that information to personalize messages. Using collected customer data to effectively trigger personalized marketing messages, offers, and initiatives is a key component of a successful event-triggered campaign.

Research from Gartner suggests that an event-triggered campaign can save up to 80 percent of a marketer's direct mail budget. This is accomplished by delivering targeted on-demand services, such as signing up a customer for a new rewards club, rather than mass printing and mailing a brochure. So, while there may be upfront costs in changing existing processes and technologies, the long term payout will be worth the effort. And that's just the beginning.

Once cross-channel event-triggered marketing has been decided upon as a strategic initiative, marketers can easily define goals in terms the entire organization can understand. These include new customer acquisitions as well as increased revenue from existing customers due to highly targeted up-sell and cross-sell offers. Now that marketers can show up to the bargaining table with clearly defined goals and budgets, they are in a much more favorable bargaining position for getting the required funding for technology, as well as approval of new processes, necessary components for making event-triggered marketing part of a long term strategy.

To begin, marketers must set clear goals for event-triggered campaigns targeting both new customers and existing customers. It is of course possible to focus on only one of these groups, and this approach may be the best way to test and evaluate campaigns on a smaller scale. Start by setting easily manageable benchmarks and metrics that can be tracked throughout the campaign.

Next, it is vital to look at your existing technologies and processes. You will need to ensure that the correct technology is in place, and that you are using it to collect data from all customer channels. Just as important, your technology must allow for you to leverage collected customer data, and it should flag anything that is not conforming to your established metrics so that you can make the necessary adjustments.

Gartner has found that event-triggered messages have a response rate that is five times higher than that of non-targeted push messages. These results are attainable for campaigns than pull information from a single database that has automatically tracked customer data from all points of customer contact, from brick and mortar stores to websites to customer support calls and more. If these communications between the customer and company aren't used, it's much more difficult to measure the effect of cross-selling or up-selling customers. By using event-triggered methods based on previous customer actions and trends, marketers gain a full set of tools to initiate new contacts, and bring old ones back for more.