Although many marketers have experimented with event-triggered marketing, they tend to stick to more simple applications, such as one-off email initiatives. For example, a customer who experiences a technical glitch or abandons an online shopping cart may receive an automatically pushed message.
Large databases and good timing are no longer sufficient to gain new customers and/or effectively market to existing ones. Traditional marketing practices are now dated, as there are significantly more channels for building two-way customer relationships, from phone to print to web to email. Thus, dated one-dimensional practices must evolve, just as the technology has.
Current event-triggered marketing tactics require two things: personalization, and a way to track previous purchases and preferences across many points of contact. To maximize the potential of event-triggered campaigns, marketers must put valuable customer and prospect information to work for them to "trigger" personalized messages, initiatives, and offers.
Some organizational changes may need to be made to existing marketing technologies and processes to fully realize returns on event-triggered campaigns. However, research indicates that the long run payoffs are well work the effort. Findings from Gartner show that a well implemented event-triggered campaign can save up to 80 percent of a marketer's direct mail budget. These savings are earned by using personalized on-demand printing based on triggered events, rather than mass mailings of uniform brochures to an unfiltered list of unqualified prospects. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
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.