When marketers think about event-triggered marketing today, it’s typically very one-dimensional: e-mail. An e-mail is automatically pushed to a customer when they abandon an online shopping cart or experience a technical difficulty on an e-commerce site. The process is fairly established and ripe for improvement.
As marketers look to build more valuable two-way relationships with customers and prospects across multiple channels — like print, Web, e-mail and mobile — they’ll soon realize that their dated, one-dimensional event-triggered practices must evolve as well. No longer are good timing and a large database enough to drive new revenue opportunities.
Done right, cross-channel, event-triggered marketing can improve campaign effectiveness, and doesn’t have to put a strain on your budget. According to Gartner, event-triggered marketing can potentially save 80% of your direct mail budget. This can be attributed to supporting personalized, on-demand printing practices based on trigger events, like signing up a new loyalty club member, rather than mass production and distribution of brochures to a list of unqualified prospects, hoping a few responses will trickle in.
To truly be effective, cross-channel event-triggered practices require personalization, a means to capture and track previous purchases and preferences across multiple touch points. Campaigns should be generated from a single data repository that automatically captures and consolidates customer activity and behavior from all customer engagement channels – in-store purchases, online warranty upgrades, customer services calls and more. If these customer communications are left in silos, marketers lack the visibility into customer conversions and are challenged to link an event – like booking a vacation at a family resort – with a personalized cross-sell or up-sell offer. Consider the potential revenue impact of developing a customized direct mail piece with discount coupons and special offers for the resort based on the size of the family, the time of year the vacation was booked and general travel preferences associated with dining, car rentals and entertainment.
By automating cross-channel campaigns associated with events like an anniversary or loyalty card renewal, companies can not only increase the frequency and relevance of campaigns, they can also improve the value of the customer journey. According to Gartner, event-triggered marketing messages receive up to five times the response rate of non-targeted push messages. With a tightly aligned event-triggered marketing strategy, companies can not only better track and measure how quickly the customer journey accelerates from “just looking” to “repeat purchase,” but also response rates for all up-sell and cross-sell messages across channels. Isn’t it time your event-triggered marketing campaigns moved into a new dimension?
