To tap into the potential of trigger-based marketing programs, you will need know how and when to pull the trigger.
Types of Triggers:
- Transactional triggers are based on a customer action such as a purchase or sales inquiry, thus providing a natural trigger for follow-up marketing communication
- Recurring triggers are based on an individual’s details and personal profile. Thus a birthday or membership renewal date can act as the trigger for a piece of marketing activity
- Threshold triggers are timed to a customer’s actions reaching a threshold, such as exceeding a spending limit or over-utilizing a facility
Use the right tool: The challenge with most trigger based marketing programs is that they are not running on a tool that was optimized for rules administration. While there are dozens of very well crafted trigger-based marketing applications on the market, many organizations make the mistake of settling for the handful of trigger-based campaigns on Structured Query Language (SQL) statements.
Trigger-based marketing by its very nature needs to be nimble and adaptable. A purely SQL-based rules system has no centralized place for administration or an abstraction layer to let less technical people craft rules, edit logic, or experiment. Marketing users need the ability to manage a trigger-based rules library, update rules, add new rules and experiment on the drop of a dime, preferably without IT resources.
Use the right rule: There are complex rules for simple customer behaviors. Simple customer actions over their lifecycle with a brand sometimes require that very complex trigger rules be running in the background. This more complicated class of consumer behavior triggers often and demands specialized tools to produce value. These need to have a business vision ahead of the infrastructure investment for the required tools, or the trigger-based concepts may never get implemented. And that would be a costly waste.
An example of a simple trigger would be to send a customer a message if she makes a Money Market deposit of greater than $25,000. This is a simple event triggered on essentially one data element and an arbitrary limit of $25,000. The challenge with this type of simple rule logic is that $25,000 might not be an unusual event if she were the CEO of a large corporation. It could be a fraction of the overall account value, and a simple distribution that occurs regularly throughout the year.
An example of a more complex trigger would be to send that same customer a message if she makes a Money Market deposit that is 7x greater than her average monthly deposit balance AND if she is over the age of 50 AND has inquired about retirement products in the past six months. This is a more complex and more accurate trigger because it is unique to the customer.
Effectively tackling these challenges – using the right tools and the right rules – will give marketers the opportunity to think creatively and adopt dozens of trigger-based “events” that will take their marketing to the next level.
For a printable guide to Trigger-Based Marketing go to: http://www.dolphin.uk.com/assets/pdf/white-paper-trigger-based-marketing.pdf