Trigger marketing, or event-driven marketing, involves initiating targeted actions based on specific triggers or events. These triggers can range from customer interactions, such as website visits or email opens, to external factors like holidays or weather conditions. The essence of trigger-based marketing lies in delivering personalized and timely messages or offers to customers when they are most receptive. Businesses can identify triggers and automate responses by leveraging data analytics and automation tools, creating seamless and relevant customer interactions. Whether sending a tailored discount coupon after an abandoned cart or a personalized birthday offer, trigger marketing allows companies to engage customers, increase conversions, and foster long-term relationships. Mastering trigger marketing is essential for staying competitive and driving business growth in today’s dynamic market landscape.
What is Trigger Marketing?
Trigger marketing refers to sending messages to customers via email, SMS, direct mail, or any other communication channel when an event/trigger occurs. These triggers are generally automated and majorly fall under one of these categories:
- Engagement-based triggers help increase engagement by sending out mail pieces on making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or visiting your website.
- Event-based triggers help in developing an emotional connection with customers that develops trust and brand loyalty. These triggers are determined by details like birthdays, anniversaries, or relocations.
- Behavior-based triggers look at online customer behavior and activities such as new registration, website activities, and conversion rates.
If you’ve ever gotten an anniversary coupon from a company, that’s an event-based trigger; if you’ve ever received a company’s catalog in the mail after visiting their website, that’s an engagement-based trigger.
The principle of trigger marketing is action and reaction. The actions of your customers can trigger a reaction from your business, such as the instantaneous sending of a personalized welcome email while onboarding.
By interacting with your brand, consumers give you all the intelligence needed to reach them efficiently. They tell you they’re ready, and you the marketer set the aim. All you have to do is send the communication that fits best. Trigger marketing applies consumer behavior data to tailor a response. For example, an abandoned shopping cart is a trigger. It notifies a company that the person is interested in their product, but due to some circumstance, they did not complete a purchase. The company can then follow up with a reminder campaign to all customers via direct mail or email. The consumer acts, the company learns about the consumer from that action, and the company plans accordingly. The trigger starts the process. This is one of the best trigger-based marketing examples.
Trigger marketing has proved its metal in the last few years. Don’t believe us, check the Blueshift Benchmark Report (2021.
| 497% Email Triggers are 497% More Effective than Random Batch Emails |
| 283% Multi-Channel Triggers are 283% More Effective |
| 116% Predictive Recommendations are 116% More Effective |
Blueshift Benchmark Report Statistics
Importance of Trigger Marketing
Trigger marketing holds significant importance in modern marketing strategies due to its timely delivery with relevant and personalized customer interactions. By leveraging triggers or specific events, businesses can engage with their audience, increasing the likelihood of conversion and fostering customer loyalty.
One of the key benefits of trigger marketing is its ability to automate responses based on predefined triggers, saving time and resources while ensuring consistency in communication. Additionally, trigger marketing allows for highly targeted messaging, tailoring content to individual customer behaviors and preferences. This personalized approach enhances customer experience and builds stronger connections between businesses and consumers.
Moreover, trigger marketing enables businesses to capitalize on opportunities in real-time, such as sending promotional offers during peak shopping or following up with prospects after specific actions. Overall, trigger marketing is vital in driving customer engagement, increasing conversions, and, ultimately, driving business growth.
Types of Marketing Triggers
Triggers in marketing are largely based on four wide categories, let’s review the classification of triggers and examples for each type.
Behavioral Triggers
These events include the opening of an account, requests for information, changes in purchasing patterns, browsing patterns, website interactions, and other events along those lines. Each action says a lot about the consumer’s position in the buying process. Say a university sees someone has clicked an email link to visit the website for their college of business. The university now knows to have someone call that person for a follow-up conversation, or to send a direct mail campaign about their program.
Transactional Triggers
Transactions naturally prompt further marketing communications. They inform marketers of the customer’s interests, what additional purchases could supplement previous purchases, the value of the customer, when they buy, how they buy, and so forth. This data allows for more accurate segmentation of prospects, as well as prompting for responses.
Recurring Triggers
These triggers come from an individual’s personal profile and happen on a certain date, including birthdays, expiration dates, anniversaries, and other recurring events. When a database shows upcoming birthdays and anniversaries, there is an opportunity for relationship-building and brand reminders. Trigger marketing automates that process by linking the trigger to a direct marketing campaign. The date is the trigger; a birthday card or membership anniversary email is the response. Trigger-based direct mails like personalized coupons can be highly effective in gaining customer loyalty.
Threshold Triggers
The message you receive after reaching the spending limit on your credit card is a classic example. The bank sees in its data that you’ve reached a threshold, and respond accordingly. A database can alert you when a threshold is reached, permitting you to respond directly to it with targeted messages and means.
How to Use Trigger Marketing?
When you’re setting up your trigger-based marketing campaign, you need to consider the following five steps to leverage automated marketing to ensure precise and accurately defined actions as well as responses.
Know your Buyer Persona
To make any marketing activity a success, understanding your buyer persona is critically important. However, for automated marketing campaigns, there is no room for a flexible approach. If you understand your buyer’s lifecycle stages and pain points, you can craft a great trigger marketing strategy and guide them through the process.
Identify Trigger Events & Set your Automated Marketing Triggers
The software works on a simple algorithm of ‘if’ and ‘then’. For this, start analyzing the sales process and consider what will happen and why. Define action as your trigger, and set up an action or series of actions, such as email or personalized message.
Figure Out the Triggering Events & Determine the Actions
To get your messaging to the right people, you need to identify the “right trigger”. This is the “if” part of the equation that the software can use as a green signal to execute the actions. Some of the common actions include:
- Actions taken on the website
- Responses to past emails
- Criteria met in the database
Once you know your “trigger”, then you can decide the “then” part of the equation. The most common ‘then’ actions are:
- Sending an email.
- Categorizing the contact in the database.
For instance, when an email subscriber clicks a link in an email, they receive a follow-up specific to the trigger action. Similarly, if there are no responses to a few emails, you may trigger an email giving them the option to unsubscribe.
Craft personalized messaging
Did you know that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences? If you want your brand to send the messages that will uniquely appeal to the user, you must be critical to know how that specific user is different from others in your CRM. For this reason, the brands must look at users’ journey to ensure they provide value and help them move to the next step.
Identify and eliminate repetitive marketing tasks.
Study shows that 70% of millennials feel frustrated with brands sending irrelevant or repetitive emails. To begin with, start by creating a list of your most repetitive tasks and eliminate them using marketing automation. This not only helps in increasing productivity, but also enhances customer experience.
Improvise your CRM
To get your trigger marketing right, you have to organize your data. The best way to get the most out of your CRM is to update your records and categorize contacts. Think about how your brand uses CRM and ask yourself a few questions:
- What and when can you gather data about your prospects to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns?
- How can you use marketing automation to ensure the cleanliness and accuracy of your database?
- What should be the frequency of auditing your database to ensure the integrity of these efforts?
Benefits of Trigger Marketing
Triggered marketing can be a successful marketing initiative for your brand only if you are able to find the right trigger at the right time. Understanding your buyer persona and then thinking in terms of ‘if’ and ‘then’ can help figure out the right triggering events and determine the actions you want your system to perform. Once the right trigger is implemented, craft personalized messaging to keep your customers interested. Ensure that the offer caters to your customer’s immediate needs. Let’s take a look at the 4 main advantages it can bring you.
Optimized & Automated Personalized Marketing Campaigns
The best CRM system and automated marketing enable you to fine-tune the way you target your database and then instantly send emails or SMS. 72% of the customers say they only engage with personalized messaging, and 80% of frequent shoppers only shop with brands that personalize their experience. Simply personalizing email subject lines can increase open rates by a whopping 20% And other simple personalizations, like birthday emails, can generate 342% more revenue than generic promotional emails.
Boost In Sales/Conversions
Trigger marketing is a golden opportunity to integrate cross-selling and increase your revenue. At the same time, the knowledge of the customer journey gives companies an undeniable edge over their competitors. Trigger campaigns can help boost your growth since campaigns are relevant, timely, and adapted to customer needs.
Not only does trigger email marketing help in boosting revenue but also helps in customer retention. Whenever your customer triggers an action, like a new purchase or subscription enhancement, think about sending them personalized communication to gain customer loyalty.
Improved Relevancy & Timing
40% of consumers buy more from retailers that send personalized emails because email automation triggers allow marketers to present customers with product recommendations based on what they’ve bought before or checked out online.
Similarly, if you can relate to the last example above – reaching a spending limit on a credit card – you know first-hand how convenient trigger marketing can be for the consumer.
You are not frustrated by the phone call, but rather thankful that the warning came as timely as it did. This is important information for you to know at that particular time.
Responding to customer cues means you act in a way pertinent to the customer; you hone in on your purpose, which makes for a more targeted message. Consumers profit from the precision of this data-driven marketing strategy in that they receive communications personalized for and relevant to them. And when consumers are happy, marketers are happy.
Examples of Trigger Marketing Campaigns
Triggered-based direct mail can boost customer acquisition, retention, conversions, and revenue. There are several ways to trigger direct mailings, so we’ve enlisted a few five lead-generating trigger-based direct mail examples to inspire you.
- Life Event Triggers: Send a postcard with a coupon to customers who have their birthday/anniversary that month.
- Re-Engagement Triggers: When it’s been a while since a customer last placed an order, send them a postcard with an offer to encourage them to make a purchase.
- Welcome Triggers: When you acquire a new customer, you can send them a personalized direct mail piece in the form of a signed “Thank You” letter or a postcard with a discount for a repeat purchase. A great example of a direct mail piece can be similar to what Verizon does when a customer signs up for a device protection plan.
The Bottom Line
Triggered Marketing campaigns are a perfect combination of relevancy, timing, and personalization with the efficiency and efficacy of automated blast campaigns, which can yield great results for the business. Here we’ve given you a rundown on everything you need to know about trigger-based marketing so that you can reap the benefits with an effective, automated, and personalized marketing strategy.
FAQs
Q. What is a trigger in marketing automation?
A: Trigger in marketing automation is an event or an action that results in a task. Trigger marketing uses marketing automation software to perform a task resulting from a trigger, often an action taken by a prospect or customer. For instance, when a user makes an online purchase using a credit card, an automated message gets delivered to the user confirming whether the transaction was made by them or not. Whether it’s an update on security concern alerts or a personalized offer to an individual’s account, users will definitely be interested in receiving these messages.
Q. What is a trigger in social media marketing?
A: With the rise in digital marketing, social media marketing triggers are a great way to get a conversation started with potential as well as old customers. Some of the in-demand social media marketing triggers include enticing images or videos, contests, user-generated content, testimonials, questions, etc. For example, a poll on Instagram or Twitter that involves asking questions is a great trigger. With such polls, your brand can get a flood of responses that can act as the right triggers for any marketing campaign.
Q. What is trigger marketing optimization?
A: In general, marketing optimization refers to making necessary adjustments/ changes in the campaigns to do a better job of reaching your business goals. The trigger marketing campaigns require small adjustments to your marketing efforts based on the data that the brand gathers with the help of the triggers that its users generate. Little tune-ups using the marketing tools and tactics spelled out in your marketing strategy can do wonders.
Q: What is a trigger campaign?
A: A trigger campaign or trigger communication is a marketing strategy that involves automated responses triggered by specific actions or events taken by customers or prospects. These triggers can include actions such as website visits, email opens, purchases, or abandoned carts. Trigger campaigns aim to engage customers at key moments, increase conversion rates, and enhance overall customer experience through targeted communication.
Q. What are social triggers in trigger-based marketing?
A: Social triggers in trigger marketing refer to events on social media platforms that prompt specific actions or reactions from users. These triggers can include likes, shares, comments, mentions, or trends related to a brand or product. Leveraging social triggers allows marketers to engage with their audience in real-time. By monitoring social triggers, businesses can identify opportunities to initiate targeted marketing campaigns, enhance brand visibility, and drive user engagement and conversions.
