Timing is everything. You have probably heard this
sentence before, and its significance has been applied to many different areas.
This time, however, our focus is on its application in generating high quality
leads using trigger marketing.
Trying to sell your products when the prospects don’t have a
need for them or when they aren’t ready to buy them can be a very painful
process for everyone involved and will most likely end up in failure.
On the other hand, if you reach out to your prospects too
late, you will miss the opportunity to sell your products, and they will buy it
from your competitors.
The solution for this problem comes in the form of a
marketing strategy called trigger marketing, also known as trigger-based
marketing, event-based marketing, event-triggered marketing, and so on. The
name might be different, but the meaning remains the same.
What is Trigger marketing?
Trigger marketing is a marketing strategy where messages or notifications are customized and automatically sent based on important events that we have identified.
Trigger marketing is very closely related to email marketing.
What events can trigger an automated email response?
The events that can be used as a base for trigger marketing
are decided according to the wishes of a specific business. For example, some
of the commonly used events are those that are associated with a certain day
(birthday, anniversary, holiday), a certain season (summer, winter) or
different actions and behaviors that are exhibited by the prospect (looking
into specific products, downloading eBooks, applying to attend a webinar, abandoning
their online cart and more).
What are the benefits of Trigger Marketing?
The main goal of trigger marketing is to deliver the
right message to the right person at the right time, which will
significantly increase the chance to convert that person into an actual
customer. Of course, that isn’t the only benefit of trigger marketing.
Trigger marketing can make prospects feel appreciated
People are fed up with all the generic emails they get every
day, so sending a personalized message will make a good impression on them. Personalized
messages will increase the user engagement since the prospects will be more
satisfied which will, in turn, increase the likelihood that they will recommend
you to their acquaintances.
Trigger marketing can increase brand awareness and help with lead nurturing
When your prospects preform an action on your website, it
doesn’t mean that they are ready to buy products from you. However, using
triggered emails, you can leave a positive impression on your prospects, which
will help you raise your brand awareness as well as help you establish a
foundation to turn these prospects into actual customers in the future. Also,
by communicating with prospects using trigger marketing, you can maximize
conversion opportunities in all stages of the funnel.
Trigger marketing can help increase customer retention
Even when we concentrate on getting new customers, we must
never forget about our current ones. With trigger marketing, not only can we maintain
a good relationship with our current customers, but we can also get in touch
with customers that have been inactive for some time and reignite their
interest.
Trigger marketing saves time and money
Automation is an important part of trigger marketing that
can help you save a great amount of time and resources, especially for a marketing
team.After all, they won’t have to waste time on operational tasks.
Instead, they will be able to dedicate more of their time on creativity,
planning, measurement, optimization, and so on.
As we can see, trigger marketing can bring you many benefits.
Of course, if you would rather have it presented to you in raw statistics, then
you will be more interested in the report made by WebFX.
According to the research they conducted, trigger
marketing boasts an open rate that is 70,5% higher than traditional marketing
emails, with 53% more conversions and an average increase in revenue of 34%.
With such results, there is no question that trigger marketing is a worthwhile
investment for any company.
Tips for sending trigger marketing emails
To achieve the best possible results, here are a couple of
tips regarding trigger marketing.
Analyze the customers data and create buyer personas
The more knowledge you have of your target audience, the easier it will be to design an effective email campaign. To achieve that, we need to collect the basic data from the customer as well as the data about their actions and behaviors when they are on our website. After analyzing the data, we can find out more about them, and, using the knowledge about our customers, we can create buyer personas.
Buyer personas can help us get a clearer vision about the
characteristics of the customers as well as what they need, want, like, and so
on. They can also make it easier to segment our customers as well as identify
if there are any cross-sale/up-sale opportunities.
Take advantage of customer engagement
Trigger marketing offers us a way to automatically respond to
the actions of our customers in a positive way and at all times. Considering
that the customers are already showing interest in our business and are
actively engaging with our content, we need to use such opportunities to
shorten the distance between us, so they are more likely to buy our products.
With trigger marketing we can confirm (and affirm) their
actions by setting up the appropriate responses according to the situation at
hand. For example, we can send them a welcome email when they join our website
or send them a confirmation email containing more information when they sign up
for a webinar or download our content.
Keeping up with the customer’s actions will help us improve
the overall user experience (UX) and help our nurturing efforts as a whole.
Never stop improving
Staying competitive is important for every business. To
achieve that, we need to always look for improvements in our current methods. Take
a cue from what is working for other businesses, especially your competition. Find
out which content on your site is interesting to your prospects by checking
their past history and try to repurpose it for better performance using trigger
marketing emails.