Event-Triggered Marketing

Event-Triggered Marketing

Technology is constantly evolving, so adopting new marketing strategy to improve customer engagement and increase response rates must be a focus. We live in a world where the average consumer has limitless expectations and the need for immediate gratification. A world where each individual believes that marketing should be tailored to their wants and needs. As a marketer who is constantly trying to stay on the leading edge of technology, it is almost impossible to predict exactly what a consumer wants before they know they want it . . . or is it?

Event-triggered marketing has evolved rapidly over the past five years as a solution to this very problem. This strategy is defined as marketing efforts that are based on the measurement of relevant and identifiable changes in an individual customer’s needs.

A simple example of event-triggered marketing is online display ad retargeting. Person A visits a site to buy baseball cleats, but does not purchase. In future web browsing, Person A notices ads for the store he visited, promoting a discount—possibly on the item he was just looking at. The event that occurred was a visit to a site; the follow-up marketing that occurred was the additional online ads.

Another example occurs in customer retention for banking services. When a customer calls to ask for the balance owed on a home mortgage, it is likely they could be considering refinancing of their mortgage. An event-based marketing trigger would be to offer to transfer the caller to a refinance specialist; another would be to then send out a triggered direct mail piece.

The aforementioned event triggers were both initiated by the customer and not anticipated by the company. So the question becomes, is it possible for companies to anticipate the needs of buyers before the buyers initiate contact in some way with an organization? Thanks to the “big data” movement, the answer is yes. Companies that buy into this concept work with companies like ours, or are fortunate enough to have their own resources, to continuously collect information on potential buying habits and life events of their target markets in order to successfully implement outbound event-triggered marketing. From an operations standpoint, the best part about event-triggered marketing is that the entire process can be automated. This means that as long as data and customer responses are being tracked, the marketing campaign can occur with little or no human intervention.

Discovering pockets of potential customers based on life events, and tailoring event-triggered marketing to them, significantly increases response rates across many consumer-based transactions, especially those in retail and banking.

So the next time something happens in your life and you suddenly notice relevant marketing conveniently being directed your way, you may realize that maybe it wasn’t a coincidence after all.