Trigger marketing is not just a fancy new marketing technique that you can layer over your existing campaign process. It is a fundamentally different way of interacting with your customers.

With trigger marketing programs typically 2 to 12 times more effective than traditional direct marketing programs [1], it’s worth implementing this new perspective for your business.

The Old Way

In most organisations, the collateral that a customer receives depends mostly on what the marketing department has created this quarter. It’s a process that normally goes a little like this:

1. It starts with a need: product development have launched a new product or sales want to run a campaign to lift sales this month so a new campaign is created to match the need.
2. The it gets sent: Marketing pull some customer lists and send it out. Who receives it depends on a number of factors, including:

2. • The subject of the campaign
   • When it is run: how long since the last contact, you don’t want to over contact the customer.
   • Demographic, segmentation, or past purchase history elements.

The approach is not very customer centric and can be summarized as: “We have a campaign now who can we send it to?”

From the customer’s perspective they are being targeting with sales messages that may or may not match their current needs. Regardless, the engagement is low and as a result conversion rates are low.

What’s more, once run the campaign may never be run again. All the development cost is applied to just one campaign execution.

The Trigger Marketing Way

This approach turns the old way on its head. Rather than start with the internal focus, this time we start with the customer. What a refreshing idea.

You do this by reacting to the customer’s actions and contacting them when their actions indicate you should.

This is a fundamentally different way of looking at the campaign process. It starts with a customer action or trigger and then we create a campaign to match that trigger.

Suddenly your customer engagement and response rates are through the roof because you are matching your response to the customer’s specifically expressed need.

In this approach customers are engaged in a conversation relevant to what they have purchased and how they are interacting with you.

The added benefits are that once you have created and automated the campaign process it continues to run in the background. It keeps working day in and day out to generate incremental sales for the business.