Interactive marketing is a relatively new feature on the marketing and customer management landscape. It is only with the relatively recent advances in software tools that this dramatically more effective way to market to prospects and customers has come within the reach of most organisations.
And be assured that interactive marketing (also called trigger or event based marketing) can drive dramatic results: conversion rates of 45%, 35% reductions in direct marketing costs are just the tip of the iceberg.
However, to be successful there are five critical success factors that you need to consider.
1. Have The Right Technology
To implement trigger based marketing successfully you will require a base level of technology:
- The ability to monitor customer behaviour via a customer database of some type
- The ability to decide what to do; this needs a real time, rules based decisioning engine
- The ability to execute in a timely fashion
- Campaign management software
- Email marketing automation software
- Ability to input to face to face / contact centre channel
- The ability to report on what happened
These really are the basic requirements. With the advent of cloud based services like Aprimo, and Infusionsoft it doesn’t have to cost a fortune but you do need it.
2. Match the channel to the trigger
For instance if you are using analytics based triggers then you should use an automated channel; email or direct mail. If you try to use a person based channel your staff will have problems believing in the trigger. That lack of belief will impact on their ability to deliver the treatment with conviction.
On the other hand if you have a rules based trigger that can be explained to staff then they can be very passionate in delivery.
3. Inbound channels – pre-think the action
If you are using your inbound contact centre to deliver the response then you need to be “action based” in your treatment description. You are not being fair to your inbound staff if you give them the trigger information but not how to react to the trigger. This is because they do not have the time to review the customer record and devise a response to the trigger while on the call.
For instance, if a customer has made a large deposit in their transaction account don’t provide that information to staff. Instead, include a note in the customer’s record that the agent should “update client on new term deposit rates.”
4. Speed / Timing
The effective lifetime of an event based marketing trigger can often be measure in hours if not minutes so you must automate the process and drive down cycle time.
When triggering an abandoned shopping cart email, you need to think about how long the person stays in the market for your product. If you delay your treatment (email or outbound call) too long, the purchase may have already been made from your competitor.
5. Measurement
“Proving results to the executive team to garner support and budget” was the biggest challenge faced by business to consumer marketers in a recent Forrester report [1]. It just as important to measure success in interactive marketing as it is for all the rest of your marketing.
Unfortunately interactive marketing makes the measurement process harder. This is because campaigns no longer have clearly defined launch, response and report events. Instead a campaign may run for years with 50 executions a day. Over a year that mounts up to almost 20,000 interactions and associated costs.
I don’t think it is any coincidence that the second biggest challenges for marketers in that same Forrester research was “Staffing marketing programs sufficiently”. If you don’t prove the value of interactive marketing process they are not likely to continue to fund the program.
Free Download
If you’re new to trigger based marketing why not download our free “Implementing Trigger-based Marketing to Drive Customer Loyalty” presentation. It has lots of success statistics and is a good introduction to this valuable approach.
[1] “How Interactive Marketers Should Rethink Traditional Approaches To Campaign Management”, Forrester, June 2011
