Why Trigger Marketing Matters

trigger marektingAs They Say…Timing Is Everything

As a marketer, you’re probably thinking about how to acquire, grow and retain customers.  That’s a lot to do! There’s a lot to process as well as consider with marketing personalization. You’ll often hear important key terms mentioned including customer engagement, 360 degree customer profile, big data, CRM, ROI, segmentation, hyper-personalization and one-to-one marketing. These are all necessary components to create successful marketing personalization so your company can deliver the most relevant content in real time.

Amid these components is trigger marketing. In a nutshell, trigger marketing is the engine that hums continuously. There’s a constant stream of messages being deployed to to your customers based on behaviors, browsing history, purchases, interests, etc. Delivering a successful trigger marketing campaign entails combining these pieces of big data, identifying an event in a customer’s life that warrants a need and communicating during these pre-planned points in time.

Having the right road map can make it easier to achieve success and the desired outcome. As part of the email marketing campaigns, triggered email marketing is at the core of helping to drive engagement and revenue.

Delivering a successful campaign is your ultimate goal.  To achieve that, there are 3 key elements to remember…

Find the appropriate trigger – The content within these marketing campaigns should be based on your customers immediate needs.

Cultivate the right offer – Triggers have to be followed up with relevant products & offers.

Timely Execution – Presentation should occur immediately after an appropriated trigger.

As a business owner, you want your campaign to drive both traffic and revenue. There’s always a concern of frequency, value and appearance with trigger marketing. And, the big question lingers…”Do people mind followup emails?” The answer is yes. Keep in mind, though, it’s all about presentation, timing and tone.

Here are some tips to keep in mind for what your customers are looking for…

1.  Acknowledge me. I just signed up to receive emails from your company.  A welcome or thank you email is a considerate means of acknowledging my interest and introducing your company, products, offers, etc.

2. Entice me a little. The operative word is little. There’s a fine line between enticing me and conning me. Why should I become and remain a loyal customer? Based on my personal information, how can your company suit my needs more efficiently and cost effectively then company A or B?

3. Where’s my receipt?  I made a purchase and I’d like to have a transactional email for my records. I’d like to double check to see if my order is accurate and things processed correctly with my bank.

4. Spark my interest. I recently ordered a new bedding set, a few bathroom accessories and some end tables. It’s safe to assume I’m updating my home. I’d be interested in additional products you offer based on my purchases. Window treatments? Kitchen accessories? Area rugs? Go ahead, inspire me.

5. Nudge me a smidgen to try something new.  I’ve worn Crocs flip flops for as far back as I can remember. It’s my brand of choice, however, there’s a chance I order a pair year after year out of habit. Expand my horizons. Is there a flip flop that’s similar made by SKECHERS or Nike? Show me. I might just consider stepping out of the box.

6. I like special treats on my birthday. A gift basket filled with gourmet treats showing up at my door compliments of your company isn’t feasible, I know. However, how about a special offer, discount coupon or, at the very least, a Happy Birthday greeting?

7. Get me excited. Is there an upcoming event that you know I’ll be head over heels about? Let me know about it. As the event nears, send me a reminder or two because I’m busy and I may have forgotten to make note of it.

8. Offer a token of appreciation for my business.  I’ve been a loyal customer for quite some time. Whether it’s a personal note or a 20% off coupon on my next purchase, it’s nice to know my loyalty is appreciated. I’m making the choice to do business with you. Without loyal customers…well, you get where I’m going with this?

9. I’m not a fan of creepy. Offer discretion when analyzing my browsing and purchase history. Any mention in your emails of the amount of time I spent browsing products to diminish the appearance of stretchmarks will be duly noted. This will not work in your favor in more ways than one.

10. Touch base with me. I’m busy. Often times weeks go by with very little time to spare. I may not have had time to browse, shop & make a purchase. I may have even left a product or two in my cart.  Send me an email. Remind me there’s a product in my cart and, if you really want to earn brownie points, offer me a coupon towards my purchase. Score!

As mentioned, with trigger marketing, it’s all about timing, relevancy, tone and presentation. Remember, your customers are real people. Address them as such, respect their time, send offers that fit their needs and time it just right. Capture the attention of your customer by establishing the appropriate trigger. Materialize the immediate needs with applicable products, offers, and information.  With automation and the right set of tools, these triggered events can be both automated and intelligent. Once these fundamentals are in place, you’re ready to execute.

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How Marketing Executives Use Big Data: All Types of Data Sets At the Right Time

Data Management Platform

I recently spoke with several high level marketing executives about the near-ubiquitous topic, BIG DATA. The executives included Paul Golden, ex-CMO of Samsung Mobile, Barry Judge (ex-CMO of Best Buy, current CMO of LivingSocial, and Brad Todd, (Principal at The Richards Group). Each of the executives with whom we spoke had used all types of data sets in different ways.  Depending on the need of the business, they called on different types of data sets to achieve their purpose.  Given their focus on marketing, the types of data sets tended to be tied to customers.

As a principal at The Richards Group since its inception, Brad Todd has seen a lot of changes in how advertising clients have used data. He recalls the proliferation of data from the introduction and use of loyalty cards at grocery stores. Although grocers captured vast amounts of information about their customers—what they bought, how often they purchased, how they paid—very little of that data was used to improve the customer relationship.  The data was primarily used for managing inventory and shelf space.  Arguably, having fully-stocked shelves does help the customer experience, but the primary use of the data was to improve the bottom line.  Today, grocers and their CPG partners have begun to combine many types of data sets for more targeted marketing.

While CMO of Best Buy, Barry Judge and his team used different types of data sets–purchase history, clickstream analysis, email interactions, demographics and psychographics–to identify and deliver relevant product offerings to their customers.  However, integrating newer analytics tools into legacy systems posed roadblocks.  And incorporating data from the physical store, in order to have a truly holistic picture of each customer, was very difficult.

At Barry’s current company, Living Social, the relative newness of the company and the lack of a physical channel makes it easier to combine data.  They have used customer information to prioritize offers according to each customer’s purchase history and click behavior, thus making the customer experience much more relevant.

Paul Golden, while he was CMO at Samsung Mobile, used big data to improve the brand preference score for Samsung’s mobile phones.  Applying analytics to their big data allowed Paul and his team to identify key markets and determine the most relevant messages for those key markets.

Once you get past the hype and noise, big data can be very useful.  The important thing is to clearly define your objectives and use the data to meet those objectives.

Want to learn more about how to connect different types of data sets? Click here.

And please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

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5 Tips for Building an Omni-Channel Customer Profile

Creating an Omni-Channel Customer Profile can be Easy, if you Start with the End in Mind

omni channel customer profileWith all the clutter of marketing messages, customers are demanding relevance. At the same time, marketing teams are struggling with some of the basic foundational components because of all the disparate sources of data available both internally and externally { there I stayed away from saying big data } …The ability to communicate with your customers in an individual manner is becoming table stakes in both online and offline marketing, what we at Nectar Online Media like to call Hyper-Personalization. Whether you use the term 360-degree customer profile or omni-channel customer profile, the goal of creating a unified picture of your customer’s data is foundational for accurate customer analytics and also hyper-personalizing your interactions with your customers.

In this post, we thought we’d provide some of our tips for how to build an omni-channel customer profile. If you start with the end in mind (i.e., your marketing or business objective), it will be a lot easier.

 

# 1 Know Your Goal — It sounds simple and we’ve heard the same tip for many other areas, both in business and personal life. As it relates to customer analytics and hyper-personalization, the goal is based on how you want to use the customer data and, therefore, impacts the data sets you really need vs ideally want to have. By selecting the right data sets for building your omni-channel customer profile, your internal business partners and external providers can be much more focused (and efficient).

For example, Nectar works with an online ecommerce retailer, hipcycle.com, to help personalize their digital communications { if you’ve not checked out Hipcycle before, I strongly encourage you — you won’t be disappointed }.

Based on understanding Hipcycle’s marketing business objectives, we were able to hone in on the right data sets to integrate. These data sets were primarily based on transaction, crm, and behavior on hipcycle.com. While data sets like social media and household data provide an interesting lens, these data sets were not going to add incremental benefit & results that outweighed the effort.

 

# 2 Marketing & IT Need to Collaborate — While the marketing team can help define business objectives and outcomes based on using the omni-channel customer profile, the marketer’s technology counterparts are pivotal in articulating in identifying road blocks ahead of time and developing the right data streams.

If the marketing group is defining the customer analytics and hyper-personalization needs, involve the technology teams early on in the process to be better informed on constraints, timelines, and the ‘art of the possible.’

 

# 3 Choose the Right Technology — Different technologies are appropriate for different business objectives. If you are aiming to build an omni-channel customer profile, our experience has found a traditional SQL (row & records) environment is not optimal. Why? In a nutshell, because of all the different data sources and likely millions of records, there is a fair amount of processing a system needs to do before you can see the results (analysis, reports, recommendations, etc.) that you are looking.

At Nectar Online, we’ve found a noSQL environment is much better suited for storing data records for the purpose of utilizing that 360-degree view of the customer. The primary benefit is that data is stored in an array … so at the instance when data needs to be processed for an individual customer, information is ready.

 

# 4 Relevant Refreshes — An important component to evaluate is the frequency of your omni-channel customer profile refreshes. Depending on your goal { see how knowing your objective comes back in }, a different refresh or re-scoring frequency may be needed potentially at a data set level.

For example, if you are using social data to identify key life events of your individual customers, a weekly refresh might be sufficient. However, if your goal is to create a trigger event based on an abandoned cart, having this behavior refreshed in real-time is important.

 

# 5 Test & Learn — In the same way that a customer’s behaviors, habits, and interactions change over time, so do requirements on how you are using the customer profile data. By having a specific testing and learning plan identified prior to embarking on building your initial omni-channel views, the marketing and technology teams can better determine what elements are important for consideration.

In addition, as the customer profiles continue to be refreshed, you will be able to identify additional revenue and engagement driving opportunities. The testing and learning plan establishes the right set of performance indicators for what you are looking to accomplish.

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I’d love to hear from you and learn about your experience building omni-channel customer profiles. What other tips have you seen be helpful?

Drop us a note or share a comment below.