With so much going on in our lives, it’s increasingly difficult to craft marketing messages that can rise above the noise and get your prospect’s attention.
That’s why my team in Managed Services has been working with many of our clients to refocus their strategies around trigger-based marketing. This approach concentrates on melding the “right audience/right message” of traditional marketing with the “right time” delivery that marketing automation technology makes possible.
Here’s what I mean. With marketing automation, you’re capturing “digital body language” by watching what someone looks at or downloads from your website. Based on that information, you then segregate prospects into nurtures designed to engage them further on those topics. Trigger-based marketing steps up your game with emails (or other communications) that are:
- Sent in response to actions taken by the prospect
- Tailored to interests displayed by the prospect
- Highly personalized
- Specifically designed to create a personal connection
An Email Trends and Benchmarks report* indicated that triggered email messages had a 119% higher click through rate than standard “business as usual” (BAU) email messages.
Let’s explore this type of strategy using DemandGen’s Managed Services as an example.
Prospects often browse different landing pages on the various services DemandGen offers like lead scoring, lead nurturing, and reporting. Let’s say one of those people downloads some content on campaign process optimization, for which a form is required, so we’ve now captured the contact information. That’s great. . . but if we just dump this person into a general nurture program that covers all of DemandGen’s offerings, we’ve really missed an opportunity.
Instead, we flow this prospect into a specialized nurture program that, over time, offers different nuggets of information specific to campaign execution. The first email is sent immediately, as that subject is highly relevant to the person at this moment. Then — most importantly — we monitor the level of response and adjust the nurture accordingly. If the prospect immediately opens or clicks through on that first email and consumes more content, the next one in the series is sent a week later. And here’s an important caveat: depending on your company, product, or prospect profile, “less” can be “more.” In other words, don’t assume that this is the right time to ratchet up communications and blast the person with marketing. In this scenario, analysis has led us to actually throttle down the emails we send if the prospect doesn’t act; the next email is held for two additional weeks.
Trigger-based marketing is effective not only at the top of the funnel, but based on where the person is in the sales funnel, and even post-funnel. The key is to push content based on wherever the prospect is on the journey. When a prospect converts into a customer, we’ll want to send a welcome email, information that introduces additional services, training, or whatever may be helpful.
Why does trigger-based marketing drive better results? I think it’s because it helps to create a more personal relationship between a company and a prospect. Responding to a prospect’s action with content that is relevant to that action is akin to having a conversation. And a conversation is the first step in building a relationship.
You might like these other posts about trigger-based marketing:
- Right People, Right Content, Right Time: Trigger-based nurturing really delivers
- Increase adoption and transactions with an automated new customer welcome program
Would you like some help in refocusing your strategy to incorporate trigger-based nurturing? Let us know and we’ll be in touch.
*Epsilon and the Direct Market Association’s Email Experience Council, 2012.
John Bokelmann leads the Managed Services team that supports DemandGen clients in digital marketing campaign development, production, and deployment. He provides strategic marketing operations leadership, develops and implements optimized workflow processes, and reinforces marketing best practices for both B2B and B2C clients.
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