DLB Magazine Article - July 2008

Trigger Based Marketing: Timing Is Everything.

Trigger programs are not new in New Zealand.

Ten years ago it was largely seen as a dark art, performed only in the privacy of the back rooms of credit management teams.

Large and sophisticated systems churned through volumes of data looking for signals that suggested a customer or business was going to go bad. Depending on how bad, the customer was placed in different communication and management programs to reduce the chance of the event happening.

The stories of success filtered out over time; there was value to be had from this dark art.

Today trigger based marketing is a growing success story and it is only going to get more important as consumers get edgy about the price of heartland staples (like diary and vege) and their rapidly depreciating property.

The story behind this success is brilliant in its simplicity. As marketers we are more likely to get a response from consumers when we talk to them about products and services that meet their needs, at the right time.

Trigger marketing programs ramp up the relevance of communications because they are initiated when a consumer interacts with us or we know something important about their needs now.

Connecting with prospects or customers when they are in the market is the single biggest determiner of response.  The Automotive industry understands the importance of timing.

A motor manufacturer in the UK trialled a trigger and event approach to prospecting over a shotgun cold list traditionally used.  It achieved a 250% increase in response. This was driven by gathering a purchase intention date and model of interest, then timing their communications around the typical research cycle prospects go through to buy a car.

Unusual you ask, not really. US marketers who are well experienced at wringing the last vestiges of response out of their campaigns using more established direct techniques, have over the last 5 years hit a vain of gold in trigger marketing producing jaw dropping increases in response of up to 400%, as they have married their customer knowledge of behaviour with communication preferences. 

Closer to home take a look through the Marketing Associations awards for the RSVPs and Nexus over the last few years. A significant number of Gold and Supreme standard winners have event and trigger marketing elements as integral components.

So what has driven the change?

Consumers taking control and Advertisers getting savvy

Firstly, consumers are taking more control over the communication channels they use, who they engage with, receive communications from, and an exponential growth in the usage of mobile, web (75% penetration in NZ households1  and 61% of Adult New Zealanders shopping online each month2) and web2.0 to manage their relationships.   

This is highlighted by an astonishing 48% of New Zealanders online signing up to Social Network sites in the last 12 months3. 

These channels make connecting faster and more exciting, but more importantly are immersing consumers in a world of highly contextualised advertising and communication driven from their profiles and behaviour. The net result is this is likely to become considered the ‘Norm’ in a short period of time.
Behavioural information is more readily available

Secondly, with a trusted dialogue comes an opportunity to share information and understand your consumers in a way that hasn’t been possible to the same extent before.  The barriers were due in large part to the costs and complexity of gathering information.  These have now reduced, certainly in digital channels.

When we break down and look at the different types of events that allow us to create trigger communications, the events themselves and information that underpins them has evolved.

Events that initially triggered communication focused more heavily on information that occurred less frequently like having a baby or moving home.  This ensured the admin overhead and cost of communicating with customers was manageable.  The downside was the quality and accessibility of information.  There was always a risk that your timing was off, the opportunity lost or consumer annoyed.
 
Now that systems can capture, process and organise vast amounts of data, trigger events have become less about the life changes and more about the day to day living, your roadside recovery, exceeding your overdraft limit, your newspaper subscription.   This opens up more opportunities to engage, more opportunities to start building an extended relationship.  It also provides more insight.

Think moving from requesting a glossy car range brochure, to being able to go online, and customise and spec out your ideal car, then request a price and ideal delivery date. 

From this information we know when the prospect is likely to buy, what car they are interested in and are able to give them a menu of custom parts they can decide on purchasing. This gives them the control and marketers the timing and insight.

So this more dynamic behaviour information allows us to be more responsive and personalised than broader descriptive or lifestage information that changes infrequently.

Marketing automation has improved beyond recognition

This has been the single biggest driver of the uptake of trigger marketing.

With the increasing complexity of designing and managing a dialogue with consumers instead of pushing communications, trigger marketing would have evaporated if tools had not been designed to automate a significant amount of the process and administration behind the scenes.

These tools have a number of benefits:

1. Reducing communications costs, by supporting the set up of library programs.  This allows templates to be developed and re-used, and costs to be spread across a year or more;
2. Testing and learning made easier, by providing marketers with the functionality to set up efficient tests, and gain real time campaign feedback on how the test groups are working.  The upside is better constructed campaigns in market faster;
3. Contact management improvements that ensure consumers don’t get overwhelmed and confused with overlapping campaigns. The very nature of trigger campaigns is to communicate with your audience when it’s best suited to them; this typically makes coordinating campaigns across your base very difficult as you don’t know when the communication is going to occur.  These tools allow you to set priority rules based on what the consumer wants, and where you want to place your sales emphasis;
4. Campaign administration is reduced, as the effort to determine who has received what, when, how they responded and what to do next is handled by the software.
5. Web based tools reduce the need for in-house IT resources, which in a single move reduces the time to market and most of the pain of integrating software into your businesses IT platform, not to mention the pain of dealing with stressed IT staff.

How to avoid becoming too trigger happy

In implementing trigger-based programs, keep in mind some critical success factors.

Keep it simple and don’t get cute.  Don’t serve up trigger communications just because you can.

The ease with which trigger campaigns can now be created (especially using 3rd party suppliers), does encourage banal communications which add little value to building a dialogue and even less to improving your ROI.

Just last week I ordered one of our staff a laptop from a well known online PC brand and was sent an unpersonalized email two days later asking me to confirm my payment.  At the bottom it then stated “Disregard everything in this email if you have already confirmed, in the last couple of days”. 

This communication highlighted to me that this business has no idea whether I paid or not or when.  This is basically an email triggered off my order confirmation, but had no information about me or my payments.  After confirming my payment twice to two different sales staff I received the unpersonalized request again.

So while they made a clumsy effort to engage me, their timing, email content and response processes hadn’t been well thought through or executed and the communication did more harm than good.

Bottom line is you need to focus as much on the back end processes as the communications themselves.

So your initial trigger communication steps should revolve around:

1. Defining some simple events that you can capture, and triggers that your audience will connect with;
2. Where possible use some of your current creative until you know it works;
3. Follow existing well established business rules and processes. Don't try to reconfigure your current systems or dramatically change internal processes;
4. Start with a heavy emphasis on measuring results. You'll be able to learn and test on-the-fly, so layer in new business rules and continue to hone messages and offers to ensure you are getting the most from your new-found flexibility and speed;
5. Be prepared to understand and define the next set of events that occur from a responsive audience, it happens quickly;

- ENDS -

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