By nature, I'm a bit of a lazy guy. I'll gladly invest time, money and effort into a project, but if there are no solid returns to look forward to I won't bother. My laziness also means I'll automate everything I can, leaving me time for smarter, more fun things to do. Marketing communication is one of the areas where automating can be used to great extent, especially when it comes to lead-, cross- and upsell processes. Our automating process starts with the marketing database. Here we find the triggers for actions we'd like to see automatised. There are clients who purchased, clients who didn't, clients who bought a lot of groups of relations we've not heard from for a while. We see birthdays, surfing behavior, newsletter requests or participation in online games. We see certain target groups reaching certain customer values, we see complaints or unpaid bills. All of these things are triggers, and we've got dozens or perhaps even hundreds of them. It makes sense that event driven marketing brings the strongest results. Afterall, it's the client's own actions (an order, complaint, download...) that invite interaction. We can't imagine a better time to act, so long as the interaction is relevent and brought at the right time using the right tools. Based on set triggers, we can design event driven campaigns, startedautomatically when a certain action occurs.
Some examples. A customer could automatically receive an invitation to a seminar after having purchased a certain product. A customer who hires a car could automatically receive directions through a text message. A health insurance agency could automatically offer additional insurances, such as dental care for the kids, when a client buys a basic insurance package. How did you know the client had kids? Why, it was in your marketing database of course, which in turn you've coupled to your event driven marketing
systems!
Theater visitors can be connected to their favorite artists: before the show, during the show, and after the show. Amusement park visitors often buy tickets online. So two weeks before they visit your park, you send them an exciting overview of your amusement park, invite them for an online game, you let them share their results with friends and they can receive a small prize at the amusement park.
Event driven marketing offers endless ways of automatised interaction with target groups, sending every client his own personal campaign, with the right content at the right time. Text, direct mail, personal mini sites, e-mail or personal contact can all be used to interact with the client. Coincidentally, this builds on a company's promise to open a dialogue with the client. If done well, this dialogue is bound to raise loyalty and boost buzz among clients and prospects. I believe that with event driven marketing, 60 to 80% of your
cross- and upsell can be fully automatised, while most of your lead management can be automatised through 'thank you's, comfirmations and phonecalls.
When considering effective marketing and cost reducing measures, event driven marketing comes to mind. Another challenge where event driven marketing works very well, is structurally improving customer value, an otherwise difficult task during recessions. Customer value is where a company gets its profits, and this way we execute our marketing at the most effective moment, automatically!
Event driven marketing ensures we stimulate the company / customer dialogue and ensures we don't miss any sales moments, because all phases of our customer relationship are detected by the automatic triggers. Our IT is ready for it: several campaign management systems support event driven marketing. It's up to us marketers to develop the campaigns and identify the triggers.
Reacties