Don’t let this happen to you.  Read this article and don’t hesitate to call me if you need help in pulling it all together.

We’ll show you how easy it is to set-up behaviorally triggered email messages that deliver the right message to the right subscriber at the exact moment he or she is most engaged and likely to respond using Listrak’s automated event triggered messaging solution.

You will learn how to:

- Add a powerful, automated email responder system to your integrated marketing mix

- Trigger specific email responses according to your customer’s behaviors or targeted events

- Have one-on-one conversations with each of your customers and prospects

- Increase your email’s relevancy, open rates and your sales

Participation in this webinar is free, but space is limited. So, reserve your seat today.

While we’re putting the finishing touches on our webinar, here are five tips from Target Marketing Magazine for Triggered Communications success.

• Thoughtfully defining your triggers – this is the heart of your program
• Prepare your sales team to handle these leads – without making customers feel like “they’re being stalked.”  You want to your customer to be loyal to your brand and feel, “Hey, this company really gets me and understands my needs.”  That’s a big difference from a creepy, “I’m-being-watched feeling!”
• Put contact frequency in your process so you don’t bug your best customer and burn-out your sales team
• Continually improve your triggered-based program using feedback from your best sales people

I’m excited about what Triggered Communications can do to grow our clients’ businesses and I’m looking forward to meeting you online on April 15 for the Webinar!  I hope you can join us!

While email response rates are continuing to be challenged, Triggered Communications are a key component to adding relevancy to the communications.   And just like any form of communications, the more relevant and engaging, the more likely it is that you will get your message not only opened, but responded to.

A new conversation can be triggered from almost any customer touch point:

• External factors – website forms, shopping cart abandonment, customer service, etc.
• Messages – email activity (opens, clicks, unsubscribe, etc.), address change, etc.
• List – subscribe, profile update, and address change
• Link – specific link in email message

Once the “customer or prospect event” is captured, you can set a communications cadence around the key attributes of this event.  These campaigns allow you to communicate with each subscriber individually based on his or her behavior or response.  Because the messages are related to the specific action taken by the recipient, the conversations are natural and progressive, not sporadic and interruptive. 

For example, a prospect clicked on an email to find out more information on your product, but did not take advantage of the offer.  In the case of triggered communications, we can capture all “like prospects” and design communications cadences specific to this marketing situation. 

These automated campaigns can be structured to follow up in a period of time after their initial response, or even so many days before the offer expires.   Content can be specific to the link they clicked, or specific to the fact that they opened the email and didn’t click on a link.  Testing strategies can be easily incorporated into the process as well.

According to Forrester Research’s US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009-2014, marketers are taking on a more strategic leadership role in organizations because of their close connections to customers and prospects.   Transactional, triggered email communications are on the rise because they improve open, click and conversion rates dramatically.  

This builds off from the marketing foundation that a “handraiser” is one of your most effective prospect segments (from a percentage basis).  Adding relevant and engaging follow-up communications will nuture leads through the sales cycles to drive more sales.  

Give one of our account managers (or myself) a call to discuss triggered communications in more detail.  

2009 Direct Marketing Association's Annual Conference Oct. 17-21

I can’t remember a year where we have had as much change in our marketing world.  With the economy struggling, this alone has had significant impact.  Add onto this the evolution of new digital tools such as Search, Social Media and Mobile and this year’s Direct Marketing Association’s national convention is bound to be interesting. 

Yet my initial day at the conference reinforces much of what I thought.  While  new tools and mediums evolve, much of the foundation for targeted marketing remains the same:

• Test, test, test:   Continues to be the foundation for targeted media.  With today’s powerful analytics, you can set up your testing strategies to optimize your marketing efforts whether it is your direct marketing acquisition effort, search or your web site. 
• Permission-based:  Permission-based marketing comes in the form of many names now (i.e. opt-in, preference centers, social media invitations), but a constant thread has been forming in marketing for over a decade.  Today’s marketers realize that putting the consumer in the driver’s seat of their communications is the key in today’s world.  Now there are just more targeted consumer options to opt-into than ever before.
• Technology Centric:  Technology continues to drive our advances on many fronts.  More user friendly tools to use without tapping the IT department.  Increased abilities to personalize the medium to known customer attributes, easier and lower cost tools to manage all these efforts.
• Integration:  A couple of decades ago, it was integrating targeted marketing with mass media to deliver improved performance.  Today, these integration points are still important, but can be taken much further.  Web site integration, retail point of sale, digital targeted media campaigns are now all thrown into the mix as well. 

My point in all this is that while times are changing, likely 99.9+ percent of what we see at this year’s DMA will be based on the foundation already set.   Should be an interesting time to see how the industry is doing and where the experts see it all going.  From my first day in attendance, what is being touted as “new” looks very familiar.

In our opinion, one of the easiest ways for organizations to address these new complexities is to create a replicated marketing database driven from your enterprise customer data management tools.  Rather than trying to make your enterprise tools something that they are typically not meant to be, creating a replicated marketing database provides the security and fully functioning marketing features for integrated electronic and traditional communications to your customer base. 

While you may be concerned about costs, we find that this approach provides significant advantages:

• Typically costs much less than trying to customize your own enterprise system
• Can be launched much quicker and with less hassle than changes to your own system. 
• Immediately offers more features (i.e. Landing pages for customer email and general updates, customer preference centers, activity reporting, demographically enhanced customer data) that would require even more costs and development time if done internally

Given the growing demands for integrated marketing communications, you are likely looking at this area if you haven’t already set a strategy for your organization.  We recommend that you consider this approach when you do.

Feel free to give us a call to discuss options in this area, or listen to our recent webinar How Changing Communications Trends Drive Integrated Marketing ROI for more concrete Direct Marketing Association facts in this area.  You will also find an overview of ICS’s Integrated Communications Platform (ICP) which may be consideration for your business as well.

It seems marketers are improving at deliverability and open-rates, but still struggle with relevancy.  Isn’t that ironic?  The one element that is NOT technology-based – message and offer relevancy –is still the primary hurdle!

You would think that marketers would have this down-pat by now because fine-tuning your message or offer has been a part of successful marketing long before email was a twinkle in your MS-DOS PC’s eye. 

Or, maybe it’s just human nature that we fall into the trap of marketing in terms of what we want to offer to our customers INSTEAD of marketing in terms of what’s relevant to customers’ wants, needs and challenges. 

The good news is that even in spite of the relevancy issue, email marketing continues to be a successful and low-cost method for increasing sales and stimulating offline purchases (as part of an integrated strategy… yet another one of my favorite soap boxes, but I will refrain myself!). 

This study also shows which sectors did a better job in click-through rates.  Enjoy…  http://directmag.com/email/news/e-mail-delivery-open-click-0709/

But how do these new marketing tools really compare to the fundamentals in the Digital Services arena like Search Engine Optimization.  As Adam explains below, this is more of a longer term investment and very analytically/metric driven.  While the new social networking tools have their place, SEO has proven to be a constant contributor to targeted digital lead generation in the long run.  Take a read through his thoughts below:

We live in an instant gratification world anymore, and it somehow manages to become even more instantaneous with each passing day. Twitter is a perfect example of this.  If you haven’t “tweeted” yet, you’re probably going to be considered unhip by teenagers and the tech savvy, and you’ll also be left out in the dark as to what everyone you know is doing at every second of the day.  Businesses, of course, have jumped on this bandwagon and are courting followers and fans through these channels and (some better than others) promoting products and services and attempting to build brand loyalty.

Some of us who earned our stripes in more traditional online marketing (does anyone remember SEO, pay per click and banner advertising?) are going to have to continue to get better at selling the value of a service that often seems to be getting no results, or moving at a snail’s pace.  Social media appeals so well to the instant gratification crowd, as you can get huge blasts of traffic through to your site from Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon, but often this success is fleeting.  Twitter can be a great tool to engage customers and prospects, but still lacks a great ability to target.

I’ve spent months, and sometimes years on sites to finally get that high ranking that starts driving the “dream traffic” you want to your site.  The hard part is trying to keep someone paying for this service, when all you can show them is an increased ranking…but no revenue.  The truth is, even for highly targeted terms, being on page one of search results simply isn’t good enough to get a significant portion of traffic.  If you’re not in the top three listings, you’re still not even playing the game.  In competitive markets, getting from 15th to 1st can be incredibly difficult, and may take months or years.  But depending on what product or service that keyword relates to, getting to the top can mean literally thousands of visitors coming through to your site who have already expressly stated they want what you have.

Let’s put it this way, if you sold coffee, this would be the equivalent of magically appearing in front of someone right after they decide, “I need a cup of coffee.”  No trip to Starbucks, or the grocery store to look at competitive products, they ask for coffee and you’re there, and you have the first opportunity to sell.  How much is that worth?  And can you afford not to make that investment?  The truth is, if you don’t, someone else will, and those who do won’t be worrying about jumping on the next digital marketing bandwagon, at least not with the same urgency.

Adam Henige is a Managing Partner at Netvantage Marketing, an ICS Strategic Partner specializing in paid search management, SEO, and web analytics.