Triggered Communications Raise Email Response Rates and Conversions
Filed under: Email Marketing, General Marketing, Lead Management, List Strategy, Uncategorized, integrated marketing
There has been a lot of discussion from the recent DMA and around ICS regarding Triggered Communications. Why all the buzz? Quite simply it is driven from the successes that larger organizations are starting to see in this area.
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.
2010 DMA Should Be Interesting
Filed under: Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, General Marketing, Marketing Technology Solutions, Search Engine Marketing, Uncategorized, integrated marketing
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
