Trigger Marketing: Definitions, Benefits, and Key Strategies

When it comes to successful marketing strategies, the main thing that matters is delivering your messages to the right audience at the right time. If you fail, customers, in most cases, won’t engage with your products. No matter how many messages you send and what communication channels you use, customers learn to ignore them if they aren’t relevant.

How do you know the right time to approach a customer? Trigger marketing may help you find an answer. It’s a highly effective strategy for finding the exact moment customers need you and reaching them with a relevant offer. Recent research shows that triggered email campaigns receive a 306% greater click-through rate than non-triggered emails.

Aren’t there enough reasons to try out its full potential? With this article, we will help you understand more about trigger-based marketing and how you can make the most of it.

Black laughing woman waving hand and using mobile phone while in office

What you will find in this article:

What is trigger marketing?

Trigger marketing is an automated event-based marketing technique that undertakes a specific set of actions in response to customer behavior. These actions may include sending messages and notifications or activating pop-ups and chatbots. Different customer actions trigger different types of communication in order to maximize impact and customization.

Because triggered messages are sent to customers in response to their actions, they are ideal tools for marketing campaigns that need specific and timely targeting. Most importantly, they can be sent at any stage of the customer journey and require minimal resource investment.

What are marketing triggers?

Triggers drive everything; that’s why you need to define them precisely. They can be anything measurable by your CRM or any other automation software: a specific date, a purchase, an email opening, or a cart abandonment. Each of these triggers can automatically generate a customized reply to a customer.

There are several different types of triggers:

1. Event triggers

Events, such as public holidays, customer birthdays, or company anniversaries, are some of the most popular options for creating triggered messages. They’re a great way to send a limited offer, a personal promotion, or a gift recommendation that customers may choose from your products.

Trigger Marketing: Definitions, Benefits, and Key Strategies

2. Engagement triggers

Trigger messages can be sent in response to different types of user engagement – or the lack thereof. If your customers don’t show any activity on your website or with your ads, triggered messages can help you win back their attention. Responses to different user actions, such as subscription, comment, or inactivity, can help you increase conversion and engagement rates.

3. Behavior triggers

Focusing on the customers’ behavior online and collecting data about their actions is a chance to understand them better and suggest more relevant offers. Responding to behavior triggers, such as cart abandonment, viewed products, or time spent on a specific page, can show your customers that you care and entice them to purchase your products.

4. Emotional triggers

Emotional triggers work with customer feelings, such as fear, hunger, love, happiness, trust, and so on. An appeal to these sentiments can help you deepen a connection with customers, make them trust your brand more, and increase conversion and engagement. Strong emotional relationships with customers can also make them more loyal and encourage them to buy more.

How to use trigger-based marketing?

To achieve the best results with your campaign, you should have clearly defined triggers and immediate automated actions in response to them. This ensures the relevance of messages customers receive from you. Here are some tips to help you set up your triggered campaign:

1. Get to know your customer

Any marketing activity requires understanding of the audience, but this point is particularly important with trigger marketing. Triggers leave no room for mistakes, so collecting as much data as possible is crucial. You should not only know basic demographic and employment information about your customers but also understand their pain points, values, and goals. This will allow you to create highly personalized trigger campaigns that increase conversion rates.

2. Identify your triggers

To set up a relevant trigger campaign, you need to clearly identify your triggers so the automated software can understand them and initiate appropriate actions. Triggers can be determined based on the information in your CRM system or any other software. They can tell you what message is relevant to your customer and when to send it. Try to analyze your sales stages and define what actions make your customers drop off, and set them as triggers.

Trigger Marketing: Definitions, Benefits, and Key Strategies

3. Set automated responses

Once you know your triggers, define a set of actions that should be performed as a response to them. For every specific trigger, you should choose an appropriate message that will help you achieve your goals. The most common actions are sending personalized emails, activating pop-up offers, or suggesting help via chatbot. This will show customers you care about them and move them forward to the right outcome.

4. Personalize your communication

To increase engagement, you should customize your offers to make them more relevant to your clients. Recent studies show that customers find personalized experiences more appealing and are 80% more likely to make a purchase if they receive personalized offers. Crafting relevant messages with added value can lead your client to purchase, but to do so, it is crucial to understand how one client is different from another and where they are in their customer journey.

To wrap up

Trigger-based marketing can help your brand build automated communications that are timely, relevant, and highly personalized. Implementing this strategy is an excellent way to respond quickly to customer behavior and encourage them to respond in line with your goals. If you want to enhance your client’s experience and establish deeper connections with them, implementing elements of trigger-based marketing in your campaigns is a great way to start.