Trigger Marketing’s Biggest Challenge: Going Beyond Human Intuition

Trigger marketing is a good idea. Customers are not always ready to buy when you want to sell so it’s important to nuture leads through periodic communication triggered by events such as website interaction, inquiries, birthdays, etc. The more relevant and well timed that communication, the more likely you can keep the customer engaged until he or she is ready to pull the trigger, so to speak.

Michael Thompson of ClickTactics/ClickSquared makes good case for trigger marketing in his recent DMNews article Keys to trigger-based e-mail marketing. What caught my attention most was:

Timing and relevancy are the foundation on which successful marketing programs are built.Missing on either front can often spell disaster for a campaign.

Much as a dancer needs both rhythm and knowledge of the right steps to dance, marketers must hit both “right message” and “right time” to move the customer to action. By aligning the content and timing of e-mail messages with customer needs, you’re increasing the relevance, response and, ultimately, revenue from your direct marketing programs.

There is no question that communicating the right message at the right time is critical in trigger marketing. Often, however, more resources are devoted to implementing the data collection systems required to track customer behavior than to determining the marketing rules that will make trigger marketing a success. This is not surprising since vendors make their money selling analytics systems, leaving analysis to hapless marketers awash in a hurricane of raw data.

Faced with the task of developing trigger rules and content, many marketers go with intuition. Did the customer just abandon a shopping cart? Send an email asking them to finish the purchase! Did he click a PPC link for one product but then look at another before leaving? Send an email pushing the first product! Or should it be the second? Or both? And do it immediately! Or maybe give them a day to think it over!

The fact is that using human intuition, while better than nothing, rarely produces optimal trigger marketing rules. The optimal rules are there, though, hidden in gigabytes of customer data collected in analytics systems waiting to be uncovered. Few marketers, however, have access to the statisticans and data miners needed to unlock the secrets.

We’re looking to change that and I suspect that others are too. Trigger marketing will play an increasing role in marketing and it will always require elements of human intuition. Our bet, however, is that it will require data crunchers even more.

Tags: Data Mining, trigger marketing

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Data Mining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.