Many marketers have only scratched the surface of event-triggered campaigns. These tend to be “one-off” initiatives, and primarily limited to email. Common examples include an email that is automatically pushed to a customer who abandons a shopping cart or experiences a technology glitch on an e-commerce site.

As marketers engage in building more valuable two-way relationships with customers and prospects across multiple channels like print, web, email, call centers, and mobile, they soon realize that their dated, one-dimensional event-triggered practices must evolve as well. Relying on good timing and a large database isn’t enough to drive new revenue opportunities.

Modern event-triggered marketing strategies require personalization and a means to capture and track previous purchases and preferences across multiple touch points. In order to maximize the potential of these campaigns, marketers must learn how to put valuable prospect and customer data to work in order to effectively ‘trigger’ personalized marketing messages, offers and initiatives.

While organizations may need to make some changes to existing marketing processes and technologies to maximize returns on these campaigns, research shows the long term payoffs are worth the effort. Consider research from Gartner that found event-triggered marketing can potentially save 80 percent of marketers’ direct mail budget. This can be attributed to supporting personalized on-demand printing practices based on trigger events, like signing up a new loyalty club member, versus mass production and distribution of brochures to a list of unqualified prospects. And that’s only the start.

Once marketers establish cross-channel event-triggered marketing as a strategic initiative, they can establish goals in terms the entire organization can understand – new customer acquisitions and revenue gains based on successful up-sell and cross-sell offers to existing customers. With a clear set of measurable strategies, marketers arrive at the budgeting table in a position of strength and are more likely to be able to gain approval for the necessary process and/or technology changes required to make event-triggered campaigns an important element of long-term cross-channel marketing planning cycles.

To get started, marketers must clearly define the goals of event-triggered campaigns for both audiences – new customers and existing customers. It’s possible to focus on only one audience to start, in fact this approach may be the best way to test and evaluate on a smaller scale. Begin by selecting a few metrics that you can easily manage throughout the campaign to establish benchmarks.

Then you need to examine existing technologies and processes. Is the right technology in place to leverage the data you collect about your customers across channels? As you track your predetermined set of metrics, can your existing system flag something if it doesn’t look right in order for you to make necessary adjustments?

According to Gartner, event-triggered marketing messages receive up to five times the response rate of non-targeted push messages. These results are within reach for campaigns that are generated from a single data repository that automatically captures and consolidates customer activity and behavior from all customer engagement channels – in-store purchases, online warranty upgrades, customer services calls and more. If these customer communications are left in silos, marketers lack the visibility into customer conversions and are challenged to link a purchase event with a personalized cross-sell or up-sell offer.

By targeting event-triggered messages and offers across channels based on customers’ previous actions and preferences, marketers have the tools they need to encourage loyalty and repeat business.

Join Quaero and Neolane for a free webinar: New Rules for a Cross-Channel World Sep. 22, 1:00 pm (EDT)