Today, we're going to talk about trigger marketing... Namely, how to drip email campaigns out based on what prospects and visitors do!
With marketing automation, there are lots of different things that you can do in terms of outbound marketing. You can send emails, text messages, fire out outbound calls... You can even send postcards and letters depending on the platform.
At the root of marketing automation, though, are three things that you need to be familiar with:
- Triggers
- Campaigns
- Goals
Look at any campaign builder, MarTech or AdTech tool, and you find that they're all based around those three fundamental components.
We'll be doing individual videos on each component. Today we're going to talk about triggers and how they are used in trigger marketing and email automation as a whole.
What is a Trigger?
A trigger, sometimes named a rule, is any action that causes another action to happen.
Think of an if-then statement. If someone does this, then that happens.
There's a really, really popular app called IFTTT. It stands for If This Then That. If you take a photo, then it'll automatically upload it to Facebook for you. If a sale comes in, then it'll send a notification to your email address or send you a push notification. It'll add a string of text to a Google Drive doc... It's infinitely configurable and it brings two pieces of software together.
In trigger-based marketing, when the "IF" statement is fired, there's a "THEN."
What makes a Trigger fire?
Marketing automation triggers can take on a few different forms. One of the most common is when someone fills out a form on a landing page (for, let's say, a lead magnet). When someone opts in, it then triggers them to be added to a campaign.
Another type of trigger is a tag. When a tag is applied to a customer record, it triggers the campaign.
A third form of trigger in marketing: if a person visits a website. That page visit can actually be a trigger that'll send a drip email campaign.
Automatically adding someone to a email promotion sequence
One of my absolute favorite things to do with marketing automation is firing a trigger based on a page view.
Inside Axis, we have an advanced analytics tool that tracks page views. When a page is visited AND we have the email record on file, then we add them into the promo campaign.
I've been doing this for a really long time in our software sales pages and for clients.
So, what happens is, the prospect is clicking around... Maybe they go over to the sales page to watch the sales video... Then a day later they get Email #1 of the Product Promo Sequence. Two days later they get Email #2. Three days later, they get Email #3.
We set this whole trigger marketing / drip email automatoin up with little blocks of five and six emails for all of the major sales pages...
If they added that product to a cart, but didn't buy it within 30 minutes, we would send them a shopping cart abandonment email. And then a day later, another shopping cart abandonment email.
One of the most effective things to do is think about what actions my prospect will take, and what needs to happen because of those actions.
In terms of trigger marketing, page views, opt-ins, and tags are great ways to kick off an email automation campaign.
If you want to talk a little bit more about how trigger marketing and drip email campaigns can be used in your business, make sure to book an action plan call here. It's free, we'll dig into your business and what you need to do to optimize your sales and marketing campaigns, and give you an action plan to get it done.