The Ultimate Guide to Trigger Marketing

You’ve heard it before: successful marketing comes from getting the right message to the right person at the right time.

But how do you know when the right moment has come, and how do you deliver that message to your customers?

One possible solution? Trigger marketing.

Below, we explain what trigger marketing is and how it works. We also walk through several examples you might be able to use in your business. We also discuss this strategy's benefits and answer other questions you may have.

What is trigger marketing?

Trigger marketing refers to the marketing practice of sending marketing messages to current or potential customers when a particular event, or trigger, occurs. This message may be delivered through email, SMS, direct mail, or any other communication channel. Trigger marketing aims to influence your customers when you believe they are primed to make a purchase or interact with your brand.

Brand content is woven into the fabric of our online experiences, and modern consumers interact with brands as a matter of routine across devices and platforms. This creates a double-edged sword: there’s plenty of opportunity for marketers to connect with their audiences, but it’s also easy to send irrelevant or poorly timed messages — and this is how you end up annoying and alienating customers.

In a study by Convince & Convert, 67% of consumers reported unsubscribing from company mailing lists because they received too many irrelevant messages. In fact, it was the number-one reason people unsubscribed.

Trigger marketing examples

There are countless potential examples of how you might implement trigger marketing within your broader marketing strategy. Just a few examples include:

• A “reminder” email you send to customers when they abandon a shopping cart
• A birthday message sent by email offering a birthday discount to a repeat customer
• An email from an online retailer with holiday inspiration or gift ideas
• A follow-up text to customers who viewed a product page or item listing on your site without making a purchase

Types of triggers

While trigger marketing is often discussed as though it’s some monolithic concept, in reality, there are several different types of triggers and trigger strategies that you might consider. We typically break automation triggers out into the following categories:

• Event-based triggers: Event-based triggers are tied to a specific event. They commonly trigger marketing around big sales like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Other examples might include your brand anniversary, a significant product conference, etc.
• Behavior-based triggers: Behavior-based triggers are determined by customer behavior — an action they take on your website. They are commonly used to nudge customers who have abandoned a cart, viewed a particular product page or website page, or taken some other action that could potentially signal interest in your product or service.
• Segment-based triggers: Segment-based triggers are determined by what you actually know about your customers. This can include a customer’s birthday, age, geography, interests — truly anything you know about them.
• Location-based triggers: Location-based triggers use a customer’s physical location to send them marketing messaging. For example, if a customer connects to your store’s wifi, you might send them a 5% discount by SMS or in-app notification to encourage a sale or direct them to a new product offering you’re trying to push.
• Emotion-based triggers: Emotion-based triggers seek to lean into a customer’s psyche to encourage a sale. Loyalty rewards sent to customers who have made a certain number of purchases or who have been customers for a certain amount of time are one example of these triggers.

Benefits of trigger marketing

When done right, digital marketing triggers are a thing of beauty. Email automation triggers, for instance, produce a staggering 306% greater click-through rate than blast emails. And yet, most companies still aren’t using trigger marketing to its fullest potential.

Marketing automation triggers foster a long-term relationship between a customer and a brand. A customer’s journey with your company may begin months or even years before they purchase. Still, you should consider their LTV (lifetime value) and not over-focus on enticing them to take immediate action.

Trigger automation and robust data allow marketers to achieve this at scale to maximize ROI. When you’ve access to rich data that helps you understand a customer’s personality, goals, and routines, trigger marketing offers relevant, personalized communications at just the right time.

Effective trigger campaign marketing is one of the modern marketer’s most powerful tools, but it’s becoming harder to implement, with a growing number of technical and legal considerations many marketers simply don’t have the bandwidth to address: Apple’s iOS 14.5 release shrunk support for cookies and turned off sharing of users’ IDFAs (Identifier for Advertisers) by default, vastly limiting marketers’ ability to deliver personalized and targeted advertising and laws like GDPR, CCPA, and VCDPA all point to a path of narrowing data availability that will require companies to own their data.

Companies that aren’t preparing now for the rapid changes in how customer data can be collected and used may well find their digital marketing efforts suddenly crippled.

Marketers should use this shift to create more thoughtful, organic relationship-building strategies because customers want that. This is no longer possible to achieve manually or by using the same outdated tools companies used a decade ago.

Thankfully, for marketers intrepid enough to take the plunge, tools are available that make trigger marketing the secret weapon you’ve been waiting for.

Tips for implementing trigger marketing

Are you excited to begin implementing trigger marketing within your organization? Below are some tips you can use to get it right:

1. Iterate to find what works best for you

A highly effective trigger marketing strategy is tailored to your product, industry, and customers. With that in mind, you may discover that certain triggers or communication channels work better or worse than others.

The only way to know this is to test out as many as possible to see what does and doesn’t work. Once you know what works, you can lean into those strategies and avoid wasting resources on the options that prove less effective. Continuously iterate to ensure that your strategy performs as best as possible.

2. Focus on collecting customer data

Trigger marketing is a way to help your business achieve more genuine interactions with your customers. But that’s only possible if you have a solid customer data foundation. Without this customer data, designing a trigger marketing strategy that will predictably work over the long term will be impossible.

With that in mind, you should focus on building a comprehensive data strategy that includes zero-party, first-party, and third-party data capable of providing deep insights into your customers' personalities and motivations.

3. Use AI and machine learning for added efficiencies

You're not wrong if this sounds like a lot to manage manually. Manually segmenting your database and looking for data to inform your triggers may not be feasible for many smaller businesses.

The good news is that AI and machine learning can help you achieve trigger marketing success without breaking the bank. Predictive analytics using AI, for example, can help you parse your data, looking for insights more efficiently than would probably be possible through manual evaluation. Meanwhile, generative AI can help you craft and test the different messages (emails, texts, push notifications) you send.

Why industry leaders choose Simon Data for trigger marketing

Simon Data’s platforms represent the next generation of digital marketing tools. They’re comprehensive, fully integrated platforms that unify powerhouse data-gathering capabilities with the ability to craft cross-channel marketing experiences, including all essential forms of trigger marketing.

Industry leaders like Venmo, TripAdvisor, ASOS, and BarkBox are driving explosive growth using Simon’s Customer Data Platform and Simon Mail and Simon Journeys. Here are a few reasons why:

Better CRM and marketing integration avoids trigger collisions and misfired messages. When customers are eligible for multiple campaigns, trigger collisions are a common problem.

This may include situations in which customers receive a cart abandonment message after actually purchasing the item or when customers receive several messages with disparate calls to action within too short a time span. Simon Data’s solution sidesteps these problems through better campaign prioritization logic.

Triggered email marketing is one facet of a cross-channel approach. Earlier generations of email marketing platforms didn’t allow for cross-channel campaign integration. The strongest triggered email marketing campaigns today, however, draw on triggers from various channels, including but far from limited to email.

More sophistication doesn’t mean more confusion. Unifying a customer data platform with marketing management tools creates a central command hub for your marketing team. Simon Data customers don’t need to worry about important information being lost among employee silos or about not being able to actually use good data when it counts. Instead, they enjoy smoother, more efficient workflows, and a much better ROI on marketing dollars spent.