November 5, 2019

In direct marketing campaigns, the word “trigger” is commonly used but often misunderstood. While most folks rightfully consider a trigger to be a reaction to some sort of event of – like a customer placing an order or clicking through an email – it’s not truly a trigger unless (a) you know it happened, and (b) you’re able to act upon it. What does this mean? It’s simple. For starters: if your marketing database is updated weekly, you can’t react to something that happened a day ago, much less a few seconds ago. And secondly, your marketing system has to support real time interrupts; which is a fancy way of saying that it has to immediately stop whatever it’s doing and react to an event, then go back to whatever it was doing before being rudely interrupted.

Fortunately, with MarketWide™ you’re in luck! It provides several helpful features for handling triggers, including:

• A digital component that automatically processes email and web activity – opens, bounces, page clicks, and so on; and writes this information directly into your database, regardless of your standard update cycle. This means you can react to an email open or a page click within seconds of it happening.
• A simple API called “MarketConnect” that lets you pass it transactions such as inquiries and purchases as they occur. MarketConnect saves this information to your database where it can be acted upon.
• And finally, MarketWide cheerfully accepts interruptions through its integrated Trigger mechanism. With due respect to Roy Rogers’ beloved horse, a MarketWide trigger – among other things – can bounce people out of a campaign or send them in a different direction at any point during their journey.

How it Works

MarketWide campaigns consist of two general steps: segmenting people into its campaign universe, then sending each selected person through a series of multichannel touches. In some extreme cases, the journey can take months to complete, and things can happen along the way that ends or changes the path.

In the simplest scenario, a person can respond to your offer by purchasing and you stop marketing to her. More complicated events might be someone changing their address or solicitation preference, and having a system that can immediately react and adapt to these things gives you an advantage in your marketing tactics.

MarketWide’s journey system is built with its MarketFlow interface – a word that combines “marketing” and “flowchart.” Visually, MarketFlow is a diagram where each shape represents a marketing action like sending an email, waiting a couple days, asking if it’s been opened or clicked, and so on; while the lines indicate direction of travel.

To react to events, MarketFlow journeys can be interrupted by triggers, which are built by the campaign designer. A trigger can produce two outcomes:

• Exclude – everyone matching the trigger condition gets bounced out of the campaign.
• Jump – everyone matching the trigger condition jumps to a new path in their journey.

As campaigns are processed, MarketWide continually polls to see if a trigger condition has been met. No matter where each person is in their journey, the instant a trigger is fired, everyone matching the trigger is either bounced out or jumps to the new destination.

A Visual Walk Through

Adding a trigger to MarketWide is easy! Just click the trigger button to open the MarketFlow Triggers dialog. From here, choose the “Add” button and build your trigger condition. To exclude responders, this can be as simple as selecting your Orders table and adding a recency condition (i.e., exclude everyone that places an order after the campaign has launched).

The screenshot above illustrates two triggers in action. The first one catches everyone who complains or opts out of our email while the campaign is active. The instant this happens, MarketWide redirects these people to a “DirectMail” destination. The second trigger simply bounces people out of the campaign once they place an order. As you can see, there were 13 complaints/unsubs transferred and 47 responders excluded.

Conclusion

While the phrase “cash is king” is popular in business and finance, in direct marketing, data is king. Data let us know who to market to, what to market, how to market, and so on.  But equally important is your ability to quickly act upon data. And that’s what MarketWide triggers are designed to do. Want to see it in action? Contact us now.