One thing every Internet user has in common is the fact that they're constantly bombarded with advertisements throughout their web browsing experience. It's easy for customers to become incredibly jaded towards ads, eventually filtering out marketing that does not instantly resonate with their needs. When you take into account the rising use of adblock technology, it's clear that marketers must combat their customers' skepticism towards ads by employing newer and better techniques to remain relevant. The turning point against the rising tide of skepticism? Triggered messages.
Triggered messages are customized to each recipient's needs, preferences, and personal history and sent only at specific points in their customer lifecycle. This means that what the customer sees is guaranteed to be directly relevant to who they are and what they want.
Why is this necessary? Studies show that personalized marketing has a significant effect on KPIs, which means that customers who send messages or products that meet the needs of the customer have a much higher chance of getting through to a jaded customer than a generic, one-size-fits-all ad would. Ultimately, personalized content is more likely to reach and resonate with its intended target than non-personalized content is, and therefore that much more likely to generate revenue.
So, how can companies reach out to disconnected customers with a marketing strategy that combines personalization with triggered messaging? To start, companies should have an analytics software in place that tracks and sorts customer data. This will enable them to adjust their marketing strategies to meet the needs of each individual customer. Once that system is in place, reaching an ad-weary customer is as simple as initiating interaction or creating a final push.
Using Triggered Messages to Initiate Interaction
An introductory triggered message is kind of like a pick-up line: you take what you know about the customer and use it to break the ice and get a conversation going. This can take the form of an automated "Hello!", a birthday offer, or the introduction of a new product that a customer might like based on his or her previous purchases and browsing history.
The weird thing about triggered messages: on some level, we're perfectly aware that the "Thank you for following us!" or whatever is an automated message, but another part of us is honestly just glad to be acknowledged. Poignant indictment about the massive distance between individuals in today's digital society? Perhaps - but it works.
Alongside Twitter, Facebook, and so on - email still yields some of the highest ROI for advertisers and is a great platform from which to send personalized trigger messages. Retailers already make frequent use of this space to announce new products and special offers, but this tactic can be enhanced by specifically tailoring content to each customer's past purchases and buying behaviors.
If you're unsure about where to start or don't have much customer data to go on, personalized birthday messages that include special offers are a fantastic opportunity to create a dialogue between your customer and your brand. Everyone loves free birthday stuff - that's just a fact.
Final Push
Triggered messages can also take the form of a notification about an abandoned cart, a request for the user to take action on a website, or simply a reminder than the user has not interacted with your brand in a while.
Sometimes, this personalized final push is just what a disconnected consumer needs to finish a transaction that they've left hanging for one reason or another. Abandoned cart emails are a perfect example of this. When a customer strays from a website leaving behind a shopping cart full of products, an automated email that checks in with the customer can lead to a completed sale. It's a no-brainer for any online retailer to have this in their toolkit, since it costs next to nothing, doesn't require any additional effort on your part, and has the added benefit of closing a sale.
The Idea of North
Marketers have got to adapt along with the times and circumstances of the era. In the case of triggered messages, it means sending out offers that meet a specific need that a customer has at a particular time in order to overcome their ad-weariness and circumvent their adblocking software.
I'm not going to lie - as a marketer, sometimes it can be difficult to sift through the noise of emerging technologies and new developments in omnichannel. In times like these, we find that it's best to fall back on perhaps the most basic principle of marketing, business, and sales: serve the customer.
Put the customer first. You won't get lost.