RSS Ray's Online Marketing Blog

Ross Kramer, CEO of Listrak, explains how Event Triggered Messaging allows you to design and decide the conversation you want to have with your customers.

Automated email marketing, also known as Event Triggered Messaging (ETM) is NOW technology that will enable virtually any sized business to greatly energize its email marketing. What does that means in business terms? It means improving customer relationships and customer care and it means increasing purchase frequency and brand loyalty. It also means reduced time and money compared with manual processing and management.

How does that work? Automated email messaging is designed to send transactional email messages that are triggered by subscriber actions or profiling attributes. You can trigger messages from just about any customer or subscriber touch-point and you can lead each recipient down the path that is most relevant to their needs.

So for example someone makes a hotel reservation online, after which they are automatically sent a confirmation email. A set number of days prior to their hotel stay they are automatically sent another email containing links to various local activities and hotel amenities. Depending on the action, or in-action, of the recipient, they will then receive a further more specific email related to the area or activity they clicked on that prompts them to make an actual booking or purchase. If they choose to do nothing – after a set period – they are removed from the conversation.

The result is a natural, progressive conversation with each customer that provides them with useful individualized information, without the marketer or business having to reach out or respond manually. Even elaborate email campaigns can be mapped out in minutes, empowering businesses to build deeper relationships with customers and prospects – while spending less time managing them.

As an example – automatic cart abandonment emails aimed at encouraging shoppers to complete or even increase the level of their transaction by the inclusion of discount offers or free shipping have proven highly effective and have much higher open rates than promotional emails.

Not all Event Triggered Messages are complex. Simple auto-responders like welcome messages are triggered by someone completing a form online. And anniversary or birthday messages based on information captured from online forms, can be set up to automatically send an email with a special anniversary discount offer every year at the same time.

In a nutshell ETM lets you design and decide ahead of time what sort of conversation you want to have with your customers and subscribers, and what messages you wish to send them based on their actions or profile characteristics. It’s this one-to-one interaction and the ability to integrate dynamic content that builds engagement and encourages ongoing, profitable relationships.

Listrak Conductor™ from Email Service Provider Listrak is a new event triggered messaging solution built in to Listrak Professional and Enterprise accounts. It’s both powerful and easy to use. It’s also priced so that just about any business can afford to use it, not just the big guys. There are no upfront costs, volume pricing and pay per use pricing are both offered, plus accounts receive 500 free Conductor messages every month. Pretty much a no-brainer to try.

In terms of easy to use, Conductor lets marketers plot their email conversations “whiteboard style,” giving them a quick snapshot of every conversation path.  Plus, the system includes a bunch of time-saving features like ready to use templates and visual reporting tools that make it easy to edit the conversation flow, create and save the emails, define the timing for each message, and select the events to kick off the conversation.

If you need more convincing to try automated email marketing (event triggered messaging), refer to Forrester’s June 2009 US Email Marketing Forecast 2009-2014. According to the report, email remains an indispensable low-cost communications tool for consumers and businesses alike – with an ROI that is 2 to 3 times higher than any other form of direct marketing.

The report also forecasts greater adoption of relevancy empowering tactics, such as triggering, segmentation and dynamic content – as businesses face increased clutter in the in-box and the need to get serious about relevance. Forrester also suggests that any business innovating now to increase relevancy, will have a tremendous opportunity to outpace any competition that choose to defer adoption due to the current economy.

What are you waiting for?  For more information, visit www.listrak.com/conductor or call us at 877.364.4556.