Triggered campaigns: The power to do more with less
With marketing budgets shrinking and an ever-growing pressure to do more with less in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, automation is no longer a nice to have, but a must-have. Here, Adobe’s Mike Madden explains how to get it right using triggered campaigns.
During his session at the Mumbrella B2B Marketing Symposium, Mike Madden, Adobe’s director of North America commercial and customer demand generation, Adobe Experience Cloud, explained how triggered campaigns can give marketers the power to respond to prospective buyers anywhere and everywhere, at any moment in time.
“You can listen for all sorts of behaviours,” said Madden. “You can listen for people opening an email, clicking an email, unsubscribing, visiting your webpage, which web page [they visited], and whether they filled out a form.”
Automation not only allows marketers to track current actions, but their entire path online, which includes where they came from, where they went, and what their next move is. This is critical when you consider that marketers today own a far greater chunk of the buyer’s journey than in decades past.
Madden uses the example of buying a car pre-internet, at a time when sales owned far more of the buyer journey. “You would show up at a dealership, and say ‘I’d like to know more about that car’. The salesperson would hand you a brochure, you’d take it home to discuss with your spouse and with your family, and you’d weigh up all your options. You go back to the dealership, maybe interact with the same salesperson, and you would buy your car.”
“Today, you can literally buy a car online. It can show up at your door on a tow truck, but you’ve never interacted with sales. Compared to where we were, marketing owns far more of the customer journey.”
The workhorse of marketing automation
According to Madden, smart campaigns are the “workhorses of marketing automation”, which do everything from data value changes that trigger emails, to nurturing leads. These campaigns are built up of smart lists, which is the “audiences that you define”; flow, which is “what happens to that person”; and schedule, which is “do I want it to happen now, or is it always happening?”
In order to build a successful smart campaign, behaviour scores can be implemented to help determine how important a lead is, and help sales and marketing work together in tandem. “Behavioural scoring is the shared methodology between sales and marketing, for ranking what behaviours are most important, and which ones are not,” said Madden. “What makes someone an unqualified lead? What we’re trying to do is create a common definition: what’s a good lead? What do they do? What do they look like?”
Behavioural scoring is an incredibly effective tool: a 10% increase in lead quality can translate into a 40% increase in sales productivity. Scoring is dynamic, meaning it fluctuates based on the type and quality of interaction.
Leads can also be scored by demographic, which involves “scoring people based on who they are.” These are the inputs and explicit attributes that you’re able to collect about someone’s personal data, including their job title, phone number, and whether their phone number and email are valid.
“You can also pair that with their company data,” explains Madden. “Does this company squarely fall within the correct ideal customer profile (ICP) that we go after? Or is it an industry that we don’t even care about? Do they have the right revenue size?”
“Now we’re finding the right person for the right account and bringing those two attributes together to ensure that I’m not just passing leads, but leads that really matter for a salesperson.”
The same methodology can be applied in the reverse, in which the marketer can assign a visitor a negative value based on who they’re not. “If a student comes into your website, and you know a student isn’t the right buyer, you should be assigning them a negative demographic score.”
Once leads are coming into your system, an intelligent nurture engine gives them content based on who they are, and it can all happen automatically. Marketers are able to automate their triggers, which allow them to sort people into where they belong by how they receive content.
According to Madden, triggers are the way to help these leads find their home, and can reduce the headache of sorting new people into the appropriate programs. They’re also incredibly effective: website triggers drive three times more engagement than batch emails.
Triggered emails, when compared to batch and nurturing emails, have a 261% better open rate, 157% higher click to open rates, 833% higher click-through rates, and are 7,675% more efficient at generating an opportunity for sale.
Ultimately, it’s clear that triggered campaigns result in better marketing outcomes. In a world where budgets are being squeezed tighter than ever before, automation is the superpower every brand needs.
Click here to watch the full session on demand.