What is Interactive Marketing?

Interactive marketing is a one to one marketing process that reacts and changes based on the actions of individual customers and prospects. This ability to react to the actions of customers and prospects means that trigger based marketing is dramatically more effective than normal direct marketing.

Interactive marketing is typically 2-12 times more effective than traditional direct marketing[1].

Interactive marketing is called many things. You may have heard it called event based marketing or event driven marketing or even trigger based marketing but it is all the same idea: reacting to what the customer is doing and driving up marketing effectiveness.

Where would you use interactive marketing?

When you ask people about trigger based marketing they generally think of reacting to some trigger in the customer relationship, such as asking for a loan payout figure for a bank loan. Customers asking for this information may be looking to refinance their loan. The request should trigger some action on your part to try to stop them from leaving.

However, with the growth of inbound marketing and lead nurture campaigns interactive marketing is applicable to all organisations:

Business to business and Business to consumer
High transaction and low transactions businesses.
Pre-sale prospect management and post-sale customer management

Implementing event based marketing

When implementing event based marketing you need to ensure that you have right systems in place and that you address each of the five 5 key steps.

Systems

There are minimum practical systems needed to run any type of event based marketing campaign

The ability to monitor customer behaviour via a customer database of some type
The Ability to decide what to do needs a real time, rules based decisioning engine
The ability to execute in a timely fashion though
- Campaign management software
- Email marketing automation software
- The ability to input to face to face / contact centre channel
The ability to report on what happened

Processes

There a five key processes needed to implement event based marketing campaigns.

Identify Triggers Triggers can come from a number of places including data analysis, customer feedback and staff brainstorming. Identifying a set of triggers that is right for your organisation is the first key part of the process.
Create responses This seems easy but can be one of the hardest parts of the process. When you have identified a potential trigger you need to create a response that will drive the right action.
Evaluate success Just like any other marketing approach you need to be able to measure and demonstrate success in event driven marketing.
Operationalize Unlike traditional direct marketing where you might run 10, 20 or 30 campaigns a week / month / quarter, with event driven marketing you may end up running 50, 100 or 300 a DAY. So you will need to automate the process.
Optimtimize When you are running 300 campaigns a day it is likely that the same customer will be a candidate for more than one campaign. So which campaign to you put them in? That is the question that Optimisation answers.

Next Steps

More Detailed Information

Download this 38 page presentation on Implementing Interactive Marketing.
Download Now

Getting Started: Interactive Marketing Workshop

This one day internal company workshop will provide you with the tools and skills to get moving on your own interactive marketing program.

Workshop Info

Contact Us

[1] Source: http://www.customerthink.com/article/event_based_marketing_banks_changes_behavior