It’s All About the Offer: Time to Pull the Trigger?

By Janice Mayo

Technology enables marketers to customize direct mail offers beyond personalization

Traditional direct mail personalization techniques allow you to customize communications at the group level, using information such as age, income, location and education. However, these techniques cannot address the fact that every segmentation group is comprised of individuals with very different wants, needs, attitudes and buying behaviors. Trigger programs give marketers added power to act on individually supplied facts about what each customer actually wants and needs rather than statistical inferences.

Direct response trigger programs use an individual’s responses to media, input, interactions, purchase transactions and even complaints to deliver a fully customized marketing message at the individual level. Each of these triggers, when “pulled,” can release a unique direct marketing message geared to that individual at that specific moment in time.

Trigger programs truly are individual conversations in print, brought together through the intelligent application of technology. Sophisticated content management systems and dynamic document publishing tools provide the platform for integrating brand assets and transaction assets with individual-level data to produce and deliver appropriately timed, fully customized communications.

Three Keys to Success
Trigger programs can be built on any customer or prospect data. Such data can include phone calls, mail responses, visits to a Web site, input gathered at the point-of-sale and individual information like birthdays, customer anniversaries, appended demographics or psycho-demographic clusters. Transactional information such as purchases, returns and product trials also are a fit.

There are three key elements to building a successful trigger program:
• Listen to what your consumers are saying and doing, and capture as much relevant information as possible.
• Think about the appropriate format in which to compile consumer information; then think about how to use it to influence response.
• Respond in the most effective media at the most appropriate point to trigger the desired consumer action.