Event Driven Marketing

“Always start from your customer”: How many times have you heard or used this slogan inthe last year? It is one of those catchphrases that are used without really using them.

Even in Direct Marketing (DM) campaigns, where the customer stands more centric by nature, a lot of below the line activities are not customer centric.

If you talk about Direct Marketing, starting from the client, you talk about Event Driven Marketing (EDM).

Need a crash course? Here you are:

What is Event Driven Marketing?

Discipline within marketing where commercial and communication activities are based on relevant and noticeable changes in the individual needs of a client.

What makes EDM different from more ‘traditional’ DM is that you start from the needs of your client that he/she has at a given moment in time. So, instead of starting from your offers and finding a group of people who are likely to beinterested in one offer (Product push), you start from one person with one specific need and try to find an offer that best answers his need.

An example: you are marketer in a bank: In your database you see that a client could not withdraw money from a cash machine because he passed his limit. This might be the moment to propose him a flexible credit.

Customer centric with a targeted approach for an individual need.

A client action (which can also be doing nothing) triggers a commercial action.

For the client, his need is very personal. It is a concrete need he has at this moment in his life. On the other hand, for you as a company, you have different customers (and prospects) that have the same need (but on different times).

This means you can develop generic programs that cover a need. When you are able to start this program for one client at the time he has the need, for him, this feels like a very welcome and personal offer.

“The right offer” instead of “The right client”.

Traditional direct marketing campaigns start from a certain offer. Eg.: in a financial

environment, you want to launch a campaign to sell or upgrade credit cards.

With EDM you select one specific customer for whom you capture a need. Afterwards, you find the best product in your portfolio to answer that need.

“The right timing for the customer” instead of “The right time for the organisation”.

The right time for the customer can be… any day for your company. This means that you will have to identify daily which customer has which specific need.

When a client benefits of a heritage, he need a good advice and a relevant way to do

something with the extra money now and not four months later when it happens to be your yearly investment campaign.

“The preferred channel” instead of “The chosen channel”.

“At the right time” is closely linked with “Trough the right channel”, because getting the message in time with the best impact to your client means using the right channel. To fully benefit of your channels, you need to have identified the ‘preferred channel’ for every client (or even better: for every client-offering type combination).

What is in it for me?

Competition becomes harder. We are not telling anything new with that. EDM has some advantages over traditional direct marketing campaigns:

a. Higher response rate.

EDM typically has higher response rates than traditional DM campaigns. Not only is

the client more perceptive for your offer because you target him at the appropriate

time and trough the channel of choice of the client, you also gain by sending out less

communication.

b. Higher impact.

Not only do you leverage the response rate, you also have more impact on the client,

resulting in higher profit.

c. Possibility of testing.

In contrast to traditional campaigns where testing is either very expensive or nearly

close to a real campaign run, EDM lets you test new ideas for scenarios rather quickly because, once the scenario is ready, you can select a limited number of clients daily for testing.

d. Ongoing adjustments.

Because you select a target group every day and send out messages every day, you can monitor and adjust both selection criteria, scenario and message content daily.

Compare this to a traditional campaign where you can adjust these variables lets say

once every year…

e. Homogenous load.

With EDM, you level out the work load (both financial as in terms of human

resources). You divert the peaks of load in the start-up-phase of a new traditional

campaign to daily operations.