Fair and Gentle Retailer,
The industry has embraced the term “trigger” for automated email, which I believe is a misnomer. A trigger implies that you know what (or whom) you are aiming at. It implies a level of detail or specificity around target identification and the selection of the communication weapon to use. That’s not how we see things.
While a trigger is what we should all be using, most vendors are selling a “trip-wire.” Strung haphazardly across our purchase funnel or a handful of categories – it sits, waiting for anyone to stumble across it. It is indiscriminant, incomplete, and basic. It’s usually the result of a vendor whose core business is not contextualizing all of your customer data and well, we have some data, so why not use it to trigger an email?
The “why not” is that there is an art and a science to triggered email – even more so when you are a company like Smarter that manages large scale marketing automation. With laser beam focus, we let you hone in on who it is you really need to communicate with, using all the experiences with their website, mobile site, mobile app, and in-store experience as the reason to communicate. If you are going to trigger – be precise.
While trip-wires will cause collateral damage (loss of margin, brand management issues), Smarter allows you to tune the value of each customer engagement, managing offer, messaging and merchandising at the visitor level in ways that are fully automated. It’s more than a trigger – it’s a conversation and you always need to have something to say.
We’ve assembled the following checklist from the experiences we’ve collected over years of working with numerous retailers. The goal is simple – to help you identify the type of vendor you are “truly” engaging with.
| Trip Wire Style Automation | Triggered | Smarter Campaign Automation | |
| Support basic purchase abandon | Y | Y | Y (usually at 2x rev) |
| Support up funnel brand/category browse | Sometimes | Y | Y (usually at 2x rev) |
| Look across session | More Rare | Sometimes | Y |
| Look across devices | Rare | More Rare | Y |
| Ability to use order management data | Rare | Rare | Y |
| Ability to use point-of-sale data | Rare | Rare | Y |
| Support 100s of campaigns | Rare | Rare | Y |
| Manage campaign prioritization | Rare | Rare | Y |
| Manage frequency capping | Rare | Rare | Y |
| Attrition Risk Model | Rare | Rare | Y |
| Engagement Models | Rare | Rare | Y |
| RFML Analysis | Rare | Rare | Y |
| Advanced Merchandising (email optimized templates) | Rare | Rare | Y |
| Offer Model (predicted purchase) | Rare | Y | |
| Offer Management (in their UI) | Rare | Y | |
| Segments provide turn key optimized content in web/mobile site | Rare | Y | |
| Segments extend to display ad (real-time) | Y | ||
| Segments extend to on-site (real-time) | Rare | Y | |
| Ability to support your print strategies (unified digital/analog) | Y | ||
| Ability to extend your loyalty programs data) | Y |
All well-intentioned marketing buzzwords run the risk of creating confusion once the market formulates different working definitions based on experience. Trigger is certainly one of these. The market changes quickly, but we hope this review equips you with enough tangible feature comparisons to help you ask and answer deep questions about what triggering means relative to new breadth of customer touch points that now comprise potential triggers for true campaign automation.
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