Automation can be a marketer’s best friend, and no, it doesn’t replace jobs, it just makes us more effective in our jobs. Many marketers are familiar with marketing automation systems, especially those for email, but it’s not only email that gets to take advantage of automation – mobile engagement marketing can too.
Enter behaviorally triggered campaigns, or for our Localytics users, we call these Workflows. Behaviorally triggered campaigns are automated campaigns that are triggered after a customer performs a specific action, like signing up for a free trial or leaving items behind in their cart. And these multi-step campaigns create an ongoing conversation with your customers, reacting to their behaviors in a timely manner with relevant and personalized messages.
Here’s an example to help you envision how these campaigns work:
Liz just got a new iPhone 11, however when she bought her new phone she never added a protection plan. This gives you the opportunity to set up a campaign that would identify new phone purchases that did not include a protection plan, then create a series of messages that remind Liz that she can add one to protect her expensive and important new purchase.
Your first message is a simple reminder that links into the protection plan page of your app, prompting her to add any plan she likes.
If she adds the plan, a confirmation push is sent and directing her to where she can find information should she ever need to file a claim.
If she doesn’t purchase, another push is sent a day later, reminding her to add a plan and also offering 3-months free of the basic plan as an incentive to spur a purchase. Again if she does purchase, she receives a confirmation push. Then, a week before her basic plan is up, she’ll receive a message reminding her to upgrade or renew.
And the last step, if Liz still doesn’t purchase, she gets one last push a week later, offering the 3-months free and putting an expiration on the offer to add a sense of urgency. She gets a confirmation push if she ends up making a purchase, as well as the reminder message to upgrade or renew before her trial is up.
If after three push notifications Liz doesn’t make a purchase, she is removed from the campaign. And all this time, others just like Liz are making their way through the campaign as well.
Behaviorally triggered campaigns enable you to create dynamic conversations with your customers through automated, multi-step campaigns that run for an extended period of time all on their own. As your customer acts on one message, the campaign continues the interaction with a follow-up message and call-to-action, helping you engage in an ongoing interaction that ultimately helps get you to your conversion goal.
And the triggered campaigns bring in new customers when they meet the criteria, and remove them once they complete the journey, continually staying up to date on your audience, while always sending relevant and timely messages.
With Localytics, your Workflows campaigns can be triggered by events that take place in your app or website, such as a purchase, content viewed or played, product or service browsing activity and more. But they can also be triggered by external events, such as visiting a brick-and-mortar location or calling into a customer service line. This helps you create a more seamless interaction between the physical and digital experiences of your customers, all within one campaign.
You can also use Workflows to trigger messages across different channels in one campaign, so you can engage with your customers where they are, or use the engagement channels that are best suited to deliver your specific message.
Now that we’ve explained what they are, let’s talk about why you should use them.
Let’s start with the show stopper – at Localytics, we’ve seen that our customers who use Workflows (our version of behaviorally triggered push campaigns) see an average 200% increase in customer engagement.
200% seems like a lot, and it is, but there is good reason for it. These campaigns adapt and respond to each customer based on the actions they take, making them incredibly relevant and timely. They aren’t push messages that can sometimes be annoying or bothersome because they came out of nowhere, they are contextual and speak directly to the customer based on the way they have interacted with your brand. We all love a brand that just seems to get us, and these campaigns are a good way to show the same to your customers.
Now if the compelling results that Localytics clients have achieved using Workflows aren’t enough to convince you, here are a couple ways to address some worries you might have.
We know that some marketers are just plain apprehensive of behaviorally triggered campaigns, maybe it’s because relinquishing control of a big, multi-step campaign to a piece of software makes you uneasy, or maybe it’s because there are more steps to these types of campaigns, thus more chances that you mess something up. And the fact that they run on their own for as long as you like, what if something goes wrong and you don’t catch it quickly?
Let’s address the worries:
Relinquishing too much control – Software is already taking care of all your one-time or recurring campaigns, this is just another campaign type that the software is handling. To help you feel better, you can start with a few lighter campaigns for a smaller audience and a shorter period of time while you get comfortable. After a few tests you’ll feel confident to make behaviorally triggered campaigns a mainstay in your customer engagement playbook
It takes more time (that I don’t have)– Yes, behaviorally triggered campaigns do have more steps than your standard one-time or recurring campaigns. But considering they can run on their own for weeks or months, the extra time setting up the campaign pays for itself many times over as it runs automatically for whatever period of time you see fit, thus helping you set up fewer manual campaigns.
Also, one-off campaigns can’t accomplish what automated campaigns can, or at least not in a very timely, responsive and relevant manner, so the extra steps are worth it in order to introduce a new form of customer engagement to your strategy. And the messing up part? See below.
What if something goes wrong? – All campaigns run the risk of a mistake, so just like your other campaign types, be sure to check your work a few times or have another set of eyes take a look to approve them. Also, after you set a campaign live check in on it frequently in the first week or so to make sure it’s all running smoothly. If you happened to make a mistake, you can easily deactivate it, fix the issue, and get it up and running again.
In conclusion? The worries can be assuaged, and the results are well worth the extra bit of effort. Don’t wait any longer, add behaviorally triggered campaigns to your bag of marketing tricks and watch your customer engagement soar.