Email marketers who specialize in monetizing triggers can drive tremendous value to the top line of any campaign.

This is the second installment in a three-part series on response marketing in email. In the first piece, Making Email Auto Responders Work, we emphasized that it's how you use the technology that matters. Today we'll explain how to manage your campaign's trigger. In the next piece, we'll look at how to get more mileage with response offers.

Much of the first segment from this three-part series focused on auto responders and how to make them work. As anyone in the DM space -- especially in email marketing -- knows, an essential element of these auto responders is its triggers. Triggers are a specific kind of auto responder that creates an up-sell or cross-sell email that marketers have crafted to be sent automatically whenever a user initiates an event within a given campaign. 

While auto responders generally are associated with a user’s behavior within a Web site, triggers are assigned and affixed to that user’s behavior within a given campaign itself. Email marketers who specialize in monetizing triggers can drive tremendous value to the top line of any campaign -- a 40 percent or more boost to revenue is a common result with well-crafted triggers. 

The ability to craft effective triggers also differentiates great database managers from just good ones. Think in terms of your database manager driving an average of 20 percent more revenue from your database and you’ll get the idea. Effectively monetizing triggers depends on assigning the most contextually relevant offers to the user’s already demonstrated interest. Therefore, as we stressed in the auto responders segment, the effectiveness of triggers is all about relevance. So, being able to anticipate a user’s behavior with the right kind of offer to trigger is where the rubber hits the road in email.

For example, if a consumer has expressed interest in a new car quote, it seems intuitive that they would respond favorably to an auto finance offer or an auto warranty offer, more so than you may think. In fact, as you manage your trigger campaign, certain rules are established that help a marketer predict which offers a consumer has the highest propensity toward and deliver more value through relevance. In this case, the consumer may be interested in something more specific from a national auto repair shop such as Meineke.

It’s impossible to overstate how vital the relevance is to the effectiveness of any trigger effort. When choosing a list manager, be certain to familiarize yourself with the kinds of brands and clients they work with already, so that they will have a stable of offers at the ready for them to be able to monetize your database from the start. The best list managers have these relationships in place all the time because the best list managers get the best results by leveraging the most relevance in their campaigns.

Ask any list manager candidate firms for examples of their recent campaigns, and make certain they understand the true nature of the dialogue that takes place between the marketer and consumer in any campaign of this kind. The consumer’s interaction with your email creative is a window into what sort of offer he or she will respond to next. So, your list manager or email marketing partner has to be able to develop the right kind of creative to have at the ready for any trigger offer, and the right kind of technology to provide the right kind of offer in response to the item that the user/consumer triggers in real time. Obviously, the right marketing partner will have multiple examples of both of these ready for any pitch. 

The best email marketing firms can all manage consumer data from those users who have catalyzed triggers or otherwise interacted with creative units from a given campaign. They should be able to demonstrate to you in real time just how they have populated their scoring template or interface with the right kind of message pursuant to a given event. The customers that work with the best email marketers can see what kind of exchange is going on between individual users in their database and the offers they receive in real time. So, be sure to choose a partner who can tell the whole story graphically within a simple, easy-to-access interface.

The best email marketing firms execute these kinds of campaigns every minute of every day and night. If your email marketing partner can’t display compelling results from their trigger campaigns, consider looking for another partner. Once you manage to optimize the results from a well-managed campaign targeted to your database, you’ll never look back.

Sean O'Neal is Chief Marketing Officer for Datran Media. He has managed Marketing and Sales for the company virtually since its inception. Over the past two-and-a-half years, O'Neal has built out a world-class sales and marketing team.