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What is Event-Based Marketing?

Event-based marketing is a business strategy to give a personalized customer experience when your customers take any certain action or make any interaction with your brand.

These certain interactions are called ‘events’ or ‘triggers’.

An event or trigger stores the information which is tied to a user’s identity. And, brands access this information to prepare a further personalized communication plan with users. Event-based marketing is also called trigger marketing or event marketing.

Anatomy of an event in event-based marketing

An event can be associated with three parameters.

  1. An identity
  2. An event name that is unique
  3. All the Attributes stored inside the event.

Events store information (user behavior attributes) inside it. For marketers, events can be associated and identified with the ‘what’, ‘when’, and ‘How’ perspectives.

Why should you focus on Event-Based Marketing?

Event-based marketing requires detailed understanding and monitoring of customers’ past interactions. However, once it’s done, it becomes easier to lineate the process to optimize conversions.

According to a survey by Harvard Business Review, 52% of respondents believe that event-based marketing drives more business value when compared to other marketing channels and strategies.

Here’s why your business should focus on event-based marketing.

Reach the most potential and targeted audience

Event-based marketing (EBM) allows brands to engage customers that share highly relevant characteristics of their audience.

Using Event-based marketing, you can segment your customers from a particular region that you are focusing on. Or, you could categorize your customers for various segments like- The final purchasing stage, beginning stage, or intermediate stage of their journey, and so on.

For example,

Let’s say you have a visitor from the US on your website that surfs through the product comparison page.

Using event-based marketing script codes, you’d be able to record the location of the site visitor.

Once the visitors accept the cookies on your website, you will have a unique id assigned to them.

Using this information, you can segment these visitors based on countries and engage them with information that’s relevant to their location.

Builds customer loyalty

Customers stay loyal to brands where they feel valued. If you succeed in engaging your customers through personalized marketing, your users will prefer your brand over others.

With time, your customers will, in return, help your brand in further recognition and even recommend it to others.

Multiply conversions

When a brand provides its customers with what they want and are looking for, it certainly results in conversions.

The EBM can double your conversions while keeping the costs to a minimal amount.

Gathering useful insights from customer feedback

When understanding your customers is done in a highly researched way, it becomes easier to gather insights that help in establishing the future growth and sales strategy.

For example, if your customers reach a specific point in their journey and find it difficult to move ahead. You can study the behavior and build strategies around that address the loopholes. For example, it could be a missing demo video or a specific user query, and so on.

Traditional Behavioural marketing vs. Event-based behavioral marketing

To run marketing activities, the user’s behavior is tracked across various touchpoints.

Traditional behavioral marketing makes use of limited algorithms to track user behavior. Whereas, in event-based marketing, the user’s behavior can be tracked in a much detailed way using intelligent algorithms.

Let’s understand this using the example below.

Cart abandonment campaign using Traditional behavioral marketing 

For an eCommerce platform, it’s important to engage users at the checkout process to ensure the purchase is happening.

Therefore, using traditional marketing, you can monitor the user’s behavior in the following ways:

  • When a user adds the items to the cart
  • And, when the user checks out the online store.

The user interaction is tracked here with limited options.

Cart abandonment campaign using event-based marketing

When the cart users are engaged using event-based marketing, the engagement links to a more detailed understanding of user behavior.

The user can be engaged through various touchpoints as follows.

  • The products/items are added to the shopping cart
  • When the user initiates the check-in process
  • When a user enters shipping details
  • When the user confirms billing details
  • When a user completes the payments
  • When the payment procedure fails
  • When the user checks out from the online store.

In event-based marketing, you know the correct and accurate position of users in their purchase journey. Therefore, it becomes easier to understand the stoppage and then reach out to these specific users through push notifications, emails, SMS, etc to continue from where they left.

For example, if your user added the items to the cart, and confirmed the billing details. However, the purchase has not been done. In this case scenario, you can push a campaign with the payment link and ask the users to complete the payment.

How to implement event-based marketing in your business plan?

Event-based marketing is quickly becoming a must-have for businesses that are data-driven. It improves the quality of marketing efforts to engage users. In addition to that, EBM adds various capabilities to the brand.

Often, event-based marketing is confused with physical events that businesses do to promote their products and services such as trade shows, conferences, etc. Here, in this context, we refer to event-based marketing as the digital marketing strategies that engage users throughout their online journey.

In the digital context, EBM helps you to market your product effectively, analyze different metrics, do advertisements and campaigns to boost customer communications.

Event-based marketing makes use of events as mentioned above in the blog. These events do the following things:

  1. Detects the change in state or behavior of user’s action.
  2. Run javascript code that triggers or calls functions to initiate engagement.

Use of email in event-based marketing campaigns

Businesses use email campaigns to make use of events associated with specific users. There are various types of campaigns you can run, should you be having enough information that meets the set criteria for the event.

Some of the examples of email campaigns that get triggered based on EBM.

Welcome emails to new users

Welcome emails are sent to newly added users to your service. Here the set criteria for the event to call the trigger action is the signup completion.

Email campaign for inactive customers

Businesses send this email when the customers remain inactive for a set time limit. Once the time (event) crosses the threshold, this type of campaign gets triggered to your inactive users.

For example,

If you want to target users who remain inactive for more than 3 days of using your products. Then, you can set up email campaigns that get triggered after the third day of user inactivity.

Other generic emails for your existing users

This type of email campaign can be used based on various activities of users on your website or application.

For example, if a user is surfing through your documentation guides, then the mail campaigns containing live integration video links could be sent.

Use of push notifications in event-based marketing campaigns

Push notifications have long been used to engage users. Its strategic use and implementation leave a huge scope for improvements in customization.

Push notifications are short and concise modes of communication that reach your user’s devices in a matter of seconds.

Brands are using push notifications in various ways. Some of them are mentioned below.

Trigger Push Notifications

Trigger push notifications get prompted when a user takes certain actions on your website or mobile app. Triggers create a feeling of urgency in users' minds, thus prompting them to further engage with the brand.

For example, suppose you are an ed-tech platform, and the user is surfing through a dedicated educational course page.
Using EBM technology, you can filter such users and send push notifications about their preferred courses with discounts.

Welcome notifications

Welcome notifications get triggered when a site visitor clicks on ‘allow’ to receive push notifications from your website or applications.

Welcome push notifications, not only welcome your new users but also make their online journey a good experience.

Cart abandonment triggers

We have already talked about cart abandoned triggers earlier in the blog. These push notifications get triggered when the user forgets to make a purchase through your online store and forgets the items in the cart.

Conclusion

Event-based marketing is becoming the most crucial asset for businesses. It not only engages the users with a personalized approach, but also sets up the base for future strategies that result in improved conversions, engagement, and retention.

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