Large databases and good timing are no longer sufficient to gain new customers and/or effectively market to existing ones. Traditional marketing practices are now dated, as there are significantly more channels for building two-way customer relationships, from phone to print to web to email. Thus, dated one-dimensional practices must evolve, just as the technology has.

Current event-triggered campaigns require two things: a way to track and capture previous customer interactions across all points of contact, and a way to use that information to personalize messages. Using collected customer data to effectively trigger personalized marketing messages, offers, and initiatives is a key component of a successful event-triggered campaign.

Research from Gartner suggests that an event-triggered campaign can save up to 80 percent of a marketer's direct mail budget. This is accomplished by delivering targeted on-demand services, such as signing up a customer for a new rewards club, rather than mass printing and mailing a brochure. So, while there may be upfront costs in changing existing processes and technologies, the long term payout will be worth the effort. And that's just the beginning.

Once cross-channel event-triggered marketing has been decided upon as a strategic initiative, marketers can easily define goals in terms the entire organization can understand. These include new customer acquisitions as well as increased revenue from existing customers due to highly targeted up-sell and cross-sell offers. Now that marketers can show up to the bargaining table with clearly defined goals and budgets, they are in a much more favorable bargaining position for getting the required funding for technology, as well as approval of new processes, necessary components for making event-triggered marketing part of a long term strategy.

To start, marketers must define the goals of an event-driven campaign for both new and returning customers. It may be easier to initially focus on one group as a way to test the effectiveness of the campaign on a smaller scale. Start by effectively setting benchmarks that are easily quantifiable and checkable throughout the campaign.

Next, it is vital to look at your existing technologies and processes. You will need to ensure that the correct technology is in place, and that you are using it to collect data from all customer channels. Just as important, your technology must allow for you to leverage collected customer data, and it should flag anything that is not conforming to your established metrics so that you can make the necessary adjustments.

Gartner has found that event-triggered messages have a response rate that is five times higher than that of non-targeted push messages. These results are attainable for campaigns than pull information from a single database that has automatically tracked customer data from all points of customer contact, from brick and mortar stores to websites to customer support calls and more. If these communications between the customer and company aren't used, it's much more difficult to measure the effect of cross-selling or up-selling customers. By using event-triggered methods based on previous customer actions and trends, marketers gain a full set of tools to initiate new contacts, and bring old ones back for more.