Last week we announced the release of the new SimplyCast 360 element, Contact Changed. This new node allows you to trigger marketing and communication campaigns based on any changes that happen within a specific contact's profile. Being able to act on these individual changes allows you to target contacts and provide them with relevant information at exactly the right time.
If you're still unsure how the new element could work for you, here are three ways you can utilize it to boost contact engagement and improve your marketing strategy.
1. Provide information instantly
One of the most important aspects of your online marketing strategy is your website. Contacts go there to get information about your company and learn more about your offerings.
Wouldn't it be great if you could automatically give contacts more information about a specific product as soon as they view it on your web page? Being able to do this would boost your customer engagement because as soon as a contact is interested in something, you're able to provide even more information before they can even ask!
The Contact Changed element allows you to do just that.
Let's say, for example, that your pet shop has a website that has a whole page dedicated to dog grooming. Now, when someone visits that page, you want to send them more information about your dog grooming services and a 20 percent off coupon to encourage them to take advantage of your services.
In order to do this, you'll need a Sonar tracking pixel on the dog grooming webpage. This pixel will add a tag you specify to any contact that visits this page. You'll want to use something related and obvious like "visited dog grooming page."
After that is set up, you need to set up the parameters for your Contact Changed element in the 360 campaign you want to trigger when someone views that page. Since tags are a metadata field, select that option and find the Tags field.
In order to ensure that your contacts only receive the information when they've visited the dog grooming web page, you need to add a Decision element after your Contact Changed element and specify the tag you want the campaign to trigger on. So, in your decision, make "visited dog grooming page" as your setting so only that tag will trigger the information.
You'll remember from last week's blog post that the new element is very powerful and means you need to use it in conjunction with other elements in order to prevent sending out duplicate information. This is a great example of that.
Now, what happens if a contact visits that page more than once? Chances are that you don't want to send them the same information repeatedly, so you'll need to use a Duplicate Filter element to ensure your contacts aren't bombarded with the same information over and over again.
After these elements are complete, continue on to setting up the rest of your campaign as usual, whether this is by setting up an email, SMS, fax, etc. The Contact Changed element is able to trigger campaigns that include any form of communication.
2. Offer more to engaged contacts
The scoring feature has been a staple of SimplyCast's platform for a long time. The Contact Changed element now gives you a new way to maximize the use of scoring by allowing you to trigger campaigns when contacts reach a certain score.
The ability to track email opens is another aspect of SimplyCast projects that comes in very handy for tracking how engaged your customers are.
No matter how you've been scoring or tracking your clients, manually or automatically in other 360 campaigns, these scores and opens can now be used to trigger other campaigns individually for contacts.
For example, your bakery uses scoring to see how engaged customers are with your business through email newsletters and visits to the bakery. Your email communications are automatically tracking how many email opens each contact has and when a customer visits your shop you've been adding 5 points to their CRM score.
To thank these customers for their business and engagement, you've decided that whenever someone reaches a score of 50 or opens 100 emails, you want to offer them a free pastry. In order to do this individually for each customer, you need to use the Contact Changed element.
The new element will allow you to select a CRM field to base the trigger off of. In this case, you would need the metadata field of Score and the field of Email Opens. This alone is not enough to trigger a campaign based on reaching a score of 50 or opening an email because by not specifying a specific number for each, the campaign will be triggered by any change to any contact's score or by any email they open.
In this case, you definitely don't want to leave these settings alone because it could cost you a lot in pastries. Instead, include a Decision element and set the corresponding fields, Score and Email Opens, to Greater Than/Equals 50 and 100, respectively. By doing this, you ensure that only contacts that reach a score of 50 or more and 100 or more email opens are sent the free pastry offer.
After you've included your Decision Element, you'll also want to include a Duplicate Filter element to prevent the same people being sent the offer more than once. For example, if you score a customer that comes in for their free pastry, and you don't add a Duplicate Filter, they will be sent the offer again because they, again, reached a score above 50. A Duplicate Filter helps ensure customers aren't sent the same offer more than once.
3. Keep your information up to date
There are many ways that a contact can update their information with you. Whether it's through an API, form update, or if you manually change specific information yourself, you're going to want to ensure that your complete record is up to date for that client.
Updating information is one of the few cases where you may want to use the Contact Changed element without a Decision or Duplicate Filter element since you're going to want to contact that contact no matter how many time they change their information or no matter what they change it to.
In order to make sure all your information is current, let's say that if any communication field is changed, you want to send them an update form to capture any other information that may have been changed.
In your Contact Changed element, you'll want to select any communication-based field you have (mobile, email, fax, etc.) and then connect the Contact Changed element to an email containing your update form. Now, any time any communication field is changed, the contact will receive an email asking for them to update their records with you.
The new Contact Changed element is a powerful tool that can add a lot to your marketing campaigns. From offering rewards, sending information based on browsing habits, keeping contact information up to date, the possibilities for individually-triggered campaigns are nearly endless with the new SimplyCast element.
To learn more about what marketing automation can do for your organization or business, visit this page.
