What Is A Trigger Event?
Before you get on with trigger event selling, it’s important that you first understand what a trigger event is. Trigger event is any occurrence that provides you an opportunity to market or sell a product or service. A number of marketing and sales automation workflows, such as online and social media ads, use trigger events to help businesses reach out to the potential customers. When it comes to using trigger events, timing is everything. You don’t want to promote your brand too early or too late. To make it work, you should grab the opportunity at the right moment.

How Do Trigger Events Work?
Craig Elias, the author of Shift!: Harness The Trigger Events That Turn Prospects Into Customers, considers timing as “silver bullets” in sales because they give brands the opportunity to present their products or services to the right person at the right time, that is, when they are most likely to buy. But how do you determine the right timing? The perfect timing is when a customer has entered the Window of Dissatisfaction. Once a customer is at this phase, you can grab the opportunity by being the first viable seller. During this period, you have a 60-90% rate of closing a deal. Moreover, you have the opportunity to close sales within a shorter cycle and even be able to offer your products or services at a higher price.

How to Do Trigger Event Selling
Since timing is everything when it comes to trigger event selling, it’s important that you know when and how to spot the perfect timing. Here are four types of triggers when it comes to marketing:

1. Behavior-based
When it comes to online selling and marketing, monitoring your customers’ behavior is a lot easier. With the availability of analytics tools, you can collect data on how your customers behave and use these data to build a better means of connecting with them and help build their trust. These behavior based triggers can be used when:

• a customer does online search that is relevant to your brand or offerings;
• a customer takes up an offer or interacts with an advice you have provided, for example, on your website;
• responds to an on-site validation, such as providing a review to a recent purchase; or
• social pattern triggers, wherein a customer is willing to purchase add-ons along with a recent purchase (example: a phone case or an headset for a newly-purchased phone).

2. Engagement-based
Subscriptions and social media interactions also play an important role when it comes to improving your conversion rate. This is handy for brands with a large number of followers, users or frequent customers, especially those who offer subscription products or services. Subscription reminders can come in handy when reminding customers about an expiring subscription. You can also use this to upsell a higher tier of subscription. Another way to do engagement-based triggers is when interacting with your followers on social media. You can use these interactions to promote your brand by building a personal connection with your customers. These online interactions can help maintain or build your customers’ interest towards your brand.

3. Event-based
All customers love to know that they are being valued by the brands that they support. For you to show that you care for your customers, you can take advantage of seasonal changes, anniversaries, and even your customers birthday to offer sales and boost your conversion rate. You can run time-limited sales and offers. You can apply the scarcity principle during these situations and help improve your chances of closing more sales for your business.

4. Emotion-based
Another way to boost your sales is by giving your customers the opportunity to emotionally connect with your brand. Advertisements, if done properly, can help boost your sales rate. This trigger also includes ads and promotions about weight loss, skin care, fashion, food products and more. Emotional triggers can help you bank on your customers’ loyalty or take advantage or market trends to be able to increase your sales. Once you are familiar with the different instances as to when you can time your trigger event sales, then you are ready to follow these steps on how you can implement trigger event sale and marketing approach.

Step 1. Know the right trigger. Not all types of trigger will essentially apply to all your customers. This is why it’s important to know what type of trigger will work better for whoever. This is where your knowledge of different trigger types will come in handy.

Step 2. Come up with the right offer. Once you know the right types of triggers that are suitable for your customers, you should now develop an offer that is perfect for that trigger. See to it that you provide something that will truly pique your customers interest, or better yet, make them decide to purchase from you.

Step 3. Present your offer immediately. For your offers to work, you should see to it that they are presented to your customers immediately and at the right moment once they are triggered. See to it that the offer you are presenting truly meets your customer’s need or demand to make sure that it works.

Step 4. Record and analyze customers’ response. Data is important to help you improve your trigger sales and marketing approach. This is why it’s important that you keep track of your customers’ responses to help you come up with better means of promoting your products and services at the right instance. Trigger event selling has proven its worth to various brands and has changed the way we online marketing is done nowadays. Knowing when and how to use it to your advantage is essential. With constant analysis of your customers’ behavior, you’ll be able to streamline your trigger sales offering and boost your conversion rates.