Tripwire Marketing

My first exposure to tripwires was when I was about five years old. A group of my dad’s friends played a prank on us by toilet papering our house. As we went out to inspect the front lawn, I remember my dad yelling at me to STOP immediately. He noticed a clear fishing line strung across the lawn, hovering and about to be tripped if I took one more step. Had we tripped the wire, it would have set off an annoying ‘scream box’, which was sure to wake up the entire neighborhood until it was destroyed.

Thanks to the magic of marketing automation technology today, tripwires (without the scream box!) can be set up throughout your marketing to both enhance the experience for your customers and prospects, as well as notify you of their progress. Tripwires are also a great way to speed up the education and sales process and eliminate a lot of the manual work that you or your staff have to deal with.

Here are a handful of trip wires I’ve seen effectively deployed:

• Website opt-in forms: advanced opt-in forms can be set up to deliver the opt-in data to your database/CRM, track lead source, segment the opt-in by assigning it to a group, and start a single or multi-step email marketing campaign via autoresponders, automatically assign the lead to a sales rep (if needed), notify a manager of the new opt-in, and more.
• Shopping cart: when a prospect becomes a customer, shouldn’t the purchase trip a wire that removes them from all prospect marketing groups and marketing campaigns? Shouldn’t it also add them to a customer loyalty campaign or notification? Tripwire marketing can do this… automatically.
• Email links: most email marketing tools allow you to insert what is called “trackable links”. These enable you to see who is clicking on the links within your marketing emails. Instead of having to manually run a report to see who is clicking links within your emails, wouldn’t it be amazing to configure tripwires within your trackable links? Just think of what can be done automatically just by a prospect clicking on a particular link within an email: sub-list them further based on interest, stop a general marketing campaign and start an extremely targeted one based on what they clicked on, notify a sales rep that their lead just clicked on a link which is a hot buying sign, and more.

There are many ways tripwires can be used within your business besides the few listed above. Think about it a moment… customer service, new customer welcome materials, information requests, partner or affiliate signups, end of the month or seasonal promotions… the list goes on indefinitely.

Infusionsoft is a perfect example of a marketing automation tool that is affordable and enables a business to set up an unlimited number of tripwires.

Tripwire marketing can be difficult to grasp and understand how you would best use it in your particular business. If you are currently not applying tripwire marketing to your campaign, what tripwires may work the best for you? If you have already tried this strategy what was the outcome of your endeavor?