Has a brand you use ever sent you a birthday e-card offering you exclusive special offers on some of your favorite products? The only way it could be better is if the company actually bought you a gift from their catalog! It makes you feel like the company really knows you and wants to be part of your life, right?

More companies are beginning to understand the value of events in a customer’s life to their shopping habits. That’s why companies have started using special days as ways to connect with potential customers and promote brand loyalty. This marketing strategy is called EDM, and we’ll show you how it works in this brief article.

What is EDM?

EDM is an initialism for event driven marketing, and it’s created a paradigm shift in how companies connect with consumers in the digital world. It’s a type of experiential marketing that treats special days as marketing events. The characteristic of an event will determine everything about a marketing campaign, from its design to the channel on which it finds you.

EDM is a form of trigger marketing in that a specific event is a motivation for the deployment of a marketing campaign. There are plenty of use cases for this marketing strategy, and we’ll get into those later. First, let’s get into how it works.

How does it work?

So, now we’ll answer the question that finds you reading this article: How does EDM work? It’s a marketing strategy that requires the use of some powerful tools and best practices. It relies on customer relationship management (CRM) software and big data analytics to provide customer data and generate marketing leads.

Data scientists use an application programming interface (API) to create the conditions for the predefined corresponding event that initiates the experiential marketing campaign. A marketing automation system then uses the customer data to create a marketing campaign based on the predefined corresponding event and CRM data.

What are some use cases?

Now, as we mentioned earlier, we’re going to get into some use cases for EDM. One of the main ways companies use this strategy is to follow a new marketing lead. In these cases, the trigger event could be someone visiting a website and agreeing to the site’s “cookie policy.” Companies can use the information their cookies gather to create email marketing campaigns and increase the conversion rate of people visiting their websites.

Another one of the many good uses for EDM is creating special offers for people on their birthdays or another big event like a work anniversary. Marketing teams use these targeted email campaigns to show customers they’re thinking about them on these important days.

What are the benefits of using EDM?

There are plenty of great reasons to use an event-driven architecture (EDA) to enhance your marketing strategy. The best reason is that it will significantly enhance your marketing efforts, increasing your ROI. An event-first approach enables you to save money by prioritizing the quality over the quantity of marketing initiatives. It also helps build personal connections with customers, promoting brand loyalty.

EDM is all about using a big event to connect with customers. You can use holidays to reach people on a mass scale or personal trigger events like the birth of a child to initiate and automate marketing campaigns. This marketing practice uses data from CRM applications to automate the creation of workflows and event streams that become targeted marketing campaigns. The success of your marketing efforts depends on your CRM tools and having a robust marketing automation system with a functional integration tool.

EDM is much more than a fad — it’s the current and next generation of marketing strategy. Indeed, significant events in a customer’s life are often the right time to entice them with special offers. With the right tools and best practices, you can reach more potential customers and significantly enhance your marketing efforts.