Sign inGet your API key
ProductDocsPricingCompareBlogSign in

Glossary

What Is Trigger Marketing?

Outreach that fires when a defined event happens, and which of those events you can filter for in a database.

Get your free API key →Free to start. No credit card. 1,000 records to spend whenever you like.

Trigger marketing is the practice of sending a message because a specific event happened, instead of on a fixed calendar.

The event is the trigger. It can be something the prospect did, such as a signup or a pricing-page visit. It can also be something that happened to their company, such as a funding round or a new executive hire. The two kinds are covered in what is a sales trigger and triggers.

Why it matters for outbound

A trigger gives the message a reason to exist. "You raised a round last month" reads as relevant. "I wanted to introduce our product" reads as a mass email.

Triggers also decide who goes first. You cannot write to every account this week, so you start with the ones where something just changed. Timing is the part of outbound that a plain firmographic list cannot give you.

Keep the trigger list short. Two or three events you can act on within a week beat a dozen you track and never use. Each trigger needs a named owner and a message written in advance.

Example

You sell analytics tooling to marketing leaders at software companies. You pick one trigger: a funding round in the last year.

StepWhat happens
TriggerAcme closes a Series A
AudienceVP of Marketing at acme.com
MessageOne line on the round, one line on the problem you solve
WindowSend within 30 days of the event

Acme gets a message that mentions its own news. Globex has no recent event, so it stays in the general queue. The names and values are placeholders. For a persona-specific play, see how to sell to a VP of Marketing.

In LeadOcean data

LeadOcean holds profile and company attributes, not live behavior. It has no filter for web visits, email opens or job changes, and the dataset is refreshed monthly. Use its fields as slow triggers that build the list, and bring fast triggers from your own site or CRM.

  • minLastFundingYear and maxLastFundingYear limit companies by the year of their last funding round. Search with POST /v1/companies/search or the MCP tool search_companies.
  • technologies and technologyCategories match what is detected on a company website, which shows a tool the prospect already runs.
  • jobLevel, jobFunction and title, with domain set to the account, find the buyer on POST /v1/people/search.

The free count_leads MCP tool does not support fundingType or minFunding, so do not size a funding list with it. To size a funding-trigger list, send a search with count=true and limit set to 1. Read email_status on each person before you send.

The free plan gives 1,000 records, one-off, with no card. Pro is $499 a month. See /pricing. More terms are in the glossary.

Build a funding-trigger list, free

Free to start. No credit card. 1,000 records to spend whenever you like.

Get your free API key →