Email marketing

Spam, phishing, dropping open rates, ‘deliverability issues’ and inbox overload; if you are in any way involved in the email marketing business, these are terms you will be more than familiar with.

By Grant Keller, director at Acceleration

These are business issues that need to be dealt with, but the medium is still relatively young and this is just the first hurdle. Let’s not stumble here and give up before the race has even started.

For marketers who treat their email customers and prospects with respect, the channel is far from dead; it’s thriving, and helping build solid relationships.

You can have as many “Golden Rules” as you like but they all boil down to respect, and nowhere is this notion of respect more important than in the world of B2B marketing.

Generally audiences are smaller, but don’t let this mislead you. They might be smaller in number, but they are without doubt bigger in terms of buying power, and bombarding them with irrelevant, badly timed messages can be fatal.

All this makes good sense - but it is really achievable? How can the needs and desires of our customers and prospects be anticipated? Once they are, how can they be delivered in a way which does not place an enormous strain on business resources?

As with anything complex, the way to achieve it is to break it down into small, manageable tasks. Although each marketer will face some unique challenges, the tasks below are a very good place to start:

•    Go back to basics, segment your databases into useful segments, ensuring that mechanisms are in place for customers and prospects to move between segments as their situation and needs change.

•    Define the appropriate strategy for each segment. This could include conversion, retention, deeper share of pocket or re-activation.

•    Breathe life into the strategy, and apply it to each individual in every segment. This is the important bit, and the key is to listen to what customers and prospects are saying.

•    In order to do this, you must make sure that email platforms must be in tune with what web analytics tool are reporting.

•    With the necessary integration in place, define each and every ‘Business Event’ that prospects may trigger. The place to start is to capture any event that may reveal something about the state of mind of the customer.

•    At the simplest end of the spectrum, this may be a registration. While at the more sophisticated end, it may be an individual who has gone through four stages of a check-out process, but failed to complete the final stage.

•    Listen to what each ‘Business Event’ is saying about customer needs and desires and define an appropriate response to each. These responses become ‘Business Rules’ and to be effective, they need to define both the content and timing of the response.

•    The simplest way to deliver this is to develop a ‘Messaging Matrix’. Segments (and related strategies) mapped across the horizontal axis and ‘Business Events’ mapped on the vertical. What naturally fills in at each point of intersection are the ‘Business Rules’.

•    With the ‘Messaging Matrix’ defined, attention can be paid to creative messaging and dynamic content creation. With the rule set defined above, it’s a relatively simple process to extend this into rules for building and deploying creative on the fly.

With the hard work done, it is key is to ensure that all these processes are automated from the outset. All too often I have seen sophisticated programmes, which seem manageable at first, spiral out of control when traffic increases. Automation from the outset means that programmes can be built confidently, without fear of resource or administration nightmares in the future.

This does mean an extra bit of work to start with, but once defined, automated and deployed, marketers can get back to being marketers and focus on the important business of delivering results, rather than scrambling to keep up with the administrative needs of an email programme.

Rating

By Grant Keller  on   Jul 08,2008

Add a comment  |  Add a rating  |  Email to a friend

Keywords

email marketing    spam    direct marketing   

Comments

Erica
The email marketing was a good idea in the first stage of the internet. However, in this moment, everything is ignored and spemmers are everywhere. rca ieftin Report Abuse