It’s all well and good sending out marketing emails but if they are not relevant, they will, at best, clutter your contact’s in-box and, at worst infuriate your potential and current customers. The good news is that new strategies and products are springing up all the time to help sharpen up email relevancy by paying attention to segmentation, personalisation, life-cycle management, and testing.
Kim Cook, Product & Marketing Manager, Business Strata, discusses:
It is vital for the email marketer to target strategically and effectively. An email delivered to a prospect or customer who has no interest in its content, is a waste of time and provides no return on investment (ROI). Not only this, the offending marketer risks being added to the spam list.
As with any direct marketing exercise, the starting point for success is focused on data quality and sustainability. Get this right and the benefits are mind-blowing. The variety of demographic information available from business databases allow for very specific targeting. More than that, email marketing allows for the marketer to purchase ‘opt-in’ databases, where the prospect is pre-qualified.
You want to reach the person responsible for making purchasing decisions in South Yorkshire, with more than 50 employees, who operate in the manufacturing sector? No problem; if your data is accurate.
Accurate data is something that Business Strata ensures it provides; on average 10,000 businesses are contacted every day to verify and update records. Investing in business lists is critical to business success, be that customer or prospect databases.
The business that does not, as an absolute minimum, invest in maintaining an accurate customer database is fundamentally flawed. It defeats the object of the exercise if the right person does not receive the message that is being communicated. In other words, a valuable resource is being poorly deployed.
Quality data is not only invaluable in maintaining timely and profitable dialogue with past and existing clients; it is also critical in informing future prospecting activities. A full understanding of ideal customer profile saves time, money, effort and could save brand embarrassment.
Because email marketing resides within the digital arena, it is possible to go much further. In fact, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination. Email marketing delivers the secret ingredient that businesses have craved for years; knowing the right person, in the right industry, in the right place, at the right time, with the right purchasing power and most importantly, tracking their response.
The statement is over used, but has to be said: “I know half of my marketing is working, I just don’t know which half.” Well you do now.
Email provides the ability for the customer to respond quickly and easily. Vast amounts of data, which when fed back to the main database, can provide detailed prospect selection and results modelling. This in turn, enables choices such as: ‘Let’s target as before, but only those who regularly open or click on similar marketing emails’.
Measurability not only provides for clear ROI analysis against the campaign, it provides real data which nurtures the database and improves future activity. The simple fact that we know how many emails have been opened, and by whom, can be viewed as a Eureka moment.
It is clear that, as with all marketing, the battle of the inbox will be won by those organisations that deliver the most compelling proposition to their target audience. The route to this is by taking the time to source the right prospect data – data which provides the opportunity to segment on recipient profiles and their preferences.
Email supports building on-going dialogues with prospects because it is cost effective, flexible and measurable and due to these factors it also opens the door to the lure of mass mailing for a quick volume injection of enquiries.
Plenty has been written about the future of personalised marketing, and not just in recent years.
Technology drives potential and digital technology is presenting many more opportunities – one to one digital personalised marketing is no longer the stuff of science fiction.
Most marketers are excited by this prospect, sales directors are looking forward to improved ROI stats and CEO’s tasked with driving business growth and profitability welcome relevant targeted communication.
However, the starting point for the marketeer looking at email for client acquisition is gaining access to a base of data which is opt-in, up-to-date, flexible and importantly, provides some form of relevancy selection either on customer profiling or historical results data, ideally both.
Whether prospects or customers; they don’t want to be inundated with irrelevant rubbish. However, when has the serious marketer ever taken that as their strategy – we never want our brands to be associated with any form of bad practice marketing, so why would we start with email?
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