From Stream20
In today’s economic climate, marketing professionals are challenged more than ever to deliver measurable results and returns on their investments. At the same time they are experiencing increasingly competitive markets, greater ad-fatigue from consumers, higher customer expectations, a host of new media channels and shrinking budgets - all while facing the growing pressure to deliver more with less. Stuart Russell, senior consultant, Stream:20, examines the evolving role of email marketing within that mix...
Through work with some of the biggest consumer brands, including Sky, National Express and Ted Baker, delivering multi-channel online marketing campaigns, we hear time and again that organisations are striving to communicate effectively with their existing and prospective customers in an increasingly noisy environment. If any brand is to maintain and build sales levels while meeting wider business objectives, marketers must build intelligent, tailored and integrated digital strategies into their marketing campaigns.
With its relatively low implementation and maintenance costs, email marketing is a tactic that remains popular and is used to varying extents by organisations of all sizes. However, the way brands use email is evolving to become an increasingly sophisticated tool. So how can marketers effectively harness this direct channel to customers? What makes the difference between a successful email campaign and what is little more than spam?
An evolving channel
Where once email budgets were weighted towards acquisition campaigns, recent trends have seen the focus increasingly shift to customer retention and loyalty. Email is consistently cited as delivering the best ROI of all marketing channels. However it can be - and often is - executed very badly. The golden days when organisations were able to yield solid results from basic, untargeted mail-outs are well and truly over. After years of underinvestment in their email channel, businesses are now having to seriously readdress how they build and carry out their campaigns if they are to yield tangible results and in turn have a positive effect on an organisation’s bottom line. This shift is represented in the way we are hearing brands talk about the way they use email. The term ‘email programme’ is gradually replacing reference to ‘email campaigns’ as brands take a much more intelligent, agile and joined-up approach to the channel.
Key to success is building a sustainable, data driven infrastructure that can deliver campaigns that cut through the clutter of customers’ inboxes. But with email marketing still surrounded by something of an air of mystique and in-house experience in the channel frequently rare businesses are often not in a position to yield the best possible results. So what exactly can organisations do to address this?
Knowing your audience
As a first port of call, marketers must consider who their audiences are and segment their target groups for relevant messaging. It sounds obvious, but an existing customer who you’re trying to upsell new products or services to requires a completely different approach to targeting a prospective new customer. The power of well thought through email contact in customer retention cannot be under-estimated, with a key building block of a successful email campaign being able to deliver real value. Here data must make the decisions.
Email campaigns designed to retain, upsell or cross-sell can be hugely successful and the key here is knowing and understanding each customer as an individual. If you can segment your audience and target each group with relevant, personalised and timely messages, click-throughs, which result in sales, are maximised. The beauty of email means that almost anyone can segment their data by one or more variables. At one basic level, segmenting by gender and age to suggest appropriate offers remains a robust and simple way of maximising the impact of your program. At the other end of the scale, if customer purchase history can be used to find out who has been buying what, when, quantity and how much they’ve spent, the most valued customers can then be distinguished from those who need encouragement to buy more.
Consumers will always benchmark against best of breed emails and to stand out from the crowd marketers need to make sure their messages are both engaging and that relevant information is structured to make it as easy as possible for the recipient to digest the content and follow the relevant call to action. With marketers increasingly understanding the value of testing management strategies and continually refining their lists, the quality and relevance of the information reaching our inboxes is set to continue rising.
Integration & Social Media
A further opportunity for marketers is integrating email into wider marketing strategies. Email may be used as a stand-alone tactic, or as part of a mix of digital marketing activities. All of which should likely complement more traditional marketing tools such as direct mail or PR. Smaller businesses in particular can very simply and effectively integrate social media channels and email – if you know who is already engaging with your Facebook page or Twitter stream, why not focus your email efforts on those who are not? Marketers must ensure that messages, offers and information are consistent, concise and relevant across all channels to avoid confusing existing and potential customers which, in a worst case scenario, could result in lost business and bad feeling towards the brand.
In short, marketers must get more agile and take a considered, long-term approach to email marketing by understanding the lifecycle of customers and developing strategies to match that. Many marketers still focus their efforts primarily on building a ‘creative’ email campaign without giving due thought to long-term objectives or technical requirements. Building an email program around robust, segmented data is the key to unlocking long-term value and return on investment through relevant, personalised and timely content, delivered to the right people at the right time.
If you would like to discuss your email marketing channel (or any other aspect of your online marketing) Stream:20 will be holding free 30 minute consultation sessions at the show. To book your slot, please call Grant 0207 793 2440.
For more information on Stream:20, please see: www.onlinemarketingshow.co.uk/en/Exhibitors/stream20.aspx