You’ve come a long way from where you were. You’re no longer stuck sending one-size-fits-all broadcasts. You’ve grown your database and you know that your email marketing drives loyalty as well as sales across your entire business.
But there’s room for improvement. And we know we can help you increase your efficiency, customer loyalty and develop your eCRM skills.
We understand that each client faces their own set of challenges when it comes to changing how they do business. With this in mind, we’ve developed a way of tailoring our advice to our different clients’ needs, time and the resources they can dedicate to email marketing.
The Email Maturity Model is an industry-leading framework of email sophistication which allows you to pinpoint exactly what level of email marketing sophistication you’re currently at and what your next steps should be. The model identifies five ‘types’ of email marketer – all at different stages of development.
In this blog post we’ll be looking at ways to help the type of email marketer we call ‘The Recommender’.
If you’re a Recommender then you want to nurture your relationship with the customer. You know the value of loyalty and you’re focused on increasing order value by upselling and recommending products. You test and analyse your email campaigns to find out more about your audience and develop their engagement levels. Unfortunately your current IT systems or skill set don’t support your ambitions and you’re struggling to achieve a single customer view.
We hear a lot of questions from The Recommender on how they can unleash their potential when it comes to email marketing. Below we’ve answered some of the most common queries we get, to help free you from the shackles of limited IT resource and unwieldy data dilemmas.
Question: How do I encourage loyalty through email marketing?
Answer: Nurture contacts with lifecycle campaigns
Nurtured leads generate 47% more in purchase value than non-nurtured leads (Annuitas Group). It’s no coincidence these customers spend more money with a business they trust and feel valued by. The first step in developing your email marketing strategy is building your database.
There’s no secret to nurturing customers either, just put yourself in their shoes. Imagine yourself joining a mailing list – what’s the first thing you’d like to receive? A thank you, some interesting advice, a recommendation, a review and then maybe an introductory offer?
It doesn’t stop there – once you’ve purchased, then how about being asked about your opinion on the product, feedback on the service or suggestions for complementary items.
The great thing is that you don’t need to be reliant on your IT capabilities to do this – solutions such as Behavioural Targeting will automatically generate a series of emails based on where the customer is at on their journey with you. You can re-engage customers who’ve lapsed, prompt an additional purchase from a recent buyer or just reward a loyal repeat customer. All these things will improve the engagement across your entire database.
Question: How can I improve the targeting and efficiency of my email marketing?
Answer: Try using dynamic content
Dynamic content is a way of using technology to improve your efficiency in creating targeted personalised content. This feature allows you to deliver personalised content automatically without putting any more pressure on your team.
By using dynamic content you can personalise your emails by delivering different articles, promotions or calls-to-action based on information you know about the recipient. The content could be based on demographics, personal preferences, purchase history or the online activities of the recipient but they all help provide a personalised and targeted message.
It means you don’t need to spend hours creating different versions of emails. You can simply create different content blocks or banners which fit into one email template – then dynamic content automatically inserts what’s most relevant to the recipient. It’s a great way of reducing the time you spend on creating your emails while still achieving the benefits of personalisation.
Question: How can I achieve a single customer view?
Answer: Try our Customer Intelligence solution
Imagine if you had all the information you hold about your customer in one place. A single view on your customers at your fingertips and you don’t need to scramble around trying to piece together the full picture. It sounds simple but having the data in one place and getting insights about your customers quickly is a coveted marketing dream.
Our Customer Intelligence solution enables you to see your customers’ behaviours in one place. Gathering and combining all the information from your CRM, email, website, social media, offline and transactional channels, Customer Intelligence gives a complete picture of how people interact with your brand. By consolidating your data into this single customer view and using it to send targeted campaigns, you can increase your email revenue by up to 53%.
It’s not just about putting the data together though. Customer Intelligence does the number crunching for you, reducing analysis time by up to 80% while producing drag and drop visual representations of trends and patterns in your data. You can then use this to automatically launch targeted email campaigns based on these insights.
These are just a few basic topics but you can see that with some simple changes we can help increase your efficiency, targeting and your ability to gain insight into your customers’ behaviours. And regardless of your time, budget or team resources, there’s always opportunity to develop your email marketing to drive wiser marketing decisions and a better customer experience.
