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Email marketing F


Email must-haves five


Five key ingredients for more effective email marketing By Marcus Wilkinson


one


rom large multinational retailers to small online-only start-ups, marketing is nothing without a well maintained and well managed database. Ensuring best practice is essential for maintaining the quality and safe management of the information at the brand’s disposal. Here are some of my best- practice tips on data management.


Think quality not quantity Whether you have a database of hundreds or millions of customers, when first creating email marketing campaigns, marketers need to look at the quality of their databases to ensure that the information they have at their disposal is, in fact, useful. It sounds trite, but something as simple as making sure all fields are filled in correctly, or validating email addresses to prevent bounce backs, can make all the difference. Starting at the very beginning to ensure that all the data is clean, means that marketers can then deploy sophisticated marketing technology to align data streams to personalise emails based on past purchases, interactions and conversations, using data from across the spectrum, whether that is customer service calls, posts on social media or in-store purchases.


two Automation is key


In order to reach this level of sophistication and personalisation, automation is required. If emails are to be truly relevant, all customers’ past interactions need to be taken into account and this requires analytics and attribution software. Analytics will allow brands to track and break down the data gathered at the checkout in-store, online and on any social media, providing incredibly valuable insight to add to both the content of emails and the medium through which they’re sent, whether this is a tablet, PC or mobile. Analytics software allows data to be used optimally by marketers, permitting them to personalise marketing messages and send out relevant email messages over the preferred channel, increasing the likelihood of customers reading the content and engaging with it and, in the long term, driving sales. The stats point to the same conclusion; 44 percent of those surveyed in e-Dialog’s recent global research study said that looking at past purchase was the best way to target future email campaigns effectively but the majority of brands have little to


no understanding at all of attribution modelling (according to the IAB Search Marketing Barometer 2012). Additionally, 60 percent of European consumers and 71 percent of American consumers said that the most effective and relevant marketing emails they received were from brands that “knew” them. This is why companies like Amazon and Boots are so well-respected; they seem to take an interest in each and every customer. Adopting the technology that allows acute segmentation to go that extra mile with consumers is what will make promotions stand out.


three


Pull the trigger Using email triggers is a very clever technique that shows a brand knows its customers. Email messages can be triggered based on real-time interactions—at its simplest, the order confirmation email is a trigger. Triggers are effective reminders since they can be set to be activated before or after a particular event has taken place, for example, before a subscription or policy has run out. They are especially useful in ecommerce to remind customers if they have left items in online shopping baskets or for recommending similar items after a purchase. To illustrate this in more detail, if one customer has attended a brand’s event, they may receive a thank- you email with information on further events. If another customer hasn’t, they could receive an email, saying sorry you missed the event; you might want to check out our next one. If the second customer continues not to open emails on events, they could be removed altogether from events lists and only receive news on offers and promotions. This can all be done automatically, tailoring messages to consumers and taking caution not to irritate with too many irrelevant messages.


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Customers are bombarded by promotional messages across all digital media and to make emails stand out from the crowd, they need to be engaging. Email needs to evolve from the standard text-heavy format and incorporate video and essentially viral content, something that instantly attracts the customer’s attention and is shareable—a direction that all forms of marketing are quickly moving in.


Marcus Wilkinson is technical


services director at e-Dialog, a provider of integrated digital marketing services.


Integrate the platforms Social, email, mobile or TV, these platforms complement each other in the digital experience, highlighted by the recent popularity in “media stacking”—watching TV while looking at social media and checking emails. Customers will certainly be less likely to respond to emails, SMS messages or adverts if they are not consistent across every medium and more importantly modified for every medium. Our research shows that over half of the respondents would forget about an email or even delete it if it wasn’t in an appropriate format when opened on mobile. Equally, marketing on email should be linked to marketing on social media, giving the user a better brand experience and driving traffic to all brand platforms. Although social may often be viewed as a new marketing medium and email a rather retro one, both email and social are inextricably linked in the fact that all notifications from social media sites are sent to a customer’s email address. It is by email that you register in the first place. So when a brand uploads competitions, promotions and announcements, it is by email that a customer will first be notified, offering marketers great potential to integrate the marketing message.


Email will always be a popular method of communication and a medium used by all ages. However, rather than relying on a steadfast format, it needs to catch up with the technology. This isn’t to compete with other marketing channels but to complement them, creating engaging messages for multichannel customers that are targeted, personalised and operate on real-time, forging a real relationship between brand and customer.


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