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As you look ahead to 2008 for new opportunities to improve your email marketing efforts, we encourage you to look back for a minute, as well.
Remember the “email is a courtship” metaphor and “one-to-one” techniques espoused by Seth Godin and others? Even as far back as 1999, those ideas resonated strongly with all of us because they were dead-on. Jump ahead to 2008, and it’s pretty obvious that marketers have failed to realize the potential in offering true relationship email marketing to customers. Instead, email marketers have grown complacent, generating a certain degree of success with only minimal segmentation and personalization. We’ve modified our definition of relevance to accommodate “good enough” technology and strategy. But “good enough” shouldn’t suffice anymore.
Your Call to Action: Lifecycle Email Messaging
In 2008, all of us at BlueHornet encourage fellow email marketers to achieve what’s been the “future” of email marketing for a very long time: Greater email personalization and relevance through lifecycle email messaging.
Lifecycle email messaging is not a product or a feature. It is a campaign management approach that combines strategy and technology to deliver highly targeted emails that evolve as your customers’ preferences and behaviors change over time. No two people in your email database are the same and, undoubtedly, their engagement with your brand or organization is unique. So instead of sending the same offer or content to your entire list, you can use lifecycle tools and techniques to automate and improve your ability to communicate more personally with individual subscribers.
From a theory standpoint, we can look at lifecycle email messaging from the perspective of Seth Godin’s 1999 book, Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers. Emails should give subscribers an opportunity to “raise their hand” and engage in a conversation with you. Add today’s technology to yesterday’s theory, and both you and your customers have access to many tools that facilitate the “hand raising” and much deeper engagement.
Getting Started with Lifecycle Email Messaging
What does the process of lifecycle email messaging entail? The hardest part is getting started, so we encourage email marketers to start small. For example, develop a basic strategy using the links in your emails. Pick one link and decide that you will send a targeted follow-up email to every subscriber who clicks that link. Without ever coming right out and telling customers that you know they clicked, the follow-up email lets you take the conversation—and the relationship—to the next level.
Yes, this is an easy example, and we’re not telling you that creating lifecycle campaigns is easy. In addition to the right tools, it requires insight and planning. But here’s what we are saying:
An Email Marketer’s Call to Action for 2008
- Every email marketer in every vertical can use lifecycle messaging techniques to achieve greater relevance;
- Many lifecycle features are basic and can be implemented without sophisticated data integration strategies;
- This year, technological advances are making it much easier to automate and simplify lifecycle messaging initiatives.
So, we urge you to make the commitment. Make sure you understand your customer lifecycle so that you can map your strategy accordingly. Consult with the lifecycle messaging experts here at BlueHornet, or ask your email service provider for help. But above all, start soon. And by all means, share your successes with others so that more email marketers can (finally) realize the future of email marketing!
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