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As web analytics gains momentum, the question remains, “How do we make it actionable?” An ongoing challenge of the email marketer is translating valuable web data to create more relevant campaigns. Having the ability to take your email marketing/web analytics integration beyond traffic analysis, to gather specific data in real-time on your prospects and customers builds true relationship email marketing.
So where do you start? A highly successful strategy is to use web analytics for gauging the effective-ness of your email marketing initiatives and determining optimization tactics to improve your overall campaign performance. Real-time messaging, or triggered messaging, is highly valuable to not only you but also your customer. Your customer gains a specific, relevant message related to their recent behavior, and you see a greater return on ROI. To create real-time messaging it's critical to understand your customer lifecycle and define where you can include email marketing that will be highly impactful.
There are five stages of the customer lifecycle: acquisition, conversion, growth, retention and reactiva-tion. Each stage represents an important time within your customer's relationship with you. By defin-ing ways in which you connect with your customer as well as which channels you connect with them on, you begin to define a strategy that is real one-to-one messaging. By taking analytics data and weaving that into your email marketing strategy, you are better able to represent the customer's full experience with your business versus only looking at email or only looking at their website behavior. By tying the two together, you can weave in email campaigns that are more relevant.
Real-time triggered campaigns offer a great deal of ROI potential. Strategic planning and identifying where to initiate the campaigns can help you create an automated marketing engine that produces convincing results.
Types of Triggers
- Transactional Triggers: Transactional triggers are based on a direct transaction between you and your customer or prospect. They can include a purchase, a download conversion, an opt-in or anything else defined within your email marketing and website as a transactional event. These events are fairly easy to define and can be easily followed up with a clear message that highlights the event they just completed. Examples can include a “thank you for downloading”, a summary of their recent purchase, or a “define your preferences” email.
- Recurring Triggers: Recurring triggers are triggers that are customer/prospect profile based versus event behavior based. Recurring triggers can include billing, birthdays, or renewal.
The key to successful email marketing using detailed analytics is to make behavioral data actionable. Email marketing provides marketers a forum to build one to one relationships via relevant messag-ing. Email is fast, inexpensive, measurable, direct and automated, which enable marketers to connect anonymous web behavior with individuals through various identifiers.
Getting Started
Once you've identified your business goals and objectives, you will need to determine how you will leverage email marketing.
- Promote a Repeat Purchase: Offer cross-sell and up-sell opportunities based on purchase activity and behavior. Notify customers of related products and new arrivals from the same lines as previously purchased items.
- Encourage a first-time purchase: Send a message about products recently browsed or searched - send a compelling offer/incentive to buy now.
- Increase customer retention: Target your audience to encourage repeat behavior that you would like to see. If a customer hasn't visited recently, offer them a compelling reason to come back through an offer or by spiking their interest with new products.
Overwhelmed by the amount of behavioral data you are facing? Don't be. Simply start with the basics. Begin with transactional messages, which are often easy to implement and work your way towards click-through data and web behavior. It's also important to be able to easily segment these audiences as well as analyze the overall performance. And, of course, don't forget to test. The most important part of customer lifecycle messaging using analytics is to make it easy for you to implement, monitor, test, and maintain.
Remember, conversions don't happen in a void and having the ability to create and provide the total customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle is essential to impactful email marketing.
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