This article addresses one of the biggest challenges associated with e-mail marketing programs – establishing meaningful contact with customer targets in order to increase sales, while protecting and enhancing your brand. It illustrates that successful e-mail marketing designed to drive sales and build brands requires adopting a methodology that includes more precise prospect targeting, better permission-based models, a better overall consumer experience and better quality lists.
Email
A Five-Phase Approach to Email Marketing July 31, 2006 By Albert Gadbut | More by this Author
The president and CEO of AcquireWeb, Inc. outlines how to apply best practices from permission marketing, brand management and direct marketing to email.
One of the biggest challenges associated with email marketing programs is establishing meaningful contact with customer targets in order to increase sales, while protecting and enhancing your brand.
Successful email marketing designed to drive sales and build brands requires adopting a methodology that includes more precise prospect targeting, better permission-based models, a better overall consumer experience and better quality lists.
More precise prospect targeting Better targeting translates directly into better response rates. Accurate customer profiling, which looks at demographic information related to consumers, business industry type and company size, is needed to define the target market. Knowing more about the target company or individual leads to messages with a high degree of relevance and therefore, impact: the higher the relevance, the better chance that the intended message will break through the clutter.
Better permission-based models Any customer or potential customer will be more apt to read an email from a trusted source. In building a permission-based email list, it is sometimes better to go beyond simple opt-in/opt-out where the customer gives the OK just once and use confirmed or double opt-in. While some marketers may see this as an unnecessarily high goal, double opt-in/opt-out reinforces the relationship with the customer, serving as a reminder that they have granted their permission, and improves the likelihood that the emails will be opened.
A better overall consumer experience Marketers need to also keep in mind that simply inundating their customers with too many irrelevant messages will deteriorate customer relationships and counter any long-term loyalty goals. The emphasis needs to be on the quality of the experience. Relevance, personalization and segmentation all add to the overall user experience.
Better quality lists And finally, list selection can make or break the success of any campaign. However, few list owners and managers understand how to best develop such lists. It is important to find a source that can provide accurate data. A highly targeted, accurate, permission-based list is a valuable asset-- the more accurate the information, the better delivery of your messages.
Furthermore, a successful email marketing program should encompass a multi-phased approach that provides an unprecedented ability to reach a targeted group of prospects by combining data compilation, sourcing and analysis to produce real results.
The phases of this type of program include:
Phase I: Identify your target audience Identify your target audience by using sophisticated technology and an extensive database to provide the most accurate customer profile. Then, based on this program, select your best prospects from a pool of permission-based individual contact records to find prospect matches for your profile. From this prospect universe, further hone your customer target list based on your particular preferences, such as campaign size, budget, geographic region or additional campaign requirements.
Phase II: Establish contact with your audience Based on scientifically proven permission letters, establish contact with your audience by generating a permission letter and sending it to your predetermined target list, inquiring whether they would like to receive information and/or promotional offers from you. This tactic establishes a second level of permission based on responses received.
Message deliverability is confirmed by successful permission letter delivery, further insuring the success of your program. You may also establish links and tracking mechanisms on a multi-channel basis. As well, controlling your own creative assures consistent messaging and seamless integration with other multi-channel messages.
Phase III: Campaign in progress Once you've sent out your branded messages to the target audience, test the creative based on geo-demographics and other target preferences, and package your message differently to subsets of your prospect audience. A reliable scientific approach is A/B split testing. Also, expanded creative ... [download for more]
