Email Marketing and your Customer Lifecycle

As an active digital consumer myself I receive a lot of email. Most of the time in my limited personal time, I find myself browsing through at a rapid pace looking for those few emails that are exactly for me and not whatever group the sending company placed me into.

It makes me wonder how prevalent is behavioral marketing or life cycle mapping in most email marketers tool chests today? Because even as much as I have read about it in the email community for years, it still seems that its not yet the commonplace.

Take this diagram for example, published by Strongmail all the way back in early 2011:

 How much are you as an email marketer tailoring your knowledge and products to the needs and life cycles of your consumers? If you are not doing it now, in what ways could you grow your programs to listen more and offer things only when its right for that customer? Email is personal- so why don't we all market like it is?

The future of digital is all about 1:1. We live in an on-demand society. Are you adapting and advancing or simply growing stale? The choice is up to you.

Segmentation & Personalization

How much email do you send?
How relevant are your messages?
How do you compare to other senders out there?

Let's take Groupon for instance: 
Their list has roughly 115MM subscribers and they send around 5 billion emails a month.

Q: How do they ensure their subscribers care about all those messages?
A: Through highly personalized content driven by behavioral segmentation and extreme personalization.

Here are some tips:

• Respect subscriber permissions and ASK them what content they want and how they want to receive it.
• Segment at the user level - use a subscriber maintained profile center to drive your data.
• Take a look at all the data you have and design new ways to automate and serve offers based on that.
• Ask your self what more can we do to personalize the consumers interactions with us- throughout their lifetime. 
• Remember that these campaigns take time- but in the long run technology saves time!
• Consider tracking cookies on your website to gather more data on your customers - but be clear and ask for permission.
• Start small, there are 3 levels of segmenting:
• Good = "Explicit segmenting": ie. basic data like gender, demographics, etc.
• Better = "Implicit segmenting" ie: more detailed info like preferences for content, frequency
• Best = "Single Interaction": ie. Behavioral or self reported user specific data.

Remember-
Personalization builds/enhances relevancy and that results in better email performance!

Test. Optimize. Grow

Did you know that 61% of Email Marketers do not test?

For me as a Strategist, that was a shocking statistic. As much as I preach best practices in email marketing, they are only a start. The old adage is true- what works for one might not work for another. The only way to really know is to test!



Sources say that you should dictate 5-10% of your resources to testing.


Here are some tips:

• Plan your tests way ahead of time
• Start small- consider only using 10-20% of your list for the test and send the winning creative to the rest of the list 2 days later.
• If you have sparks of ideas for tests post them on a wall- make them hard to ignore.
• Try testing your

• Subject lines
• Layouts
• Images
• Content pieces
• Various Landing Pages
• Varying frequencies
• Time/Day to send
•  Segments/List demographics

List Segmentation

List Segmentation: A Necessary Evil.

Gone are the days of "batch & blast" style email marketing. For a mailing to really perform these days, it has to be relevant to the recipient. That means your list must be segmented enough so that the content applies to the needs and wants of the consumer.

Don't fret- you are not alone when you start to sweat thinking about how much extra time it takes to segment lists. It's more work- but smart work- work that will pay off big in the end. There's almost always some type of manual piece of it too. But keep your focus and you will see that list segmentation is most definately a nessissary evil.  


First let's talk about the different types of "Data":

1. Endemic Data- ex: contact info, demographic info, lead record info
2. Transactional Data- ex: info from a transaction or purchase
3. Behavioral Data- ex: online/offline info collected as a result of something a recipient did/did not do, very actionable data, opens, clicks, calls, coupons used.
4. Computed Data- the combination of 2 or more of the types above

What's most important to your list? Relevancy!

• You must deliver/ship on time. You are what you ship.
• Timing and Relevancy is everything - ex. birthday messages
• Help yourself by sticking to your internal content calendar dates 
• One way to build relevancy is through using real time news and events in your email communication + relating it to your brand = “Trend Jacking” (not easy)  
• Using breaking news/trends  
• Big events  
• Weather  
•  Response to competition
• 3 Factors needed to create relevant content:
  o   The content they crave
  o   Proper list segmentation
  o   Real time communications

Building Quality Lists

    "51% of all marketers say that their list is only slowly growing." -According to a 9/2010 Marketing Sherpa Survey

     Why is exclusivity essential?

      If you spent years painstakingly nurturing a highly targeted, 110% response based opt in list, do you think you would share it with just anyone? Probably not. Quality email marketers know that a good list will grow slowly. It takes time to find the members who really want to hear what you have to say. And those members  should be treated as the highly valuable tribe members they are- with anticipated, exclusively relevant, timely email content.

      Uniqueness

      The more unique and targeted the list members are, the more unique the and targeted your content should be. Maintain your list engagement by shipping that uniqueness that your brand can offer- every time.

      Be Humble.

      Be humble in your voice and deliver only what they signed up for- use stories, videos, reports

      Favor quality over quantity in your communications, but always ship on time.

      People change. 

      Why have a preference center? Because peoples wants/needs change over time.

      Most lists loose 1/3 per year to list churn!

            Make sure your offers are relevant to your brand:

• Special reports
• Whitepapers

      You must think and act differently than the competition- use brand personality, expertise

       Maintain quality list relationships by using:          

• Preference centers
• Opt down or pause mailings
• Easy unsubscribes (47% of users will click spam instead of unsubscribe because its easier/faster)
• Try a unsubscribe confirmation page
• Request reasons on unsubscribe confirmation page
• 2 click unsubscribe as standard

·         Dependable, predictable sends- no “batch and blast”

·         **Set subscriber expectations, tell them:

• What you will send
• When/how you will send
• Spell out benefits
• Link to privacy policy
• Don’t break promises

·

·         **Ask for new subscribers in your:

• Blogs
•  Mobile
• Social
• Transactional email
• Webinars
• Websites
• Customer service
• Tradeshows

·         QR Codes- help build list subscribers- maybe use on t-shirts at conferences

·         Social Media- gain subscribers through:

• Simple updates/mentions
• Sharing buttons from relevant content
• Facebook custom forms on your fan page to sign up for email

·         Transactional emails - add email sign ups to footers

·         How to motivate your subscribers to sign up:

•  1^st notice on breaking news
• Sweepstakes and coupons 
• Premium access to features

Re-Engagement Strategies

• Send them a targeted offer or reason to re-engage with you 
•   If they click yes, send them to their own preference center
• Consider sorting your list segments as: #1=most active; #2=mid active; #3=least active