MarketingSherpa Blog

A few moments after her featured speaker session at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, Shawna Dahlin, Senior Email Marketing Manager, Microsoft Store, sat down at the Media Center with MarketingSherpa Reporter Courtney Eckerle to discuss why it’s so important for marketers to recognize problems and implement changes to their email campaigns as soon as they can.

Why shouldn’t marketers wait until everything is set up perfectly to implement program changes?

“It’s never too soon to start being relevant to your customer,” Shawna explained.

A lot of lists are “leaky buckets.” With every email send that isn’t relevant to the customer, you risk losing them forever. With the technology available today, marketers now have the ability to use data to find out what their customers are interested in and segment their email sends to make those sends more personalized.

Even the tiniest bit of data can be converted into a big win. “You can’t wait. You’ll have to do everything you can to be ever, just a little bit, more relevant so you don’t lose them out of your database,” she said.

How do these data drive tactics improve the customer experience?

Remember, people buy from people, not faceless companies or websites. Marketers need to do whatever they can to help the customer feel like they aren’t in a one-way conversation with a conglomerate.

“The data helps you get a little more relevant to your customer every time you communicate with them. It makes them feel … like they are not one and a million. Like they are being talked to by a person,” Shawna said.

According to Shawna, the two most valuable assets an email marketer has are:

• Data: The ability to make an accurate inventory of all your data sources. This includes:
  • Evaluating what content to have
  • Segmenting your customers by your data sets
  • Personalizing your email sends using the content you’ve evaluated or created based on your segmentation
•  Testing: Being able to test what works with your organization’s email list and what doesn’t.

Campaigns will always involve some sort of risk. However, marketers should “understand with failure comes success. It’s all part of learning and making a broader success story with your program. If you don’t have that, it’s really hard to progress your program forward,” Shawna concluded.

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Want to hear more from Microsoft Store’s Shawna Dahlin? Gain free access to HD video replays of full sessions from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015

Email Marketing: Microsoft Store uses relevance to increase sends by 300% and email revenue by 600% [More from MarketingSherpa]

Microsoft’s Shawna Dahlin on How To Build a Relevant Customer Experience [From MeritDirect’s Big Data & OmniChannel Marketing Summit

BonLook’s Data-Driven Emails [From MailChimp Blog]

7 Ecommerce Segmentation Hacks for Profitable Customer Loyalty [From HubSpot Blogs]

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