Email Marketing: Creating a customer profile
At IRCE 2014, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute, sat down with Pete Prestipino, Editor-in-Chief, Website Magazine, to discuss email marketing strategy in a constantly connected world.
“Customers are omnichannel,” Pete explained. “So retailers today … really need to focus on building a very rich profile of the user to understand exactly where they’re coming from at the exact time, and historically where they’ve spent their online consumptive behavior.”
When it comes to connecting via email, Pete recommended asking yourself three things:
1. How often will we be sending? How often do we need to send?
Determining how often your customers will hear from you is essential in developing a strategy. Pete indicated that all forms of email — including order confirmations — are included in this plan. All correspondence that necessarily comes on behalf of your company is included as a marketing email send.
2. How can email reflect the product?
“Selling a grand piano is a lot different from selling a pair of shoes,” Pete said. The product should indicate how often you should be in contact with your customers. Large or complex purchases may need more content, testimonials and consideration than a 10% off promotional email every three months.
3. What do we need to accomplish?
This question transcends the content and design aspects of your marketing emails and strikes right to the core of your message: Why? Closely linked to your value proposition, this question should be the crux of your campaign. Is this a complex sale, where you have to build trust or a rapport, or is it a simpler sales process?
As for the exact way that you should communicate with your list, Pete said, “a lot of it depends on the customer.” He added that although you can gain a lot of insight from open rate, “understanding the customer is the key.”
According to Pete, there is “a flow that needs to occur.” This flow is the evolution of the relationship that the customer has with your brand. Each customer builds a relationship with you in his or her own way.
“Consumers are becoming a lot more sophisticated in their buying decisions and demand a lot more,” Pete continued.
Customers are now expecting personalized campaigns and demanding a more refined answer to the question, “If I’m your ideal customer, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?”
With technology and data readily available, marketers can no longer afford to ignore customers demanding a personalized experience with content, offers and headlines specific to their needs and customer journey.
As Peter said, “Those that aren’t [creating dynamic emails] are being left behind.”
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Categories: Email Marketing customer profile, customer-centric marketing, Email Marketing, multi-channel marketing, omnichannel marketing
These are three great questions to ask. Naturally, I think we want to mail much more often but if we set a routine to our sending, not only do our members expect it, but they also give more value to it than they do the emails that are sent randomly.
Breaking the list into segments and sending custom variations of each campaign does prove to have better results. It does take much more time but even a 1% increase in opens or clicks will have a dramatic difference on your bottom-line.
A.T.
This is a must watch video! Very useful and informative when it comes to email marketing