MarketingSherpa Blog

“Hey, look at me!” While strolling down the Las Vegas Strip during Email Summit 2013, I couldn’t help but notice all of the flashy signs, and individuals, trying to get my attention.

The challenge is equally difficult (although hopefully less gaudy) in the modern inbox, so in the MarketingSherpa 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked …

Q: Which of the following tactics is your organization using to improve the relevance and engagement of email content delivered to subscribers?

We asked your peers how they could use this data …

Segment email campaigns based on sales cycle

Stage-based marketing is the future. Breaking your marketing down to map to a consumer’s research cycle means understanding they will do research in multiple sessions, and at each session, be looking for different content. Best practice will suggest that you will need to engage with them in two or more different sessions, so you will need two or more stages.

Content needs to be short and targeted. Having a single large document is no longer best practice. Content should be targeted to each stage of the research cycle, and be easily consumed in under five pages.

– Mathew Sweezey, Marketing Evangelist, ExactTarget

How closely integrated are your sales and marketing departments?

I would have loved to see another question asked: How closely integrated are your sales and marketing departments? From my experience, those using segmentation and trigger-based emails are those who make sure that marketing and sales are closely aligned. A lot of the triggers “look” like they come from the sales team based on Web behavior with the ultimate objective to drive conversion, of course.

– April Wilson, Director of Analytic Products, RevSpring

Read more…

Sales, marketing and customer services teams can each have slightly different views of customers. In large organizations, differences in perception can coexist within the same department.

For example, a search marketing team can perceive customers’ interests differently than an email marketing team. A customer service team can perceive customers’ needs differently than the sales team. In both cases, the two teams connect with customers through different platforms and analyze their behavior through different data.

“Siloed” departments that have teams separated from one another can prevent organizations from understanding and communicating with customers effectively, says Dave Lewis, CMO, Message Systems, a messaging management solutions vendor.

As the number of marketing channels continues to expand with the growth of mobile and social media marketing, Lewis sees opportunities, but also the potential for additional channels to deepen the problem.

“You’re only furthering the fragmentation that gets in the way of understanding your customers on a holistic basis and being able to communicate with them on that basis,” Lewis says

That’s why Lewis says more teams need to pursue marketing integration (Lisa Arthur, CMO, Aprimo, expressed a similar sentiment in our post last week). By having a central platform from which to communicate with customers and monitor their behavior, teams can get a more well-rounded understanding of their customers and how best to reach them.

Several months ago, Lewis’ team launched a new solution called Mobile Momentum, to help marketers avoid further fragmenting their customer data and messaging. The software combines email and SMS messaging into a single platform that can track customers’ delivery preferences and provide reports on the channels’ performance jointly and separately.

Lewis anticipates incorporating more messaging services into the platform, such as MMS and social media. His team started by combining email and SMS because of the tremendous volume of SMS messages consumers send per day, and because more marketers can benefit from SMS than are currently, he says.

“My view is that the overlooked opportunity associated with text (messaging) is in using it to strengthen the customer relationship over time,” Lewis says.

By offering a platform that combines email and SMS, Lewis’ team is helping marketers better understand their audiences, better meet their needs and provide a better experience. Marketers who feel pulled in too many directions should take note that combining several marketing channels into a single platform may provide more insight into how best to reach customers.

Marketers have many software vendors to choose from. There are laundry lists of companies willing to upgrade your website analytics, email marketing, display ads and almost any other part of your online business.

The growing list of platforms is making the job more complex. Work is done through several dashboards, and data comes from several directions. You have to spend time with each platform to achieve a single goal.

That is why Lisa Arthur, CMO, Aprimo, argues for marketing integration. Aprimo is an integrated marketing software provider. Arthur says integration can help marketers get back to focusing on driving higher ROI.

“The goal and promise of marketing integration is to simplify the complexity of marketing and allow marketers to spend more time on the strategy, the messages and the content, instead of chasing data and ad hoc processes,” she says.

Integration essentially pulls fragmented marketing processes under a single, centralized platform. The approach can free up some of your time, as well as:
o Streamline a multi-channel ROI calculation
o Cut campaign launch time
o Align disparate marketing goals
o Give executives and managers a quick view of overall marketing performance
o Give multiple marketing teams a central platform to work from

A key to starting the integration process is to align business strategy and marketing objectives with the goals of the effort. Consider how aligning marketing data and technology under a central platform help your company achieve its goals.

Second, marketing integration is more of an on-going journey than a short project. The process can continue for years and will require an executive sponsor. If you’re interested in integration and you’re not an executive yourself, find an executive to champion the project and point to how it will improve business goals.

Third, you should track and benchmark operational and strategic metrics. For example, on an operational level, will your team get campaigns planned and launched faster after integration? Strategically, will your team improve campaign performance?

Not all of your marketing needs to be integrated at once. Your team can start small by centralizing a disparate and manual process — such as creative review. Emails, ads and landing pages can be viewed and approved from a single, central location, rather than through an endless chain of emails.

Your team may not have a conversation around integration tomorrow, but if your number of marketing channels continues to grow, you might want to consider having the conversation soon.