By Bryan Brown ( @getvision), on February 8th, 2012
Have you noticed how much the evolution of today’s buyer has changed the makeup of today’s marketing departments? Today’s buyer is more educated, more self-reliant and more active on social networks than ever. Correspondingly, today’s marketing content must be more helpful, more transparent and more human than ever.
With those higher demands have come role changes for almost everyone in the marketing department. Consider a few examples:
Role #1: Email Marketer
Old responsibilities: Send out one-off, batch-and-blast emails.
New responsibilities: Connect series of messages into complex automated campaigns using business rules and individuals’ past behaviors; own or be part of a multichannel messaging strategy (mobile, social, email).
Role #2: Media & Analyst Relations Specialist
Old responsibilities: Ensure positive coverage in print publications, analyst reports, etc.
New responsibilities: Craft a strategy that connects the company/brand message with critical social channels and influencers to build its social audience; respond to social critiques and stream helpful social PR snippets; become the postmaster for demand-generation-oriented social content snacks … plus all their old responsibilities.
Role #3: Content Creator
Old responsibilities: Craft inward-focused content such as catalogs, how-to guides, thought leadership pieces, etc.
New responsibilities: Partner with other experts on content; create content that builds off other social content; repackage content for distribution in video, blogs, Slideshare, etc.; embed social-sharing calls to action within content.
Role #4: Database Marketer
Old responsibilities: Query and pull data from various disparate systems and upload lists for the email marketer to send to.
New responsibilities: Manage the central marketing database and ensure that all channels (Web, social, email, mobile) and systems (CRM) are feeding marketing relevant data tied to each individual.
These types of changes are occurring across marketing departments as organizations grapple with their strategy for social media. How can marketing departments keep pace with these new responsibilities, maintain alignment within the department and deliver a consistent voice and message across today’s myriad communication channels—all while delivering a more rewarding experience for customers and prospects?
Becoming more automated is the answer. And marketing automation is the only technology poised to serve all these marketing groups and help you deliver the timely, relevant, personalized communications that today’s buyers prefer in whatever channel they wish to engage.
If you’re interested in gaining additional insights on moving your marketing organization forward in today’s evolving world, please register for our upcoming Webinar, “Marketing Automation: Delivering a Better Buyer Experience by Aligning Marketing with, well … Marketing.”
In addition, don’t miss the presentation I did with Silverpop Vice President of Industry Relations Loren McDonald at last year’s Dreamforce event, complete with real-world examples and tactics for driving revenue in today’s multichannel marketing world:
By Loren McDonald ( @LorenMcDonald), on February 8th, 2012
We at Silverpop often hear email subject line questions such as, “What’s the sample size needed for subject line testing?” in conversations with clients and other marketers. My colleague Stephen Guerra wrote an excellent explanation (“Email Testing: Determining the Right Sample Size“) in a previous blog post, and he and I came up with these additional thoughts on subject line testing after receiving yet another inquiry on the topic:
1. Testing is almost always a good idea. Just remember, though, that with a small sample size, there will be less confidence in the results (Is the winner really the winner? Is it repeatable?).
2. Don’t completely discount small sample sizes, though. Smaller samples can be meaningful if you see results that vary by a wide-enough margin.
3. With a small sample size, test only two subject lines. This will keep the sample size as large as possible, as opposed to testing three or four options.
4. Test concepts and direction. Pick completely different types of subject lines you want to test, such as discount versus benefits, humor versus serious, etc. In the initial tests you’ll want to test larger concepts that you can build on and refine with continuous testing.
5. Minimize variables. If you want to test discount versus benefits, for example, try to keep the number of subject-line characters the same or close to remove the variable and impact of length. Make sure that the call to action or key content is in the same location in the subject line (e.g., at the beginning).
6. Test the types of subject lines three times to increase confidence. However, don’t test the same subject line over and over. Instead, test the style, with each subject line as close to the core/initial test as possible.
What you’re testing is not necessarily a specific subject line but a type (in essence a template) of subject line that you can use again and again with different offer copy.
7. Think about the goal of your email program. If your subject line has a call to action, use click-through rate and/or conversion rate/revenue and not just open rate to determine the winner.
If the creative is identical in both emails, then this shows the impact of the subject line on actual conversion, which is more important than just number of opens.
I’ve seen this firsthand with tests I ran for a retailer in which the subject line with the lower open rate actually produced more revenue than the subject line with the higher open rate. There are lots of tricks and approaches to increasing opens of subject lines, but this doesn’t mean they produce the action you want.
8. Make sure you do a true apples-to-apples split test. Don’t vary a single aspect of the two emails, send them at the same time and do an every nth split of your list.
9. Allow enough time for results. What’s the life expectancy of your messages? You may find that your messages still garner opens and conversions days after they were sent.
If so, you may want to run your tests over a few days to see how they perform over their true lifetime. Of course, you may need to make a decision and send to the remainder of the list before then.
In that case, use the data available to you. However, don’t forget that those tests are still running. Examine the results in a week or two, and see if the final results differ from your earlier reading.
10. Consider segmentation. Examine your results as they apply to different segments in your list to see if specific subject line types resonate better with certain subscriber groups.
11. Take credit! Make sure to internally publicize your testing successes. Let others know the numbers on how your testing improved revenue by detailing (in dollar figures) how much your test improved results.
To do this, extrapolate the revenue that would have been earned if the losing version had been sent to the entire list, and take the difference between that and the actual results.
Share what you learned with your creative team and others (merchandising, sales, brand managers) and make sure they understand the benefits and can offer suggestions for future tests.
More resources on email testing:
By Bryan Brown ( @getvision), on February 7th, 2012
At the recent MarketingSherpa B2B Summit, I was honored to be named Lead Gen Apprentice for my innovative solutions to three common business problems. This is the second part of a three-part series in which I elaborate on each problem and my proposed solution. While the dollar amounts and company details may not exactly match your specific scenario, the strategies and tactics outlined here should prove useful for addressing these common challenges.
The business problem: A networking solutions company is trying to deliver more leads to its partner community. The partners do very little of their own prospecting, and most of their leads come through regional referrals or from the company’s corporate site. The company’s partner event is in two months, and the CEO wants to show an increased number of leads being delivered to partners. The budget: $100,000.
A partner road show will foster relationships between your partners and your local sales reps and re-excite your partners about the services and products your company offers. Let your sales reps sit in a room and watch your partners present their offerings. By bringing your partners and reps together they’ll gain a greater understanding of the value the other brings, increasing alignment and ultimately driving revenue.
In addition to the road shows, reward your sales team for their partner sales efforts. Announce an incentive program for your sales reps and provide awards when they introduce a partner to leads—for example, each time a deal is closed, they’re rewarded with a small prize.
This will be beneficial for partners for several reasons—PPC ads and search will allow people to quickly find the type of partner product or service they’re seeking and, more importantly, it will show your partners how much you value them by spending ad budget on them. It also provides extra real estate for your partners on the company page and essentially serves as advertising exposure.
Give each partner its own subpage for more detailed information. Finally, consider highlighting a “Partner of the Month” each month.
The partner portal also gives you the ability to grow your partner channel with a “Become a Partner” option on the tab.
Consider naming the top 20 partners based on revenue and including them in the VIP Club. As a benefit of being a part of the club, your company can provide paid advertising on a site like LinkedIn for a specified length of time. The advertising can be filtered by region and type of service or solution. Most importantly, spending ad dollars on the VIPs will show that you are committed to them. It may even be a new and original idea that your VIPs hadn’t thought of previously.
This will reintroduce your existing customer base to your partners. Place contacts in a program based on their appropriate region and include pertinent pieces of value, such as partner overview demos and videos or how-to guides, and highlight a different partner in each communication.
Also, consider creating a partner-focused nurture program where you’re nurturing partners versus nurturing leads. Remind your partners of the benefits of your partner program and the capabilities of your products and services. This will reignite the enthusiasm in your partnership and help deliver leads to both parties.
Related Reading:
1) Blog: “Solving Common B2B Problems, Part 1: Issues with People Registering for a Webinar”
By Loren McDonald ( @LorenMcDonald), on February 3rd, 2012
In my first post on GOP email practices (“GOP Throwdown: How Do the Candidates Stack Up on Email Marketing Practices?“), I studied the opt-in practices of the Republican presidential primary candidates (Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, plus Michele Bachmann, who had just dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucus but retained an email opt-in at her website).
My next question when analyzing the GOP presidential candidates’ email marketing programs: How do their “From” lines and subject lines stack up?
Inbox presence, made up of the “From” or sender name and email address and the subject line, is one of the most important elements of an email message, because recipients use them to decide whether to open and engage with your email.
The charts below separately analyze the “From” and subject lines to assess how the candidates’ campaigns are managing their inbox presence. Are they using generally accepted best practices such as a highly recognizable and expected “From” name and creative, engaging subject lines?
Here are my observations on the candidates’ “From” name practices:
- They’re all over the board. Santorum’s campaign combines a single “From” email address with multiple “From” names, for example, while the Romney and Huntsman campaigns use multiple email addresses and multiple “From” names.
- The Huntsman campaign had the most eclectic collection of “From” names, ranging from Huntsman himself to former Pennsylvania governor and Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge and “The Jon2012 Girls.” I’m still scratching my head over that latter one.
- While there is an emerging trend, especially among B2B marketers, of using a variety of employee names as the “From” names, I’m not a fan. Several of the candidates used the names of their campaign managers and others associated with the campaigns. I expect to receive emails from Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney, but I have no idea who Matt David and Rich Beeson are.
- Of the four campaigns that have actually sent emails, they used from three to five different “From” names. I looked for any pattern of when campaigns used the candidate’s name versus a campaign manager, and couldn’t find any. My assumption was that the “from candidate” emails might focus on the message and “campaign manager” emails on fund-raising or dirty work. But in looking at the body content of the emails and comparing it to the “From” names, I didn’t see any such patterns.
- As the primaries and caucuses move around the country, I’m starting to see some targeting based on zip code, such as the use of a local state campaign manager’s name. Given my nearby residence in California, for example, the Romney campaign sent me an email from “Sarah Nelson,” its Nevada State Director, promoting volunteering for the Nevada campaign efforts.
As with “From” names, the campaigns deploy varying approaches to their use of subject lines, but with one commonality:
- Only six of the emails received during the period analyzed included the candidate’s name in a subject line:
- Huge conservative endorsement for Rick
- Rick declared winner In Iowa
- Poll confirms Santorum is the true conservative candidate
- FW: Victory Party with Newt
- Governor Huntsman Surges Into 2nd Place in New Hampshire
Using your brand name in the subject line is typically not necessary when using a well-recognized “From” name, but when using an unknown campaign manager’s name, it should be considered.
For example, I nearly deleted an email with Zac Moffatt in the “From” line and the subject line “Choose an Item” because the name was unfamiliar, the subject line looked spammy and it showed no connection with the Romney campaign.
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Email experts like Dela Quist of AlchemyWorx contend that longer subject lines convert better than shorter ones. Measured by that yardstick, most campaign emails fall short of the mark. Only two of the 40 messages had more than 50 characters.
- Honors for both the shortest and longest subject lines go to the Santorum campaign. On the short side: “granite.” The longest: “Poll confirms Santorum is the true conservative candidate.” Santorum also most consistently used short subject lines and had the shortest average subject line length at 22.2 characters.
- Several messages contain what I contend are questionable “gimmicks” to grab the reader’s eye, make the email stand out in the inbox or imply that the message is coming from a friend. These include “re:” and “Fw:” or “Fwd:” and the use of all lower-case words. Several of Santorum’s emails used this last tactic with subject lines like: “fun and work,” “crunch time,” “great news,” “wide open,” “believable,” and “deadline: tonight.”
- Santorum’s campaign also appears to choose obscurity over transparency in subject lines with subject lines like “Wheaties,” “Freefall,” “fun and work,” and “breaking: HUGE news.” While I don’t have visibility into how these approaches affect open and click-through rates, on their face they’re certainly intriguing.
In my next installment, I’ll analyze the content of the Republican candidates’ email messages. One aspect I’m not covering, however, is deliverability and inbox placement of messages. If you’re interested in that aspect, check out a column from early December by Andrew Kordek of email agency Trendline Interactive, which ran on Deliverability.com.
What are your thoughts on what you’ve seen from the campaigns so far? Let me know in the comments box below.
Related Reading:
1) Blog: “GOP Throwdown: How Do the Candidates Stack Up on Email Marketing Practices?”
2) FAQ: “What makes a good subject line for emails?”
3) Blog: “The Growing Importance of the ‘From’ Name”
4) White paper: “Standing Out in the Inbox: Secrets of Successful ‘From’ Names and Subject Lines”
By Eric Holmen ( @eholmen), on January 31st, 2012
How do you reach customers and prospects with the right message, at the right time, and via the right channel? Silverpop spent 2011 helping marketers answer the question that’s on every savvy marketers’ mind, hosting super-cool events like our Agent R.O.I. digital marketing tour, providing industry-leading thought capital and offering up our unique mix of marketing automation, email and social media tools. In celebration of another big year at Silverpop, here’s a numerical look at how we’ve been helping marketers reach their goals and the exciting ways our customers are using Silverpop:
If you’re interested in turning your email programs into marketing automation and social media results, send me an email or contact us.
By Loren McDonald ( @LorenMcDonald), on January 30th, 2012
Watching the Republican candidates for the U.S. presidential nomination has made me wonder how they’re deploying email in their campaigns.
Are they using email for fund-raising, for organizing local events or as a press-release platform? Do they use generally accepted email marketing best practices, cross the line like so many PAC-funded TV commercials or simply miss the boat?
To find out, I signed up in early January to receive email from all the declared candidates and will track their email efforts until the nomination. I’ve been busy grabbing screenshots of splash pages, sign-up forms, campaign emails and other email features as well as tracking opt-in procedures and analyzing content. (See my Slideshare presentation below critiquing the candidates’ sign-in processes.)
Although the field has thinned since I began my research (Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry have dropped out, with Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul campaigning now before the Florida primary), I’ve already amassed plenty of data.
What have I found so far? Here are a couple of highlights from the opt-in process:
- Four candidates—Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum (splash page no longer used)—feature splash pages before moving to the regular home page. All except for Rick Perry’s highlight email sign-up. Two—Huntsman and Romney—give visitors the option to provide an email address and zip code.
- All the candidates collect email addresses on their home pages, with six of the seven using a simple email address field (and zip code field in some cases) in the upper-right corner of the home page. Four also included an additional sign-up promotion.
- The Perry campaign’s opt-in form was the least prominent, with its location in a sidebar on the bottom third of the homepage. As it happened, the Perry campaign was the only one that sent no emails before the candidate dropped out of the race.
- The zip code is a logical data point to collect because it allows a campaign to segment and target mailings for appearances and local organizing. Four of the seven candidates asked for zip codes along with email addresses at opt-in, but only Romney and Ron Paul required it to process the subscription.
- Two of the candidates—Santorum and Bachmann—offered social sign-in via Facebook, with the network icon appearing top right on the homepage under the email opt-in field.
- Bachmann was also the only candidate who launched a preference center at opt-in. Most of the candidates’ sites collected detailed financial information for donations, but Bachmann’s opt-in process leads subscribers into an expansive form, collecting detailed contact and interest information.
- Two of the seven candidates used a double opt-in process when collecting email addresses. This is slightly less than one-third of the candidate population. While obviously not a reliable sample size, it’s still considerably higher than marketers in general.
- Surprisingly, only one candidate sent a welcome message after the opt-in: Michele Bachmann, who dropped out of the race just before I began this project.
- Change happens quickly during the campaign. When checking back regularly I’ve found that several candidates have revised confirmation pages, dropped splash pages and made other tweaks.
For future blog posts, I’ll examine a variety of email program aspects in greater detail, including:
- “From” names and subject lines
- Message content
- Design, layout and administrative footers
- Cadence
- Preference centers and opt-out process
In the meantime, here are two teasers of upcoming analysis:
- So far, Rick Santorum is the most active emailer, with 13 email messages sent between Jan. 10 and Jan. 14.
- Many of the candidates use a variety of sender (“From”) names such as the candidate’s own name, a campaign manager (Matt Krull for Gingrich or Mike Biundo for Santorum) or a big-name supporter (ex-Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge for Huntsman). Perhaps the most intriguing “From” name so far? “The Jon2012Girls” for the Huntsman campaign.
Is there anything specific you’d like me to look at in the candidates’ emails or their email strategies? Please post your questions and comments in the comments area below.
By Karen Marchione ( @kmarchione), on January 27th, 2012
This month I’m excited to interview Dan Caro from Whereoware for our “5 Questions” blog. Dan recently presented at our Washington, D.C.-area user group on the topic of marketing automation and the powerful effect automated, targeted emails can have on your program if done correctly. Welcome Dan!
1) Can you tell a little about yourself and your role? How do you spend your work day?
 Dan Caro, senior online marketing manager, Whereoware I’m a senior online marketing manager at Whereoware, an avid Virginia Tech football and basketball fan, and a proud member of Hokie Nation. I work with a group of 12 colleagues who live and breathe Silverpop. We help our clients take full advantage of Silverpop’s powerful marketing automation tools. Whereoware’s philosophy is “right message, right person, right time.” We use that to help push our clients’ email programs to the next level. I spend a great deal of my work day managing my team of five and assisting customers with Engage. We focus on email design, data integration and program execution. We execute, then measure and adjust to maximize our clients’ results.
2) What is your definition of marketing automation?
Each person you ask will probably have a different answer for what marketing automation means to them. Technically, it’s defined as a software platform designed to automate repetitive tasks. While traditionally it’s a B2B concept where you nurture, score and qualify leads, it can be used for so much more. Any step in the customer acquisition, retention and upsell process can use marketing automation. That may mean an abandoned cart campaign for an e-commerce company or an upsell campaign for a software company.
3) Can you tell us about a few successful campaigns you’ve created? What made them work?
 Cart abandonment camapaigns can be highly effective with the right data and integrations in place. We’ve had a lot of success with abandoned cart campaigns. These typically consist of an email that’s sent to individuals who leave items in their online cart; it reminds them to come back and complete their order. It’s a simple email with a simple concept, but we’ve seen it work over and over. Other programs we’ve seen perform well are our lead-nurture campaigns, especially when integrated with Salesforce.com. These tend to be more complex because you need to fully understand the sales cycle of each business. You can, however, break them into smaller, more manageable segments and build them out over time.
The most important step in making any campaign successful is ensuring that the data is in place. The next most important step is to break down even the most complex campaigns into simple segments and then use the data and tools you have available to make it happen. (Read more about cart abandonment campaigns and lead nurturing tactics.)
4) If someone is just getting started with nurturing, where should they start? Is there a silver bullet in terms of the number of emails in a nurture program?
The key to nurturing is your data. Do you have all the fields and information you need to nurture your leads in a targeted, personalized manner? Are all your systems integrated to maximize your results? Also, keep in mind that taking a bunch of contacts that may or may not be interested and dumping them into your nurture campaign is not going to be your best option.
Your best option is to be realistic about who you’re putting into your nurture campaign. Did you have a real and meaningful contact with this individual? Are they genuinely interested in your products or services? That’s where I would start. Nurturing is all about maintaining an already-existing relationship—not trying to come up with one that wasn’t there to begin with.
As for the number of emails, there’s no silver bullet. You should look at your sales funnel and work backwards. What are your typical conversion rates? Work back to get the number of top funnel leads you need. The number will vary based on your business. In terms of timing, I think one email per week is appropriate.
5) Do you have any high-level advice in terms of email design that will captivate an audience?
Start with an objective. While designing, keep in mind what you want to happen after the email is read. Then, your design can be measured in terms of effectiveness. After considering that, my philosophy is KISS (keep it simple, stupid). By that, I mean be clear and concise. Keep your subject line simple. Make sure your email is not too wordy, and be sure that the call to action is crystal-clear. If you have more to say, save it for your website or landing page.
For more great tips from Whereoware, check out its Slideshare presentation, “5 Programs to Implement Today.”
By Dave Walters ( @_DaveWalters), on January 25th, 2012
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how and why marketing buyers make decisions. It’s probably an oversimplification to say “because of Facebook or Twitter,” but I think that’s an increasingly critical issue—social proof. I was reminded yet again of how things have changed by a spirited discussion kicked off around a Mark Cuban blog post a couple weeks ago. His primary contention was that start-ups in general —and tech start-ups specifically—shouldn’t waste time and money hiring an outside PR firm. His point is that when you’re small and fast, there’s minimal time and money to waste on getting (and keeping) an external resource up to speed on every aspect of your business. You’re likely better doing it yourself.
I believe the crux of Mark’s argument (which I agree with) is that old-school marketing has been effectively and aggressively disintermediated. In his example, it’s the PR agency. In other examples, it’s digital functions like buying banners (hi AdWords) or building websites (Joomla, Drupal and WordPress are fun). The same is true of building an audience of buyers for your product or service. Gone are the days when you need to be in one of the 30 product categories covered by PC Magazine, and you’d better win the annual roundup to pull units through the retail channel. And your exact position in a quadrant is no longer a guarantee of success—or even survival. The gatekeepers of the past are just that—of the past.
Today, we build market credibility and buyers by reaching out directly to people and companies. Channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. have opened a new dialogue with a much wider audience. And the “informed collective” (as I like to call it) wields an incredible amount of sway over who’s considered when it’s time to buy technology. This has turned many brands of yesterday on their heads such that they simply can’t compete with this new breed of leaner, faster technology company. Look no further than how Salesforce is displacing Siebel in large-scale business. Ten years ago, no single company had a product that could span price points from $35 to $35 million.
So what does this mean for marketers? Clearly, changing the entire marketing approach is not easy stuff. The scale of dealing with 50 publications and 10 analysts to carry your message to market required less effort than having to engage all your social network followers across five to seven disparate networks—all at the same time. And this is the tip-of-the-spear for disintermediation. At this exact point is where scalable technology steps in to save the day.
The marketers best positioned for future success remain grounded in the time-proven tactics, but are quickly integrating a social strategy at the highest levels of their organization. They clearly understand that prospects don’t show up uninformed and ready to buy whatever they’re hawking. Today’s buyers are increasingly more educated on a particular segment’s competitors and products than any normal, human salesperson could ever be.
So how is this achieved? Via professional groups on LinkedIn, at networking events, in Google+ circles—the list is almost infinite. But they all have one thing in common: no brand owns them. You can’t buy a truckload of media and slam your way into consideration or market share. In fact, I’d contend the massive spending habits of the past (think Microsoft’s launch budget for Windows 8) will increasingly be perceived as a sign of social weakness. Super-fans (created through epic brand advocacy or immense peer-driven social draw) do more to convince the world that tools like 37Signals’ Basecamp or Facebook are must-haves in one’s digital life.
The same is true for marketing technology. The rise of Google Analytics opened the eyes of thousands of mid-sized business to the metrics that were possible on the digital platforms. And SaaS-based ecommerce platforms like Storenvy and BigCommerce brought store-building directly to anyone creative or brilliant enough to offer items people want to buy. And yes, these platforms have created social groups who share, enhance and evangelize about the platform they love. And guess what else? The ease-of-use and flexible designs have seen these tools become part of the consideration set for real-deal marketers.
So if you’re a marketer, it’s a double-edged sword. You’ve got to deal with a much wider sphere of interactions, but the super-fans you build will go to the ends of the earth with you. Your marketing technology now requires a different degree of consideration and execution. It simply won’t cut it to add a survey to next month’s newsletter. Step back and think about everything your customer does, and figure out how to elegantly automate behavior-driven messaging in a way that highlights your brand personality. No one wants to buy from a monolith, and you might be surprised by how aggressively your small- to mid-sized company can take customers from your Fortune 500 competitors by being authentically human.
By Richard Evans ( @rlevans), on January 23rd, 2012
The start of any good relationship requires listening to, appreciating and acting on the preferences and interests of another person. The start of a successful email marketing relationship isn’t any different.
Preference centres are one of many email marketing topics that draw a wide range of responses from practitioners and pundits alike. Some, like me, find a great deal of value in them, while others feel that while good in theory, they aren’t quite as good in practice.
Here are my thoughts on why preference centres do matter—now more than ever. And below, you’ll find 31 tips for creating a world-class preference centre of your own.
Why build a preference centre? To me, email marketers should employ preference centres to accomplish the following three goals, in order of priority:
- Give more power and control to subscribers.
- Drive higher relevance and greater personalisation.
- Help divert unsubscribes and reduce list churn.
I believe preference centres are particularly essentially today, primarily due to the fact that the variety of channels through which we “touch” our customers and prospects is more diverse than ever. And with that diversity comes a shift in consumers’ desires to have increased control over how they are being marketed to in these channels.
Here are five reasons why preference centres matter now more than ever:
- With email, social, mobile, your website and more, there are more channels available to your customers than in the past.
- Increasing engagement and interaction with messages now has the potential to improve delivery and inbox placement. Relevant messages, tuned to the preferences of the recipient, have a higher likelihood of achieving this level of engagement.
- Consumers expect greater control over their relationship with your brand and the marketing messages they receive.
- Having a central facility to manage all touch points with the customer helps improve cross-channel marketing efforts and improves the likelihood that you’ll deliver the right message to the right channel.
- By providing alternatives to unsubscribing such as snoozing or changing mailing frequency, and by providing improved change-of-address facilities, you can reduce overall list churn.
Interested in learning more about the specific tactics that go into building a world-class preference centre? Have a look at this presentation, which highlights 31 tips for doing just that—through the lens of real-world email marketing examples.
Where do you stand on the topic of preference centres? Let me know in the comments below.
By Loren McDonald ( @LorenMcDonald), on January 20th, 2012
Recently I’ve written Email Insider columns about thinking big and getting things done, and one of the questions I’ve gotten a lot in response is, “Do we have the right technology, resources and creative partners in place to reach our goals and achieve success?”
One key to answering this question is determining how much you’ll need to have your own hands in the marketing mix. The old enterprise email marketing model—where most correspondences were one-off broadcast messages—is being replaced. The “we’ve got five product emails we’ve got to push out this week, let’s toss them over to the agency or creative ESP team, send them off and move on to the next communication” approach isn’t going to work much longer.
In its place is a move toward multifaceted programs and campaigns that are triggered by customer behaviors. That relates directly to one of the biggest trends among savvy email marketers, which I touched on in my most recent Email Insider post: creating more behavior-based and automated programs. These campaigns are much more strategic, requiring a deep knowledge of the business. They need to be designed, tweaked, monitored and continually optimized by someone who understands the intricacies of the company.
In addition, transitioning from batch-and-blast emails to more behavior-based automated programs typically requires working closely with your IT team as you’re pulling data from multiple sources (CRM, ecommerce, business intelligence and more). Much of this work is frontloaded as your email strategy changes, but it’s also critical that you have internal control over these relationships so you can make changes quickly.
For these reasons, sophisticated campaigns are more difficult to fully outsource. Think of email marketers as NASCAR drivers behind the wheel of a high-tech race car. They may get some assistance from team members in the pit, but during the actual race the driver is the one in there with their hands on the wheel maneuvering the vehicle. And just as a race car driver has to adjust on the fly to track conditions, vehicle performance and other drivers, an email marketer must juggle many different messaging tracks and data points simultaneously, requiring quick mid-course adjustments to keep a few laps ahead of the competition.
So while a full-service model may make sense for some of those “throw-it-over-the-wall” companies, many will want to focus on improving efficiency and performance by maintaining greater control of their integrated email marketing efforts. That’s because YOU know your audience best and will benefit from a solution that puts the power in your hands so you can, for example, modify post-purchase email campaigns that drive revenue on the fly.
How does that translate in terms of making sure you have the right tools, team and resources in place? In my experience, it’s difficult for a vendor to be both a best-in-class software provider and a world-class agency. So if you need both top-tier technology and agency services, you may want to consider going with the best of breed from each discipline.
The good news from a technology perspective is that the best marketing technology solutions today are both sophisticated and easy to use, enabling you to improve efficiency by reducing the need for external campaign and deployment services. My advice is to dig beyond analyst reports and get demos of the marketing technology platforms you’re considering to see how they stack up in terms of ease of use, data collection options, behavior-driven features and integration of mobile, social, local and email. (See our infographic on how companies today are integrating “mocial” channels.)
So how do you know if you have the right elements in place to reach your goals and achieve success? That’s a tough one to answer, since one size doesn’t fit all and different companies use email with different goals in mind. But if you’re looking to think big in 2012 and increasingly employ the types of behavior-based, automated emails that can often boost revenue to exponentially higher levels, keep in mind that it’s easier to win the race if you’re actually driving the car.
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