ROI through relevance

Driving ROI through email marketing relevance: key tactics

By recent estimates, engaging your audience in more relevant communications can increase net profits on average 18 times more than broadcast mailings. Additionally, targeted email generates 16 times more improvement in net profit than ‘batch & blast’ mailings. In light of the above it’s no surprise that industry experts agree — the more relevance infused into your communications the stronger your ROI.

Unfortunately, the reality out there today is that only one-third of business owners using offer-oriented email campaigns rank email relevance as their number one strategic goal. For those business owners who do, there’s never been a more opportune time to outperform the competition. So what can email marketers do to infuse relevance into their communications?

1) The ‘A’ list: Permission
The effectiveness of your email program starts with an opt-in mailing list — without an interested audience to target, you might as well toss your e-Marketing investment into a Miami riptide and watch it wash out to sea.

Start by reviewing your permission practices across your Web site and all visitor contact points. Make it as easy as possible for your target audience to extend their ‘virtual handshake’ and opt-in. Like any new relationship, provide full transparency to leverage credibility and trust. For example, give clear and concise details on your opt-in practices; provide your audience easy access links to allow them to submit and update preferences and permissions, prominent icons to your privacy policy, and threaded messaging throughout your content leading up to the subscription. Full transparency builds credibility and trust allowing for a seamless transition to the next phase of the buyer/seller relationship. And like it or not, permission to email a recipient today is not optional so getting it properly from the beginning is the only recipe for success.


2) The harvest season: Opt-in subscriptions
Assuming you’ve been able to grow a substantial mailing list, the effectiveness of your email program now depends on how much you know about your opt-in list members. Remember, the better the data you mine on your opt-in subscriptions today the more relevant your email messages and higher your ROI tomorrow. So ensure your harvesting techniques are sound, allowing you to easily collect a wide range of customer profile and campaign preference information that you can leverage to send highly targeted email dialogues with key customers and prospects.

To do so, start by focusing your attention on your Web site’s existing opt-in subscription generators.  These are your custom secure sign-up forms and personalized welcome email follow-ups that you use to collect relevant visitor site data and grow quality lists.  Next, while collecting data keep in mind that what gets you nervous about giving up personal information probably gets your audience anxious as well. Use this to your advantage — play on the insecurity — detail and summarize the value and use of the data you request and capture. Take the time to enhance your ‘data harvesting’ process for the benefit of the recipient and you stand a significantly better chance of building an opt-in list rich in relevant attributes. The more attributes, the more you can send high value, high-targeted one-to-one email campaigns with even higher investment returns.


3) The break up: Segmentation
In the volatile and cluttered email environment today, the number one cause for consumer complaints to internet service providers (ISPs) is irrelevant and indifferent email communications — often, what they flag as ‘SPAM’ are generic ‘Dear John’ one-size-fits-all messages that have little value to recipients. You guessed it, the beach vacation email to recipients’ who can’t swim. Here’s where the valuable information you’ve been able to harvest at sign-up plays a crucial role in how deep you’re able cut into and segment your list with common recipient characteristics or interests.

Start by dividing your list based on where they signed up or email behavior -actions a recipient has taken in previous campaigns - gender, birthday, specific demographics or psychographics of your recipients. This tactic will easily help you learn more about each specific group in your audience, so that you can better tailor your content to send more targeted and relevant messages to recipients in each segment. When it comes to success components that have a direct impact on your email marketing program’s ROI, segmentation is key.


4) Let’s get personal: Personalization
Now that you’ve separated your audience into segments you’re ready to take the next step — improve response and revenue through personalizing your messages with the recipient’s own data. (Everyone loves to hear about themselves, it’s human nature and email marketing is the perfect way to deliver that one-to-one message.) For example, of course recognize and acknowledge each of your recipients by name, but go further and reference their purchase history or gender-based profiles and you’ll really elevate the value of your communications. Next, understand the obvious — like any marketing channel, if you give your audience what they want the more likely you’ll be welcomed as a credible friend.

So don’t by shy about it, stroke your recipient’s ego by highlighting their interests and actions to create messages they want to receive and are more likely to respond to. Put all that valuable data you’ve worked on harvesting to good use by making your messages so valuable and personal the recipient has no choice but to open and respond to.


5) It's in the mail: Deliverability
Fact: the reality online, is that more and more users are lazier than ever. As a result, many recipients will click on the ‘report as SPAM’ button instead of the ‘unsubscribe button’ faster than a Family Feud contestant. So even if your email message is permission-based and avoids the multitude of aggressive spam filters, ad blockers and excess noise on the way to your recipient’s inbox, you’re still miles from the finish line. That’s because if your message doesn't resonate with a relevant 'what's in it for me' subject line, offer, customer-centric article or a profile-related product - you may still get flagged as 'SPAM'.  In that case, you risk their ISP blocking your communications or blacklisting your IP address - and the damage that can cause to your 'email reputation' can be high.

Now, assuming you have maintained a well-managed list throughout the year (a clean list ensures you message only people who want to hear from you) this is where relevant content, specific to your recipient’s online behavior will yield BIG dividends. Like any solid relationship in life it’s all about respect. If you expect a recipient to take the time to open, read and act on your email then why not go the extra mile to make that communication as valuable as possible. ‘What’s in it for me’ value-added content equals WIN-WIN for the sender and recipient. And in e-Commerce WIN-WIN spells ROI.


6) Cloning conundrum: Automation
Let’s face it, in today’s competitive market space, you’re often ‘spread thin’ on core functions that would allow you to drive lead nurturing efforts. When you consider that it can take up to 14 encounters with a potential prospect to convert a sale, ‘spread thin’ just won’t cut it in 2007. For those of you handcuffed by that scenario, automation lets you set up lead nurturing campaigns to run on their own when your customer’s buying interest is at its peak. And timely communications in e-Marketing equals relevant communications that further nurture the buyer/seller relationship.

Whether it’s launching welcome email campaigns, lead nurturing streams, retention win-back programs, empty check-out rescues or multiple touch loyalty programs — automation allows you to reduce manual processes and cycle times so that you can focus your efforts on core marketing and automate the rest. This saves time and increases productivity overall to provide the ultimate ingredients for a tasty ROI.


7) Cross communication: Integration
Automation is great but it’s merely half the equation. If you really want to shift your business into top gear and blast your ROI to new heights, integrating your email marketing automation with a sales nurturing application is paramount to a program's success. Not to overstate the obvious, but the foundation of an effective and efficient email program is built on how much you know about your target audience to anticipate their next ‘purchasing’ move; and then how you use this detailed information to better tailor your communications to trigger a sale. Integration allows you to marry email marketing campaigns to actionable up-to-date data across other database systems like customer relationship management (CRM) using your own application programming interface (API).

This functionality increases the degree of real-time data and depth of accessible customer-centric knowledge at your fingertips. And when driving sales to optimize your ROI, ‘timing is everything’. Additionally, integration with a sales nurturing application alleviates the strain on your sales team to maintain message consistency and branding. This injects a stronger one-to-one component to all your email campaigns by giving your business the ability to collect and share data across many channels.


8) In the past lies your future: Reporting & Analysis
As any statistician will attest — numbers rarely lie. If so, then consider the number .0033. No, it’s not the average 'batch & blast' email deliverability rate, it’s actually the percentage of advertising messages a consumer reacts to on a daily basis. Now you don’t have to be a mathematician to realize that if your message wants to rise above the three-thousand plus email communications blindsiding consumers every day to get noticed, it better be POWERFUL with a capital P! So before you send your next email campaign, you may want to ask yourself whether your email communications measure up to that .0033 percentile. If not, advanced reports that track customer response rates (open rates, click rates, referral rates) will tell you a lot about why it doesn’t.

Advanced reporting and analysis provides valuable information you can use to tailor subsequent communications, refine messages, grow your audience, revise your delivery time, increase your message frequency or simply adjust the salutation next go around. And the more you analyze your previous email efforts, the greater the chance you’ll be able to identify and repair the weak links (no pun intended). Never overlook or underestimate the power of advanced reporting & analysis as top email success components in your email program. Benchmark yourself against head-of-class players in your space to see where you rank.


9) Measure twice cut once: Testing
So what’s your new year’s email marketing resolution? Here’s one: make a solemn pledge to minimize your risks and maximize your returns in 2007. Easier said than done right? Wrong! A well-maintained testing program can keep your profitability at optimum levels. And despite the extra time it takes to implement one, a sound testing program will allow you to make objective decisions based on factual data at hand as opposed to subjective ‘It looks good I like it’ decisions. In the light of the above, take the challenge to be proactive and test: your delivery rendering, personal attributes, day of that week that draws the heaviest opens and clicks, subject line tags drive higher response, and thresholds regarding frequency.

The highly competitive e-landscape mandates you refresh your email program on a consistent basis to keep pace with the competition. What you think you know is working today could be far from the truth. So start small and work your way up. For example, start with classic A/B split testing methodologies to quickly identify the best combination of variables to increase your conversion rates and work from there. In no time you’ll discover that the possibilities to test are infinite.


10) Demand on-demand: The ESP
With the largest chunk of consumer dollars shifting online, business owners looking to infuse relevance into their email programs are intensifying their focus on leading ESPs who offer on-demand email marketing applications and deliver software over the Internet. Why? Even when compared to search marketing, email is still the most efficient marketing tactic to acquire new customers, build loyalty with existing customers and generate an outstanding ROI - at a much lower cost. That’s why more and more business owners are demanding on-demand email marketing applications, and turning to leading ESPs like GOT Corporation.  Business cases demonstrate time and again that leading ESPs like GOT Corporation deliver stronger and more consistent results over the long-term than those managed entirely in-house in areas of deliverability, cost-effectiveness, personalization & availability.

By infusing relevance into communications, affordable applications like CampaignerPro ensure you get the highest return of your email investment. What's more, they make sophisticated email marketing tasks easy and simple by bringing together key success components of email marketing to empower the user with:

•    Opt-in list building to gain trust
•    List management to ensure credibility
•    Foolproof list segmentation wizards to improve response
•    WYSIWYG content editors to grow revenue
•    Dedicated delivery services to achieve industry leading standards
•    One-time campaign set-up to ensure the simplicity of on-demand
•    ‘Out-of-box’ integration with leading CRM systems like Salesforce.com
•    Advanced reporting & analysis to improve delivery and response
•    Third party SPAM scoring services like eturn Path Campaign Preview 
•    And much more!

Conclusion
A promise made is a promise kept - and for marketers sending the right message, to the right person, at just the right time, the promise for steadily increased email relevance is a dramatic ROI!
So religiously follow the 10 tactical treasures detailed above and in no time you’ll be sending highly relevant email communications and enjoying a healthy ROI. Start by gaining as much insight as possible about your target audience, then tailor the content in your emails to suit the specific demographic, behavioral and buying profiles of your recipients — and you’ll quickly become a welcome credible sender. And as marketers know all too well, credible senders enjoy significantly higher deliverability, response rates and the highest ROI in marketing today. On-demand applications like CampaignerPro give marketers the greatest ability to automate highly personalized one-to-one targeted email communications — simply and easily.

About GOT Corporation
GOT Corporation™ offers Customer Relationship Marketing technology that allows organizations to move beyond traditional product-centric marketing to create relevant communications with customers, resulting in long term, profitable relationships.

About the Author:
Luc Vezina is Director of Product Management at GOT Corporation. He monitors industry trends closely and has been instrumental in helping shape email marketing best practices for thousands of GOT' Corporation’s clients. GOT Corporation is a founding member of the Email Service Provider Coalition.
Find Out More About GOT Corporation's Products

Back to Top Email Printer Friendly View

RATE THIS ARTICLE
Rate it:

Overall Rating: Good