Marketing For Power Packed Business Growth: Does Your Email Campaign Suck?

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Does Your Email Campaign Suck?

Some marketers got all excited about using databases and email for creating complex multi-dimensional customer lists that they can send highly specific offers to.

If you're sending out an email campaign based on events like customer birthdays, high value purchase, large volume purchase or other similar criteria you're doing "Event Based Marketing".

Which boiled down means that you're targeting a much smaller and specific set of customers or prospects than your whole list.

Event Based Marketing Studies

Fascinating Case studies in event triggered marketing conducted by the Forrester Research Inc are provided free by Responsys.

Some interesting points arise from the studies.

Use Existing Processes
Use Manual Testing
Check Overlap & Frequency
Keep it Simple
Ensure Delivery

Use Existing Processes

Look for an existing process that can be automated. For example where your salespeople currently trawl through orders to find high spending customers to send great offers to.

And don't simply replicate the manual process. See if you can create extra value for the customer at the same time.

Use Manual Testing

Test any event program you're considering by trying it by hand. That means extract by hand a list of customers based on an event you've chosen. Then create the special offer letter or email and follow-up as required. Then send them out to the list and monitor the results.

If it works, that is makes a profit, check whether automating it makes it more profitable or not.

Check Overlap & Frequency

There's nothing worse than sending a customer lots of different emails or letters with completely different products or services. Or even worse the same product but at a different price - for no reason.

Keep It Simple

Don't try and work out lots of multiple criteria to extract customer lists from. For example the customer spend was at least 10,000 last quarter, they own a house on the west side of town and the previous year they spent at least 50,000.

That makes the mistake of assuming that because the data used to extract the list is the same the customers are the same.

They're not...

There could be piles of different reasons why they all happen to meet the extract criteria you set.

Ensure Delivery

Make sure your delivery channels know, and agree with, what you're planning. If they can't handle a sudden volume change you're going to lose the prospective sales of the customers you worked so hard to encourage to buy.