The Voice of Commerce

By Bill Van de Laarschot

With all the data, disciplines and analytics capabilities available to marketers, one would expect email effectiveness to be perfect every time. Yet email marketing remains an inexact science.

It doesn’t have to be that way. To be sure, email campaigns will always have room for improvement—but three key principles can assure maximum relevance and cost-effectiveness. Here they are:

 1.  Go For the Easy Things First. It’s essential that you start big. In other words, first pursue the biggest market segments, best customers and broadest possible offers. Send a “can’t miss” deal to a wide range of current and potential customers and gather as many sales and useful customer facts as you can. Only then should you begin exploring more granular opportunities.

Keep in mind that segmentation is driven by the customer relationship. As prospects become customers, converts, loyalists and ultimately influencers, each email phase should be accompanied by messages and calls to action that strengthen the relationship and build sales. Each action—or even inaction—can trigger a segmented offer; abandoned carts, first-time purchases, and periods of inactivity, for example, are appropriate for shipping offers, customer welcomes and win-back promotions.

 2.  Test, Test, Test. Testing works best when you combine marketing objectives with the proper testing technique. Simple A/B testing of a creative concept is good for uncovering broad, sweeping insights, while multi-variate testing (MVT) is more appropriate when you’re seeking to identify trends or granular insights among specific customer segments.

One of the ways to increase the likeliness of success in your testing efforts is to create “personas” for market groups. Personas—“idealized” customers that carry similar needs and preferences—are produced by aggregating information across a broad range of parameters, then analyzed to uncover similar traits and behaviors. Once you have specific personas established, it becomes much easier to generate creative with the right tone, message and offer.

3.  Embrace Automation. Many times the email marketing department is one person. Whether you send 50,000 emails a month or 50 million, automation can often help reduce costs and increase relevancy.

Email technology, used internally or through an email service provider (ESP), can help you integrate e-commerce information with social media, Web analytics and mobile data to improve the relevancy of your campaigns. Other disciplines can also be brought into play such as email templates that can be populated with dozens of different subject lines, body text, images and offers.

It’s interesting to note that the world of big data can be used to uncover insights that are useful, but also regarded as intrusive by the customer. Marketers must always be careful to balance their efforts so the long-term health of the customer relationship is at the forefront.

As it turns out, customers realize that marketers have the ability to target their email with extreme precision—and so they have little patience for messages they regard simply as spam. By using email marketing tools and techniques effectively, you have the potential to create productive, cost-effective and relevant emails that build relationships and move the sales needle over the long haul.

BILL VAN DE LAARSCHOT is Group Vice President, Strategic Marketing at Digital River, Inc.

(www.digitalriver.com) the revenue growth experts in global cloud commerce that builds and manages online businesses for software and game publishers, consumer electronics manufacturers, distributors, online retailers and affiliates.