Best Practice Advice

New Year’s Resolutions for 2011: trends to help boost your email marketing programmes

The digital marketing scenario has never been as innovative or as evolving as it is now. Consumers have the option to choose among a variety of new tools and platforms to communicate, network and purchase their favourite products with just ‘one click’ of a button. As it is the start of a new year, it is now time to analyse your strategy and consider how to improve performances and ROI. Simon Bowker, eCircle’s UK Managing Director offers an easy-to-follow checklist which will help boost the performance of your email marketing programmes and will incorporate the ‘hottest’ digital marketing trends of 2011.

Integrate your email marketing

Email marketing is not a standalone communication tool. For an effective and successful campaign, there needs be integration with web analytics, e-commerce platforms or CRM software to allow marketers to adjust their online campaigns to reflect their customer needs. By incorporating these relationships with your email marketing software, you can utilise a valuable source of information about customer preferences and behaviours that can make the difference in the success of a newsletter or a product campaign. You will also be able to analyse customer website behaviour to set up automated campaigns
focusing on behavioural and transactional data to ensure that your communications reach customers at the right time, providing only relevant and unique contents to the individual or the target segment.

Combine the power of email marketing and social media

Many marketers still see Facebook, Twitter and email as channels that compete with one another. Consumers, on the other hand, use these channels in many different ways but do not treat them as mutually exclusive. In fact, consumers use the strengths of each channel for their communications and this is exactly what marketers should be doing too!

eCircle’s ‘European Social Media and Email Marketing' study reveals new insights into how consumers engage with brands via email and social media networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, and offers marketers the opportunity to see how they can effectively optimise these channels. By adding user generated contents like tweets or product reviews in newsletter and campaigns you can improve the relevance of your message and you can also increase the reach of your email communications through the popular ‘SWYN’ function. Add the social media icon in the template of your newsletter to allow recipients to post the message on their Facebook wall and Twitter profile.

Automate your Email Marketing.

Automating your emails is a very easy way of increasing the success of your email marketing programme. Transactional and trigger based email campaigns are particularly effective because they are based on customer behaviours or an action taken versus a marketing push strategy. A triggered message is generated by a meaningful change or event in a customer behavior or profile (such as opt-in, purchase, or basket abandon).

Some of the most common and effective triggered campaigns are: welcome programmes for new subscribers (use welcome messages to welcome your customers to your brand, product, service or company), birthday emails, lead nurture programmes for emails sent to your customers or prospects based on their website behaviours (such as basket abandons or win-back programs), and cross-sell/up-sell programmes based on customers purchase profiles.

Event triggered programmes provide you with a fantastic opportunity engage your audience in relevant, personalised way whilst simultaneously reminding them of your brand and reinforcing the benefits at a time when they are most responsive.

Ensure that your email marketing is relevant and personalised

With inboxes more crowded than ever your email has to be relevant. Using a change or event in a customer behaviour or profile to trigger an email response gives you the ability to create highly targeted, relevant campaigns based on customer interests at a time when they are most responsive and likely to purchase.

The more you know your subscribers and customers the more you will be able to address them with email messages that will really interest them and cause them to react in the desired way. The integration with the new social channels (social media, blogs) or the analytics/e-commerce software mentioned above provides marketers with a continuous flow of information about what customers like or dislike, how they react when they receive a newsletter or a special offer and what they purchasing (or not purchasing) from your product range. The analysis of these data provides marketers with a clear picture of what content results are more relevant and interesting - adding a real value to each message or campaign by sending highly personalised messages to a specific customer or target audience.

Another way to increase the relevancy of your message is the integration of customer generated product reviews in your blog posts or twitter feeds in your newsletter. Word of mouth recommendations are still very effective in the world of digital communication!  

Turn your email marketing mobile

Smartphones, iPhones and Blackberries are now used by everyone both for business and personal use. When you create your newsletter or email campaign, remember to include a ‘mobile version’ of the message. This way you will be able to reach your customers at any time and place to help improve their brand loyalty.

eCircle sees the potential for its clients to use SMS to help promote their business and grow their customer database. Now clients are able to use SMS registration to increase subscribers and promote their newsletters. Invite customers at the POS to send a SMS and they will be automatically added to your database. The newsletter software will then automatically send a message to their email address to welcome them and explain the benefits for new subscribers.

Conclusion

The secret to a successful and highly performing email marketing programme is to innovate, experiment, test, and to measure. You need to constantly observe what is new in the marketplace and follow your customer behaviours. The more you are able to quickly understand which channels or tools are the most popular and attractive the more you will gain competitive advantage and meet their expectations.

This article is a summary of eCircle’s newsletter "Inside Digital Marketing". If you wish to receive further news from the email marketing sector please subscribe here: http://www.ecircle.com/en/newsletter