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Email Marketing for CRM Ninjas
By bear | April 8, 2009
I was recently invited to be a speaker for an Interactive Minds event on Email Marketing 2.0 in front of an engaged Brisbane crowd. The other speakers spoke on email marketing basics (Brendon Boulas, RACQ), acquisition tactics (Dave Smerdon, Vision 6) and using third party lists (Shayne Orbell, Frontline Direct), leaving me the subject of data & metric driven email activity.
Now data is not renown for its sexy interest levels, but it was certainly fun to try to make it so and take the Brisbane punters on the journey many of us CRM Ninjas have embarked upon. Without repeating the whole presentation, it can be broken down into the following (brief) key points:
1. Data takes us from broadcast messaging to 1 to 1 personalised information
This is the key goal of any true CRM system, to move away from a fire and forget broadcast to sending every customer a completely customised communication tailored precisely to that customers likes, behaviours and lifestyle. Of course its a near impossible journey for most businesses, so as email marketers we need to take steps towards that goal – promotional broadcasts | optimised offers based on the general traits of customers | different offers, tone and messaging based on identified segments | personalised 1 to 1 offers and messaging for every customer.
2. Data helps us to build a complete business strategy
The Customer Knowledge Cycle takes data on customers and their behaviours and layers this knowledge to optimise our business model. This starts at campaign development and optimisation, moves to base customer profiling, then to in-depth customer profiling/lifetime value/retention strategies and finally determines the customer value proposition/product development/channel development/customer cycle development.
3. Data metrics add science to the Art of Marketing
Data metrics can generally be broken down into the two streams of customer value optimisation and campaign/resource optimisation. For the former stream we look to forecast Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) & Customer Profitability (CP) and then identify ways to increase this – more relevant offers, retention strategies, cross & up-sell opportunities etc. On the latter stream we look at cost of campaigns, fraud reduction, speed to market and Revenue generated per Marketing FTE.
4. Data provides the keys to segmentation
Basic profile scoring, predictive lifestyle clustering, RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value) segments – the segmentation test and learn journey is fed by the myriad of data we gather (particularly online). The ability for digital marketers to gather data on website journey paths as well as transactional behaviours gives a rich set of cross-referenced insights on which to base segmentation activities.
5. Email Content Strategies
In the case of hotel bookings (my current line of work) the decision to purchase a hotel room is one of the very final stages of the purchase decision cycle. This means that weekly email communications with hotel deals are simply not valuable unless perfectly timed. To keep open rates at the right levels (and customers wanting to open your emails every week) you need to offer more value than just deals, and the strategy needs to be based on the start of the purchase decision cycle. This means building a content strategy that adds value by offering easy access to information that helps get your customers into the right frame of mind for your products – in our case this might include interesting destination stories (written by our roaming travel writers and supplied via blogs), free partner offers, customer reviews of destinations & hotels etc.
6. Using email marketing & social networks to help build your content strategy and value proposition
Different customers prefer different channels to receive their information. These might include blogs, Facebook groups, Twitter updates, MySpace pages, forum discussions, newspapers, RSS, tv shows and so forth. Building your content strategy across multiple channels then offers choice to your customers, and can be detailed in your regular email communications – adding to your content and building relevancy.
There is alot here to work on for you bidding CRM/email ninjas, but the step-changes in marketing effectiveness and ultimately ROI throughout the journey will make the efforts worthwhile. It probably still won’t make the data world sexy though.
Topics: Marketeer Babble | 2 Comments »
April 8th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Sean, data IS sexy!
April 8th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Haha, thx Tim, I think so too ;)