Borrow a Page from Your E-Mail Playbook
Which marketing buzzword is getting more tired: “customer-centric” or “multichannel”? You can’t attend a conference on marketing or management these days without the speakers repeating these phrases ad nauseam. Would any executives even admit to doing non-customer-centric, single-channel marketing today?
Let’s take a look at the problem we are trying to solve: customer engagement.
To engage customers, you need to understand who your likely customer is and to market to that customer based on what you know about him. The more you can build your marketing around what you know about the customer, including when and where he communicates and does business with you, the greater your chances of marketing success. Moreover, customers who engage with your brand through multiple channels are known to be of even higher value and to stick around longer than single-channel customers. Stores, contact centers, e-mail, Websites, direct mail, all are proven channels, and more channels, such as RSS and mobile, are cropping up all the time.
With this kind of rapidly evolving multichannel environment, marketing executives can easily get overwhelmed. This is when you should pay attention to your e-mail marketing, the channel that delivers the highest return on investment by a significant margin, according to the Direct Marketing Association.
E-mail gives you the ability to engage customers. When done well, it’s the most cost-effective, successful means of collecting customer data (both static and behavioral) and creating actionable, relevant, revenue-generating campaigns based on those data. And the more relevant you are in e-mail, the more engaged your customers will be. In fact, 60% of consumers who make immediate purchases from e-mail messages did so because of relevance, according to JupiterResearch. Therefore, as customers start to interact with your company using more channels, they will expect the same personalized, relevant communications in those channels.
So once you’ve gotten e-mail right, you need to use the customer knowledge you’ve gathered and the skills you’ve attained as the backbone for marketing through all your channels, instead of reinventing the proverbial wheel for each. But as obvious as the idea of leveraging your e-mail success by applying it in other channels is, few marketers actually do it yet. To the contrary, most have a long way to go.
For instance, I subscribe to a mobile messaging service from a major media channel. Throughout the day, important pieces of news show up on my mobile phone, usually big news that any business manager would have some measure of interest in— sudden swings in the stock market, major government announcements. Unlike this media company’s Website and e-mail news feeds, this service doesn’t let you personalize what you see or receive. Everything, though, is generally of interest to an adult, informed audience. Who else would subscribe to a general news feed?
So you can imagine my surprise when, on Election Day this past fall, I received along with the usual election-oriented news this important headline: Britney Spears is getting divorced. Whoa, stop the presses! Who did they think I was, a teenager? I wonder how many subscribers to this mobile feed cared about this earthshaking news. Personally, I was disappointed that my trusted source for relevant news had wasted my time.
While it might be more difficult to personalize RSS feeds and mobile messages, you take a big risk of going backward in your customer relationships if you don’t do so. You’ve set an expectation with your customers in e-mail, and they respect you for it, so you shouldn’t shatter that expectation in new channels. As such, you must apply many of the things you do to create personalized, relevant e-mails to other channels to ensure you build and maintain trusted relationships. These include the following areas:
• data—capture and integrate data about your customer, including purchases, behavior, demographics, and preferences, from multiple sources. Conduct the same kind of data analysis and segmentation as you do with e-mail with the goal of maximizing relevance (no Britney Spears updates except for pop-celeb fans!).
• measurement—track your results, just as you do with e-mail. Get beyond opens and clicks to track where the customer clicked and what was purchased.
• skills—don’t forget the expertise you’ve honed with e-mail: strategy and analytics, creative, database marketing. You’re already doing it; now apply it to the other channels.
• process efficiency—see where you can reuse the same workflow, content management, production, quality assurance, and such. Again, do what you’ve already done for e-mail.
• cross-functional integration—coordinate integration among customer service, IT/data, e-commerce, and sales/marketing, much as your organization has done for e-mail.
Most important, sit down with your e-mail team and give them the job of solving this problem. They probably know more about marketing to your customers in relevant ways than anyone else in your organization. Get their ideas on applying what they already know to your other channels. It will be a lot cheaper and a lot more effective than reinventing the wheel. And you won’t risk damaging your well-earned customer relationships.
John Rizzi is president/CEO of e-Dialog, an e-mail services provider based in Lexington, MA.
Other articles by John Rizzi:
Four Ways to Improve Marketing ROI Through E-mail
