An Overview of Email Marketing – Part 1

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

There are a lot of resources available online that do a great job explaining the benefits of email marketing, so I won’t repeat those.  If you’ve already been sold on the benefits of email and are wondering how to do it, you’ve come to the right place.  There are a lot of different models that try to explain the life cycle of an email program.  The diagram below is my interpretation of that cycle.  This post is meant to outline and explain the entire process, and upcoming posts will describe each step in detail and how it might influence reaching your email goals.

Generate Subscribers:

The cycle begins with people subscribing to your email campaign.  But they’re not going to subscribe for nothing—it’s up to you to convey the value of joining and get them past the barrier of becoming a subscriber.  Who should your subscribers be, and how do you get them to sign up?  I’ll dig into that in part 2.

Once someone becomes a subscriber they drop into the middle of the cycle, the email campaign itself, and the topic of part 3.  This is where you deliver on what got them to subscribe in the first place, and where they’ll reside until they unsubscribe or get removed.

Deliver Targeted and Relevant Content:

Regardless of the subject of your emails, subscribers will respond better to content that appears to be directed at them specifically.  They also don’t want their time wasted with fluff they have no interest in.  But how do you know what each subscriber wants?  Check back in the third installment to find out.

Develop Subscriber Relationships:

To understand this part of the cycle, think of the give and take there is in any relationship: “You scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours.”  The relationship is a step beyond sending relevant content.  Its understanding what your subscribers need so you can achieve your goals and get a return on the investment you’ve made.  I’ll explain this relationship in part 3.

Maintain List Integrity, Organization and Hygiene:

This part of the cycle is essentially keeping everything clean and organized.  It’s much easier to send targeted emails if you have some method of segmenting subscribers.  Occasionally scrubbing your list is also important so you’re not wasting effort on subscribers who haven’t opened an email in 6 months or bounce every email you send.  All this happens behind the scenes, but I’ll uncover it in part 3.

Generate Leads:

This is the goal and purpose of your email program.  In other words, what you want to get out of it.  Recruiting subscribers and sending emails isn’t free, so delivering emails should ultimately translate to an increase in your bottom line.  Achieving your goal may be the last part of the cycle but it’s easily the most important because your goal will determine how you structure all the steps leading up to it.  I’ll delve into this, along with generating subscribers, in part 2.

Track, Analyze, Report & Adapt:

One of the great things about digital marketing in general is how easy it is to keep track of in real time, and emails are no exception.  As you’ll notice in the diagram, tracking shouldn’t apply only to how well you’re accomplishing your goals, but how well each component is contributing to that accomplishment.  If any part can be improved, do it!  Since tracking applies to all the other parts of your email campaign, I’ll explore it exclusively in part 4.

And that sums it up.  While this whole cycle may start with convincing someone to subscribe and end when a subscriber is convinced to make a purchase, all the parts are connected.  It’s difficult to plan one aspect without an understanding of the others.  There is no one-size-fits-all approach to email marketing (that won’t get you labeled as a spammer).  Understanding how each phase in this process applies to your business, your customers and your goals is critical to designing an effective email program.

See you next week for part 2!

When Will Gerber Stop Sending Me Formula?

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

It’s 2010 and Marketers everywhere are tasked with doing more with less.  Communication plans are migrating online in record numbers to maintain (or increase) reach at a lower cost.  Only the most stalwart of companies have retained a significant presence in direct mail due to the considerable expense involved.  Add a product component, and a direct mail campaign can get very, very expensive indeed.  Usually, cost and targeting go hand-in-hand; ie, the more expensive the program, the more targeted it becomes.  That’s been my experience, at least.  So I’m understandably confused why Gerber is still sending me formula.  It’s true, I signed up for their loyalty program years ago when my son was born – and appreciated the samples they sent.  Probably bought some product as a result.  But that was years ago – they’re now sending expensive samples of formula to a first grader.  Something tells me that if I’m still getting samples years later, many others like me are as well.  I know where I’d look to find some additional marketing funds for other programs at Gerber.  Gerber, if you’re reading this, please take me off your samples list.  On another note: anybody looking for some Gerber formula – ?

Maybe it’s time for a Data Audit?

Friday, September 10th, 2010

You know it’s time for a Data Audit when:
*  customer information is kept in different places, by different people, in different programs for different purposes
*  you wonder what a customer would look like if all that information was in one place
*  you wonder what the true value of your customer(s) is – some are worth more than others, right?
*  you wonder if you should be spending more time keeping the most valuable customers and less time keeping up with the least valuable ones
*  you wonder how many customers leave you every year – and why
*  you suspect you could spend your marketing budget a whole lot smarter if you only knew the answers to your questions

A good Data Audit will solve these issues and provide you the visibility into your customer data necessary to identify behavioral trends, issues and segments you didn’t even know existed. That kind of insight into your customers can lead to some compelling message strategies that take your communication relevance to a whole new level.

Wonder if you’re getting the most value out of the data you have?  Maybe it’s time for a Data Audit -

What Does “Integrated Marketing” Mean?

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

The Business Dictonairy provides a pretty good summary definition of Integrated Marketing as “Strategy aimed at unifying different marketing methods such as mass marketing, one-to-one marketing, and direct marketing. Its objective is to complement and reinforce the market impact of each method, and to employ the market data generated by these efforts in product development, pricing, distribution, customer service, etc”

Although fairly comprehensive in scope, that definition lacks one key component of Integrated Marketing that really brings home the ROI.  Not only should it employ the market data generated by efforts for the benefit of sales, pricing, etc – the data should funnel back into the overall campaign elements to better inform targeting efforts overall – creating a continuous cycle of campaign improvement and a very long run-on sentence.

Integrated Marketing is about better leveraging your Marketing budget investment for improved results across the communication channels and beyond.  It’s a single message broadcast in many channels – online and offline – in the social, sales, marketing and PR spaces.  It requires customizing that message to suit the medium – and it requires intelligent design to incorporate measurement throughout.  It’s often complicated – and it’s always worth the effort.

Marketing Budget Metrics

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

You Get What You Give when it comes to allocating funds to the Marketing budget.

Many companies wonder what percentage of revenue should be allocated to fund Marketing efforts – and that answer is rarely straightforward or simple to answer. Research suggests an inverse relationship between company size and marketing allocation, with the variable for a proper marketing budget between 2% and 10% of sales.

As this is an important subject and clients are keen to get a concise, easily digestable answer, my pat response is this: the correct percentage (or amount) should correspond with what you’re looking to accomplish as a company. Big, hairy growth goals require adequate Marketing dollars to achieve – flat or declining sales require less.

In the final analysis, there is no magic number that will ensure adequate Marketing support and product sales success for your firm – that percentage is unique and will require some test-and-learn efforts to arrive at over time.

Closing the CMO/Agency Gap

Monday, July 19th, 2010

Gerson Lehman Group just published their Councils Report on Closing the CMO / Agency Gap: How Agencies Can Win Business and Build Stronger Client Relationships. The answer in a sentence: agencies should invest more in winning business – more time – more resources – more capital. The challenge of course for agencies is to do so in the most brutal marketing services environment in 100 years. Every CMO has the right to expect an agency to understand their business model, industry and related challenges before stepping into the ring to battle for their marketing budget. Every agency has the right to expect a fair, transparent and timely contest and opportunity to be judged on the value of their thinking, experience and execution. And then there is the real world where decisions are made based on relationships, based on political structures and based on the lowest bid. In the new business economy of 2010 – so many things are changing, they almost look the same – !