Chris Baggott's Email Marketing Best Practices

13 Email Marketing Trends Explained: Conclusion (finally)

Ok, we have reached the end of this string at last.  Boiled down, we can conclude with 4 truths:

1. Email is the greatest gift to marketers in the history of mankind. 
2. Nothing else has the power to be as easy to implement or grant the ability to leverage data for relevance or is as inexpensive.   
3. Success is predicated on obeying best practices and keeping up with rapidly evolving tactics.   Experiment and pay attention to the results. 
4. Listen to your audience and treat people like individuals and you are guaranteed success.

13 Email Marketing Trends Explained: #13. Control & Compliance

Last one :-)

There is liability with email that can’t be ignored.  Organizations are responsible for every communication that comes from every person within that organization.   Email is one of the least controlled.   How do you know that someone in your company isn’t spamming or engaging in other practices that you (at best) wouldn’t approve of and (at worst) could get you blacklisted or even fined?

Industrywide, organizations like yours are spending millions protecting themselves from incoming SPAM. 

Make sure you are at least evaluating systems to control your outbound email.   Keyword scans, list uploads & approval processes are all components that are necessary to any enterprise wide email marketing system.

13 Email Marketing Trends Explained: #12. Marketing Democracy

The other opportunity (or threat) that comes with ease of use is the reality of a level playing field. 

In almost every other aspect of marketing, the bigger company has an advantage over the smaller companies.  Think about Broadcast, Print, Newspaper Inserts, even billboards the organizations with the deepest financial resources have the advantage.

Not so with Data Drive Email Marketing.   

The tools are easy; they are inexpensive and are easily integrated with the other tools necessary to manage successful one to one marketing.  If the goal is to build relationships, the argument could be made that the smaller companies might actually have an advantage.  I see lots of examples of small companies leveraging email in a more personalized manner and big companies simply replicating their mass marketing tactics in a different medium.

13 Email Marketing Trends Explained: #11. Ease Of Use (UI)

All of these trends & practices need to be executable by the marketer. 

Your tools need to be easy to use.  The more complicated, the more people you need to get involved, the less likely you are to do any of it.   Marketing tools need to be in the hands of marketers.   Marketers need to be continually evaluating, testing and pushing the relationship forward.   Get the middlemen out, pick tools that are easy to buy, easy to implement and most importantly easiest to use every day.

The only way to be successful in marketing today is to be fast.   Testing, data, conversions all happen at light speed.

13 Email Marketing Trends Explained: #10. The “From” Side

Nothing is more important to a relationship than two people.  This simple fact is so obvious... yet so often ignored.  Peppers & Rogers talked about the “One to One Future” way back in the early 90”s.   That future is here.  One to One means that relationships happen between people, not institutions.   

Indoctrinated by mass marketer thinking, we are often corrupted by the idea of the Brand.   Brands are important, credibility needs to be built for the quality and reputation of your organization, but at the end of the day, decisions are made between people.  Relationships are between people.

Leverage your email marketing to facilitate and enhance your one to one relationships.  Do you have salespeople, spokespeople, relationship owners, store managers, or customer service?   Make your email come from humans rather than institutions.  Include pictures of these relationship owners.   This is one of the easiest to implement and highest gains you can do to improve the results of your marketing with email.

13 Email Marketing Trends Explained: #9. Transactional Email

Transactional email is probably the biggest wasted opportunity in marketing.   

I bought a 42 inch plasma television online a couple of weeks ago.  It was from a company that I had never done business with before and I came to them through
a search on Shopping.com.   These people had done a good job of acquiring me for this one time purchase…but then what?

What I get is a text only confirmation acknowledging my order, giving me a tracking number and admonishing me not to reply to this email!? 

This company invested plenty to get me into their system from Shopping.com...(aquire). All they know about me is that I'm willing to spend money on their products on the web.   They paid big money to find me, or help me find them.  Now they have done nothing to convert me.   

Isn’t this a great opportunity to engage me?  Maybe a survey?  An upsell? (I forgot to order the wall mounting bracket and wound up buying that from another vendor). 

You can be almost guaranteed that transactional email will be read.  Take advantage of this opportunity to grow the relationship instead of just sending your customers the message that you could care less if we have a relationship or not.

13 Email Marketing Trends Explained: #8. Automated Email

This is one of my favorite trends.  Marketing should be easy.  One of the ways to make it easy is to automate routine touches.  As you get experience with email, you will learn what you should be saying to new customers, or how to engage a prospect or how to reactivate a lost customer.  There are all kinds of communications that can be automated which are usually more effective, timely and relevant than the traditional approach:  Batching and Blasting.

The other great thing about automation is it takes the marketer out of the execution business and puts them back in the marketing business.  The easier it becomes to get communications out the door, the more time you have to focus on significantly more important things….like driving results.

13 Email Marketing Trends Explained: #7. Data Integration

The goal is the central view of the individual.  The goal is relevance.   We can’t communicate with people like we know them if we don’t collect data at every touchpoint.  With API’s and Web Services, there is no excuse not to have everything feeding into one database automatically. Think about your data inputs, what are the touchpoints that give the complete view?  Web? Email? POS? Telephone?  Person to person contact?

All of these sources should influence how you talk to someone and need to be integrated.

13 Email Marketing Trends Explained: #6. Multi Channel Analytics

We measure email success based on opens & click through, right?

Wrong!

The focus of marketing efforts needs to be the individual. The problem is that we are all so focused on one off Campaigns and looking at our marketing channels individually we miss the big picture. 

This doesn’t have to be that way anymore.   Now you should insist that minimally your email integrates to your web tracking software, and best case, both integrate with your CRM.   What’s more indicative of a successful email? 

      A: number of links clicked?
      B: activity after the click?

Of course what matters most is not the volume of clicks, but who is clicking on what, and what are they doing after the click.

13 Email Marketing Trends Explained: #5. Frequency

What’s the right frequency for email?   

Bad question.  By asking, you are admitting to ignoring point one.   Frequency and relevance go hand in hand.    Only talk to individuals in your audience when you have something to say.   The idea that “it’s Thursday and I’ve got to blast my email’ is antiquated.  Marketers have a few opportunities to engage their customers & prospects.   You can’t afford to waste that touch, so don’t.   If you don’t have something to say, don’t say it.   

Every week I get specials emailed to me from my airline.   They are most often involving trips that they should know I’m not going to take.  Trips that don’t originate from my hometown have a pretty low likelihood of attracting my attention for a ‘weekend getaway’.   So what happens?  I ignore them.   Because your audience pays no attention to irrelevant email, they miss the ones that in fact might actually have some value.  The result, you both lose out on an opportunity.

Manage frequency like any relationship.  I talk to my wife every day, my best friend once a week and my mother twice a year.