Knowing Your Customers

An effective contact strategy should think beyond traditional outbound email promotions that make up the vast majority of email programs. Marketers should update and improve their strategies and include targeted promotions that are integrated with multi-channel communications.

Profile-based Segmentation, Targeting and Personalization.

Deliver highly targeted, personalized and dynamic content and offers tailored to an individual’s profile and preferences. Depending on the context, the terms segmentation, targeting and personalization can mean different things.

Before getting too far into the strategies associated with them, it’s important to define them in the context of email marketing:

• Segmentation is the process of separating customers, or potential customers, into distinct target groups (“segments”) that have similar needs that can be satisfied by delivering similar value propositions.
  
• Targeting is the process of delivering relevant messages to segments in a manner that best matches your organizations value propositions to the unique needs of a segment.
  
• Personalization is the process of tailoring specific elements of targeted messages to individuals within a segment.

Event-triggered Campaigns.

When marketers think about event-triggered marketing today, it’s typically very one-dimensional: email. An email is automatically pushed to a customer when they abandon an online shopping cart or experience a technical difficulty on an ecommerce site or signup to receive newsletters.

When executed correctly event-triggered marketing messages can receive up to five times the response rate of non-targeted push messages. With a tightly aligned event-triggered marketing strategy, companies can not only better track and measure how quickly the customer journey accelerates from “just looking” to “repeat purchase,” but also response rates for all up-sell and cross-sell messages across channels.

We will talk more about event-triggered marketing under automated lead management, transaction-related communications and service section.

Multi-channel Campaigns.

As marketers look to build more valuable two-way relationships with customers and prospects across multiple channels – like print, web, e-mail and mobile – they’ll soon realize that their dated, one-dimensional marketing practices must evolve as well. No longer are good timing and a large database enough to drive improve ROI. Multi-channel campaigns are essential to maintaining a consistent brand experience across all channels used by a customer. These type of campaigns will be most effective at reaching all members of a target market regardless of their preferred medium and at driving up sales through all channels.

Automated lead management, transaction-related communications and service.

Companies that can distribute collateral and correspond with customers relative to order and shipping status via email and that can successfully drive customers to purchase and receive service online will significantly reduce their cost to acquire and serve customers. We can categorize this section under the event-triggered marketing section.

Retention / Loyalty programs.

Retention and Loyalty programs enable creative marketers to cost-effectively influence customer behavior by awarding benefits according to specific actions, but only if they have the right combination of tracking, analytic and communication tools.