A recent article entitled Nine Rules For Effective Behavior-Based Email Marketing by Loren McDonald in Email Insider accurately sums up the most important prerequisites to achieving success in any triggered email campaign. In the article, McDonald makes several critical points that can effectively lead any online marketer to re-evaluate their current less than optimal practices, fine-tune their email methodologies and achieve measurably better results.
Lucrative Offline & Mobile Data Collection Opportunities
The article points out that “offline and mobile channels can yield data gold” as that is a primary shortcoming of many online marketing campaigns. There is a prevailing belief that online marketing is a standalone channel, but that misconception fails to take into consideration the myriad of other interactions your company has with its customers. Almost every business has some form of offline interaction, such as event sponsorship. Failing to leverage the presence of the attendees into some form of data collection is an enormous missed opportunity. The simple act of requiring contact information as a prerequisite to attendance can be a lucrative data capture prospect, and it goes without saying that full legal permission should be obtained prior to any personal information gathering. The article goes on to list call center interactions in the list of rich data collection possibilities, and of course the practice of mining mobile functions such as check-ins.
Matching the Response Format to the Input
McDonald makes a correlation that is so fundamental that it really makes you wonder why anyone would miss it… but many online marketers do. He states that if a QR code is scanned by a smartphone, the follow-up email should be formatted to fit the tiny screens of those devices, not designed to fit on a widescreen desktop monitor. You would be hard pressed to find a customer who drags their full size tower and 27 inch monitor to your brick and mortar location where the webcam can capture a QR code on the side of one of your product displays, so use common sense and format your emails to fit!
Helpful, or Creepy & Stalkerish?
The article asks online marketers to consider the message context. A cart abandonment email that states, to the second, the time when the customer clicked away, along with a step by step analysis of their activities leading to checkout, can be interpreted not as helpful but as outright creepy and stalkerish. Online marketers have to tread the fine line between capturing customer online behavior while not really trumpeting that fact. You don’t want to come off as the kind of business that is constantly looking over your customer’s shoulder, as that will cause them to bail in favor of competitors where they feel more comfortable and less intensely pursued and analyzed.
XYZ SaaS ERP 3PL CRM… What?
Far too many automated email missives are written by “the IT guy” or as McDonald calls it, “Robbie the Robot.” There is an absolute imperative to craft any email message, transactional or not, with the same PR savvy as your website or banner ads. Each and every contact with a prospective or current customer is an opportunity to portray your brand in a positive light as one that is trustworthy, established, solid, reputable and worthy of their confidence. Although your customer may not really care to learn that their order is being processed on the XYZ SaaS ERP 3PL CRM platform, it may be advantageous to focus on the security of your payment processing system and the efficiency of your RMA policies. Given the widely publicized massive consumer data privacy breaches and hacks, nearly every one of your customers has some sense of trepidation when placing their personal payment data in your care. Anything you can do to alleviate those anxieties will result in a better customer experience and therefore greater brand loyalty.
McDonald states that using customer behavior in every aspect of your email marketing can turn so-so results into spectacular ones. Applying all nine of his valuable tips can go a long way towards honing any online marketing strategy into a much more successful one.
