Good reminders in this white paper provided by Aprimo (http://www.aprimo.com) updating the strategies and steps to have an integrated and measurable email marketing campaign.
The entire process needs to be fully integrated to provide valuable and relevant content to customers and prospects.
Marketers need to manage customer and prospect lists and create targeted campaigns to ensure message delivery.
Here are the ten steps for doing so:
- Establish a single marketing platform. Using a single platform to manage email marketing processes enables better and faster campaign management with more predictable outcomes.
- Manage customer data effectively. Customer data must be gathered from multiple sources and scrubbed to ensure ongoing accuracy and compliance. A CRM database is constantly changing and those changes need to be constantly managed. Your CRM database is as good an example of “garbage in/garbage out” as I know of in marketing.
- Form a single view of customer data. Building a single view of the customer across multiple interaction points is critical to providing a consistent, well-informed customer experience. Companies that are able to segment their audience to drive relevant, timely, targeted campaigns outperform companies that do not. Companies that get permission to send email and maintain clean data have the best chance of getting their message delivered.
- Start the relationship right. Give subscribers detailed opt-in options that make it clear what they will receive and when. When customers or prospects opt in to receive email, they are not giving you permission to overload their inbox with email messages. Learn if subscribers prefer HTML, text or mobile messages, how often and on what subjects.
- Create compelling, relevant content. Provide concise, relevant information of value that will empower customers and prospects to make well-informed decisions. Email should be personalized to get and hold the attention of the target. Forty percent of subscribers “mark as spam” when they receive irrelevant content. Focus on being known as a relevant sender. Use compelling subject lines. Don’t try to sell in the subject line. Be clear. Keep it simple. Provide a simple “call to action” above the fold. Create dynamic, personalized landing pages based on the profile of the person who clicks on the link in the email.
- Have a dialogue with your customer. Prospects now expect companies to engage them in conversations, ask their opinions and present content that takes conversations into account.
- Spam-proof all messages. Check to ensure all links are working and confirm the links themselves are not on any blacklists.
- Respond in real-time with the right content. Remember the consumer expects transparency and authenticity. Automated responses could affect their perception of you.
- Leverage social sharing. Create an email then a microsite with social site sharing from the content library. Direct the email recipient to the social site of their choice and when the recipient shares the offer and related content with their social network, you can use the application to gain knowledge about click-throughs, visits or referrals.
- Build a solid infrastructure to ensure email deliverability. North American inbox percentages remain flat with 20% of email bulked or missing.
What are you doing to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing?
