Promotional emails

Email is probably your most successful marketing medium, regardless of what you are selling, as long as you have a customer base it’s hard to beat email in profit relative to cost. But you are most likely also sending generic emails, one and the same design and offers to all customers. You might have done some segmentation, maybe the customer could choose different interest areas when they signed up for your email.

But it’s still not enough.

The problem with sending generic emails is that if you have a diversified customer base or more than a few different product categories all customers don’t want the same thing.

Even if you want to promote some products, and even if you want to influence what to sell – it doesn’t work that way anymore, that is the old way of marketing. In my opinion the best way to loyalty and sales is to shorten your customers path to purchase – in other words, show them what they want to see when they want to see it and make the purchase as easy as possible.

That being said, there are exceptions to the rule. If you want to raise awareness about a product launch, tell a story about your company or something that isn’t an email with the purpose of driving sales – then you might do generic emails.

I’m not going to go in to details about personalization and why that is better than generic, you can read a bunch of stuff about it here.

Marketing automation is basically you pouring in all your data from your CRM/eComsite/ERP and so on into a big bucket. Then you set up interest triggers, for example if you work at a car-shop you could set up some interest triggers X days after a customer have changed the oil.

Then it’s up to you what to do with that trigger, if it an email should be sent to the seller responsible for that customer, if a reminder email should be sent to that customer with a discount on oil-changes or something else.

Now this was a pretty simple example, and you might be able to do this with other systems than a marketing automation system, but the whole point is to build quite complex rules to determine what your customers are interested in and when.

Let’s take another example. Let’s say you work at a grocery store and you are launching a new low-fat, no sugar, no lactose ice-cream. That is a pretty specific product that not all customers will be interested in.

You could build your target group by

• Customers who have bought other healthy ice creams
• Customers who have bought other lactose free products
• Customers who have bought other sugar free or fat free products
• Customers who have bought ordinary ice-cream but healthy food otherwise
• Customers who have bought ordinary ice-cream but have looked X times at healthier options

 

I think you get the picture.

And voilá, there you have one target group. After the initial setup you can set up so that they will receive promotional emails on a regular basis, with content based on personalization, so that group will get “Healthy sweets”.

If you have more complex services you can set up so that the customer gets an article or information email if they are early in the process and offers later in the process.

Sure it takes some time to build up your target groups, but after you have done that you have an automated email promotion engine which I guarantee will be more efficient and generate more revenue than a generic one.

In my opinion this is more than enough if your main business is eCom, but if you have a sales department and want to use the full potential of marketing automation, read this post

Marketing Automation – Lead generation, customer heatmapping & information presentation for sales (coming soon)