Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience
Phil Gibson - Marketing | Building Brand Experience

Email Marketing

I believe email marketing is a essential aspect of your brand and staying in touch with your customers.  This begins with your initial transactional emails, notifications, problem resolution emails, new product announcements, and your monthly, weekly or daily emails.  Those are essentials.  In addition to these basic requirements, you add your promotional or launch event emails, your drip marketing triggered email marketing dialogs, and your sales or channel generated customer offer emails, and you have a wonderful mix of ways to contact your customer and satisfy their needs as you move them along your engagement cycle.

 

Your email cycle begins with your first confirmation screens.  If you have something of value, your customer will be willing to communicate with you to acquire it, use it, and eventually, replace it.  At every conceivable point, you have the opportunity to reassure, console, encourage, and relate to your customer and their desires.  This process begins with confirmation but it continues with permission.  In order to keep that permission in place, the burden is with you to keep the relationship valuable to your customer.  They can literally cut you off or begin to ignore you at any point in the dialog.

 

This all sounds very normal and of course everyone would want to do this.  The hard part is that your email marketing hunger is relentless and insatiatiable.  Fresh content is needed continuously to maintain your readers and avoid being opted out. 

 

If you remember the modular content topic from earlier sections, reuse is survival.  All new product launch material must be sourced in a modular way so it can feed your web site, your new product launch and customer visit needs, and for your email marketing hunger.

 

For the basic transactional emails, Amazon.com or FedEx are wonderful masters of the confirmation and status process.  Every step of the way they confirm status on screen while also notifying you of the status of your order with perfect email efficiency.  That reliability leads to trust.  Follow their notifications and you're golden. 

 

Email marketing dialogs and promotional event emails will leverage your registered users.  They do this by combining your cusotomer's interest profile, previous product use, or web site navigation patterns to trigger a promotional event.  You convert that event into an email from you to them with an awareness campaign or a new offer from you.  The closer these offers are in timing to a trigger event, the more "in context" or relevant they will seem to your audience.  This requires planning, system monitors, and automation.  Again, the good thing is that nowadays, there are many vendors that supply robust customer profile driven email marketing systems.  They are highly configurable and if your content is modular, you can use them with ease.  The trouble of course is that their expense grows with usage.  This can be tough to manage from a budget perspective.  You can build these yourself to convert this to more of a fixed or declining average cost basis but it is not free.

 

Sales initiated channel emails or "shares" can be tougher to create but because they are one to one promotion, they tend to be very successful.  Their open and click through rates can be much higher than automated processes.  The reason is human nature.  A customer is more likely to engage with a known human contact than an automated system.  An individual sales person can meet or contact a customer, understand their human needs, personalize an offer and send it to a customer in the context of a recent discussion.  That engagement has a high probability of being opened. reviewed, and potentially producing a successful outcome.   For more than incidental impact, Share based systems require a calendar and a steady production cycle.  The field or channel sales teams will need guidance on "the product/s of the month" and the rich content about what to promote, and how to follow up engagements.  I received a patent now owned by Texas Instruments that talks about this in depth.  You can review it here: http://bit.ly/U3zk0y

 

 

 

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This Web site is aimed at capturing some of the basic concepts I use when creating integrated marketing programs and leveraging the internet.

 

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