Email is a medium, not a practice

Email is a medium, not a practice. What does this mean? Basically it sums up the common problems we see organisations have with their email marketing campaigns. More often than not, we see companies leaving their email marketing to the IT guys, the web designers or sales assistants, and more often than not, that is where it all falls apart

Email marketing is the digital form of direct marketing, a skill that is learned and perfected over a successful marketing career. It’s about growing, segmenting and manipulating your data to communicate with customers as individuals, tailoring your offerings to customer needs and building the relationship with that customer through a personal approach. Email platforms such as IVC’s contain various ways to do that. For example, IVC’s platform includes advanced data segmentation, behavioural queries and dynamic content to alter campaigns based on the query results. In fact, it is amazing the difference you can make to a campaign by placing your customer’s first name within the design through a simple personalisation tag.

Direct marketing is proven, and brings in results. Customers feel special, appreciate that you understand their individual requirements and they only receive information relevant to them. This increases open, read and click-through rates, response levels and business activity.

Example: Imagine you are an online printer supply company. You sell your customer some printers and then, once in your database you send him your weekly promotions. Eventually, the customer stops reading them as he’s bought his printer and doesn’t want to read about all your weekly offers.

Now, imagine you get smart with the data. When you sold the printer you asked your customer how much printing they do in a month, you know what model they have and how many they have and you know how many pages each printer will do before they need a new toner. So you add this information to the system from the date of purchase and set-up a campaign that goes out a week before their toners expire…

“Hi Jon, Hope your enjoying your new printers. Based on the amount of printing you do, your toners will be running low by now, so to make life easy for you and to say thank you for buying the printers from us, here is a 10% coupon off toners if you order by Friday.”

Your customer sees a personalised campaign that applies to his business, checks his toner levels and sees they are low. Impressed by the personal service he orders from you taking advantage of the offer by clicking through to your website. IVC’s platform captures the behavioural data, meaning you can repeat this next time, and indeed every time the customer needs ink. And the best bit, it can all be done automatically, for all your customers, using triggered campaigns.

Direct marketing via any medium is a skill, and email allows you to get a quicker response and more accurate. It requires the careful monitoring and developing of your base and the careful analysis of the reporting you generate from your campaigns to become a successful part of your business, but get it right, and you have the lowest cost form of any direct marketing available, with impressive ROI and CPA levels.