Hopefully, like us, you consider “batch-and-blast” email campaigns to be, at best, a rather uncouth marketing tactic. Purchasing an email list, pushing out impersonal messaging, and praying for click-throughs to roll in isn’t where we want to hang our hats as marketers, and it definitely doesn’t earn us brownie points with our buyers. Breaking the “batch-and-blast” habit, however, can be a bit of a challenge – especially with technology enablers like marketing automation platforms, and extensive CRMs in place. It’s not exactly a twelve step program, but if you’re trying to go beyond “batch-and-blast” marketing, here are three tenets to take to heart.
Take Time for Targeting Over Shooting from the Hip:
Aberdeen Group’s predictive marketing analytics research found that leading companies experienced a 7.7% average response rate to their targeted marketing campaigns, which is a full 93% higher than the 4.0% average response rate for laggard businesses. This statistic suggests that taking the time to more finely segment your audience – based on behavior, for example – pays off in significantly higher campaign lift.
See Your Segments as People and Personalize Accordingly:
Traditional outbound marketing has tended to consist of one-size-fits-all messaging. These could be product-focused emails about the features of the software or service, generalized emails with only a first name personalization, or poorly targeted prospecting emails.
“The one-size-fits-all approach to email marketing no longer works simply due to the sheer volume of promotional emails an average consumer receives a day,” says Matt Lewis, marketing operations manager at Aberdeen Group, “According to Epsilon’s Email Institute, triggered message open rates were 72.6% higher than non-triggered messaging, which shows the importance of using email intelligently in your marketing.”
Lewis also noted that, when an email subscriber receives a one-size-fits-all messaging blast, one of three things happen: they delete the email, unsubscribe from the list, or mark the email as spam.
The better way to email your list is with a “just-in-time” model. The concept originated in manufacturing, and strives to remove waste from the production process by making the right component available at the right time. In marketing, this translates to real-time delivery of the right messaging to the right person at the precise moment they need it.
“A just-in-time marketing model takes a dynamic approach to campaigns based on the optimal combination of time and message for the ready buyer,” writes Trip Kucera, VP of Client Success and CMO-in-Residence at Aberdeen Group, in recent just-in-time marketing research.
Cleanse
Perhaps the most critical step to implementing a smarter email strategy is ensuring your database is clean. If your contact database isn’t scrubbed for obvious fakes like Bugs Bunny, Santa Claus, or The Batman — or fields that are corrupt, out of date, or inaccurate — no amount of well-targeted email copy to your buyer persona will matter. Keep in mind as well that data decays at a rate of 2% or more per month; the person who signed up for your list may have left their job or changed desks, and you want to make sure you’re not sending email into a proverbial black hole.
How to cleanse your database though? Manual cleansing processes are error-prone and time consuming, which is why 57% of top-performing companies in Aberdeen Group’s just-in-time marketing research have automated their data preparation. These issues with manual cleansing are magnified when you try to pull data from multiple sources into one view for coherent analysis. Also, there may be key fields missing such as installed technology or propensity to buy, which won’t prevent you from emailing someone but will impede your ability to send targeted emails.
Once you’ve got the clean database on your side (which will need to be refreshed occasionally), it becomes a matter of integrating that contact database with your marketing automation platform or email marketing tool to use the normalized data in your targeted marketing. Data has increasingly become the lynchpin for every marketing process, and with the bigger results expected from the same budget you can ill-afford to have a dirty database.
It’s important to strike a strong balance when it comes to emailing your subscribers. Do it too often with the wrong offer, and you can experience high unsubscribes or – worse – people not even bothering to open your message so they can unsubscribe. If you apply the principles of just-in-marketing and keep your database clean, however, your chance of maximizing the usefulness of your contact database is much higher.
For more on “Just-in-Time Marketing” download the complete report here.
