Marketers have been taking the easy route for too long: sending every campaign via email to their entire customer database. Although easy to implement, this “batch-and-blast” approach is no longer effective in a world of competing digital, social, and mobile messages. Your email may be hard to distinguish and stand out.
There’s some good news. Create personalized email campaigns to cut through the noise. They can be relevant and even irresistible for the people you’re trying to reach.
To accelerate business results, companies need to adopt new technologies and strategies that allow them to move from “broadcast” to “personal.”
What is the best place to start?
1. Take control of your data
Create 360-degree views of all sources of customer data
Data can be used to understand your customers and their traits better.
Bluewolf’s Annual Study (email is required to access the report) shows that data is the second most budgeted marketing initiative. This may be because 63% of marketers do not have a dashboard to measure their marketing activities.
Customer data is essential for your business’s growth. It’s vital to maximize sales, increase marketing effectiveness, and engage customers. It can be overwhelming and quickly become unreliable, outdated, or redundant.
You can measure and access data from Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service. You must have full visibility of how data enters your organization and its importance for each department. Your systems will be consolidated to create a single view that fosters better communication and alignment across departments, leading to higher customer satisfaction.
Standardize data fields to ensure consistency.
Start by improving the quality of your database at the time of data collection.
Companies that consistently maintain data hygiene receive seven times the number of inquiries and four times the number of leads. (Email is required to access the report.)
If your database contains multiple titles for the same person, you may find it difficult to determine who to contact. Consider standardizing title data using “Function” or “Role” rather than highly variable fields such as “Job Name.” This will bring consistency to your contact list, as you can normalize the values around a single value.
Establish data de-duplication best practices across departments/systems.
Up to 25% of customer data for B2B transactions becomes inaccurate within a year. Duplicate information exacerbates this problem, undermining effective customer communication.
Standardizing data is a process that should continue. If you use a CRM, make sure that the data flows both ways. Both sets of data must be synchronized to provide a current and accurate view of your customer.
Marketing needs to work with every department to determine how they get new data. However, the database maintenance is ultimately the responsibility of all departments. This means that you should enforce a data governance program throughout your organization, make it a part of the onboarding process and staff training, and ensure it aligns with each department’s priorities.
2. Segment your audience
Determine the business goals of your email campaigns
Targeting a certain type of client is the goal of segmentation. Data segmentation allows you to group customers with similar characteristics, such as their job function, purchasing habits, and geographic location.
Segmenting allows companies to create unique messages and offers that speak directly to the interests and concerns of every customer group.
Marketing that is personalized and relevant will improve your customer response rates and boost your customer loyalty and trust.
Implementing the right segmentation strategies to achieve your business goals
You can segment your target audience in various ways based on business objectives, products, and services, B2B, B2C, global markets, regional or local markets, etc.
By segmenting your database by buying cycle, you can create relevant content for specific periods based on your customers’ purchase habits.
There is no one right way to segment customers. The best segmentation method depends on your business, sales cycle, and marketing goals.
Understanding your customers’ personas is important. You can flesh out personas by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. By riding along with a sales representative or shadowing them, you can get into their shoes and see where your customer’s experience is lacking.
3. Define campaign success
Email success doesn’t happen overnight. Companies should set realistic expectations based on previous performance of what a successful campaign looks like.
Powerful digital tools now exist that can track campaigns and provide insight into whether a company has achieved its goals.
Marketing automation software such as Marketo or Eloqua comes with reports that provide a holistic overview of campaigns. These include performance measures like revenue and profitability, as well as dashboards customized for CMOs.