Seth Godin just posted a short blog post, Redoubling to system failure, that begins with the following sentence
Every 18 months for the last decade, the world has doubled the data it pushes to you.
Amazing fact, isn’t it? It is especially noteworthy for marketers. What do you do when there are twice as many friend requests, twice as many emails, twice as much data flowing to your prospects as the 18 months before?
There are only a few ways to handle this to get to your prospects:
1. Cut Through the Noise with Relevance
2. Find Influencers/Hubs and Influence Them
3. Leverage Supply Chain Relationships
All three of them require you to really KNOW who your customers are and how to get to them in the first place. We’ll cover the first one in this post and the others in future posts.
Email Marketing Strategy: How to Cut Through The Noise with Relevance
One of the first things we see when we go into help a company with marketing is that they are treating their email list as one blob. Everyone gets the same email… usually one per week or 2-3 per month. The email normally has a coupon for a discount towards some product they’ve decided to push. Or, it’s a general percent-off coupon.
Their emails often resembles a postcard. In fact, you could usually print the email off as a postcard and send it through snail mail to the customer/prospect’s address.
In short, their emails are not relevant. The open rates show it. The clickthrough rates show it and the sales revenue shows it.
Yet, email marketing is one of the easiest things to fix. And, the revenue gains are immediate.
The Best Way to Become More Relevant
For our purposes relevance is simply communicating with the customer about what is important to them in relation to your business relationship. But, don’t think in terms of black and white: Relevant vs. Non-Relevant. It is a gradient scale. Further, there is nothing that is Completely Relevant or you’d have 100% open rates and 100% task completion rates. (And, if this ever did happen you’d know that your email list isn’t big enough).
As you get more and more relevant your email open rates, click through rates and conversion rates go up. As you get less and less relevant they go down.
One way to become more relevant, and the preferred way, is to stop treating your customers like a giant blob. Instead, segment them based on who they are. The easiest way to do this is to take your existing database and do an RFM analysis. Then, take the top 20% who create the most revenue for you and do an append through Claritas (or some other database marketing company) that will give you back all sorts of information like SIC, revenue, location, number of employees and more.
(If you are B2c it works even better because you can get Nielsen PRIZM codes which use lifestyle and consumer behavior to give you back the best segments for your business. You can then match all media to the PRIZM codes for ultra-targeted relevance!)
This will show you WHO is buying and who are natural fits for your company. If you break this down into segments you will plainly see how different segments are interested in different products and product clusters.
With those segments built out you can cut up your email list into segments as well. (BlueSky Factory is a great email service provider that has this capability. I use them almost exclusively now.)
Now, based on this and a little further analysis you will be primed to send out more relevant emails. For example, one of my clients was surprised to discover that Churches were a HUGE segment for them. Based on this we have expanded emails, media buys and even SEO to focus more on the specific product cluster that churches use in their organization. Now, our emails can be much better targeted. By survey, we can find out HOW churches are using the products. This information becomes ‘how tos’ in our future emails to that segment.
This is how you cut through the noise with Relevance.
I’ll be writing future blog posts on RFM Analysis and Email Segmentation. If you haven’t subscribed to the feed please do and you’ll be notified when they are posted.
Jason
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