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I recently attended a lecture on Email Marketing held at MIS by Peter Rehnke. Credit to Peter for being such an engaging and humorous speaker! His presentation largely covered the core elements of email marketing strategy (the slides are available for download here).
A few things really stood out during the lecture though:
- Combination marketing; email is only part of the sales/lead gen process. It’s considerably more effective when it’s used in conjunction with other forms of engagement. The open rates and conversions are considerably higher than a fire & forget model. Clever use of combination marketing can massively increase your conversions.
- Big Data; your email campaigns generate a lot of information that you can use. Everything from locations, devices, to time of opening. Traditionally this is used to help build better emails, but it can also be used to better profile & target your customers. For example, if they’re reading their email in the morning, emails that contain breakfast or coffee offers might be better received than vodka & night club memberships.
- Testing; there’s an enormous performance variation between emails, so A/B test your email designs on target groups as much as possible. The bigger your email database, the more worthwhile the testing is going to be.
Combination marketing is probably the most significant point. There are some emails that actually get near 100% open rates – like order receipts & confirmations. These emails are great opportunities for cross selling, up selling or any other form of customer engagement). Just looking around at the emails we send (and we don’t have an online store), there are lots of interesting opportunities to sneak some great CTAs in.
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