Email Improvement V: Customer Lifestyle Direction

Monday, July 12, 2010 by Nick Godfrey

I want you to pretend for a moment that you’re a personal trainer. Here you are at your gym and you have two appointments booked on your schedule. One is at noon; the next at 12:30. The noon appointment comes in. He’s a 30 year old man recovering from a knee injury suffered while training for a marathon. He wants you to help him stay in great shape while he rehabs his knee and keeps his eye on a marathon he has planned for later in the year. Then the 12:30 comes in. She’s a 40 something mom who is a bit overweight and hasn’t worked out since college. She wants you to put her on a diet and exercise regiment that will simply get her on a healthier lifestyle. 

 

OK now, personal trainer. Would you send those two people the same follow up email with the same exercise plan? No, you wouldn’t. In fact you wouldn’t even think of it. Yet, this kind of thing goes on everyday in the world of email marketing. I’ll bet you that every hour of a typical business day, some company is sending the same email to different customers that have different goals and completely different needs from that company. More technically, this represents the fifth way to improve your email marketing plan: Set a lifecycle direction.

 

All customers have different lifecycles, or patterns of purchase and interactive behavior. The right marketing and technology partner will allow you to identify the patterns that will lead toward the most valuable behavior. They will enable you to sue automation to ensure that you find segments of the valuable lifecycles and to ensure that you have the fact based data to address them via email. Too many companies guess at these lifecycles. But you have to know them not guess at them.

 

Let’s go back to the personal trainer. Suppose he worked at a national fitness center chain like Bally’s. If that chain had the right customer database and the right intelligence to know customer lifecycles, he could tap into a common knowledge that would allow him to automatically send an email based on “rehabbing injuries” to the marathon runner, and “beginning fitness” to the 40 year old woman. Then from a corporate perspective, the chain could identify some of these lifecycle patterns. Maybe an email campaign for beginners could invite them to bring a friend. An email campaign for injured clients could offer additional personal training sessions at a discount or even special newsletters about avoiding common injuries to the knees and ankles. 

 

Bottom line companies must set a plan of finding out where someone is today in their use and relationship with your company and then have a plan for where you want to take them. Let’s go back to the personal trainer. Imagine that you went to his gym as an average person of average fitness he promised you to get to the next level. But then you go to the gym to find he only has one program, the one-size fits all program, which is the Rambo III program. You probably would not last long, nor would you enjoy the experience. Actually, you’d probably stop going and speak badly about the trainer and the gym.  You wouldn’t want to go there. Don’t go there with your brand.

 

 

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