Lights Out Marketing

Over the past few weeks we have encouraged companies to make nine improvements to their email marketing efforts. Leverage the previous nine improvements, keep adding customer, behavior, purchase and product information on a daily basis with an automated customer data engine, and you will achieve our tenth improvement: Targeting.

If your email campaign is obsessed with relevant targeting, not only are you most likely committing the cardinal sin of “blasting,” you’re also behind the curve. You’re not competing effectively. A recent survey from email marketing provider AWeber shows that behavioral targeting dramatically increases email key performance indicators. By specifically targeting email campaigns toward subscribers who have taken an action (opened a particular email, clicked on a link, made a prior purchase), nearly 50 percent of respondents indicated that behavioral targeting increases their conversion rates either significantly or moderately. An overwhelming majority of respondents (71.4 percent) plan to increase their focus on behavioral targeting in their email campaigns over the next year. So avoid this marketing opportunity at your competitive risk.

Targeting is the sum total of the right email effort. If you are focused on the most relevant message to your customers, if you know the value of your customers, and if you are focused on each customer’s own unique lifecycle, you stand a very good chance of targeting them appropriately. You will avoid “nag marketing” that, when looked at from the customer’s perspective is seen as “Did you buy? Are you ready to buy now? You didn’t buy just now, so are you ready to buy now?”  Your marketing will be more like that of the personal trainer we mentioned in earlier that customizes a training program depending on an individual customer’s needs instead of being generic and telling everyone to go run a marathon on a broken leg. Most likely your customers will not follow-through on your suggestion.

As we move toward the end of the “Ten Ways To Improve Email Marketing” it’s important to keep in mind that these are improvements. They are meant to be taken as ten ways your company can be more effective, not ten ways to trash your current email initiatives. With that intent in mind let’s look at personalization. 

In the digital era the goal of any marketing campaign must include a personal touch. Your company has the ability to market to customers as if you know them. To do anything less, especially via email, will be noticed quickly. And it could be used as a reason for customers to disengage. The more you can go beyond just using a name, the better. For example, you should strive to use preferences, favorites things, and customized subject lines the more effective your email effort will be.

As I said at the beginning, we’re focused on improvements. Most companies know personalization works better, so how do you improve? Well, first of all I recommend putting some kind of call to action either in the subject line or very early in the email. That call to action must be tied to the actual content of the email. (How often do you see these being absolutely different?) This works best when the subject line is personalized, being based on the data engine that your company has hopefully put time effort and money into. 

And there’s evidence that adding a personal urgency will lead to higher open rates, conversion rates and all that other good stuff email is supposed to do if it’s done right. According to a recent survey conducted by Experian CheetahMail, marketers may be able to further boost transactions by including limited-time offers in the subject line of emails. Experian noted that 59 percent of day one transactions were driven by time-sensitive promotions. Coupons, abandoned shopping cart notices and welcome emails also lead to transactions, though often not as quickly as time-limited offers. With a majority of Americans starting their online day by checking their inboxes, the email marketing channel has become extremely popular among businesses. A recent survey conducted by ExactTarget found that 58 percent of consumers check their emails when first logging on to the Internet. I should note here that the LTO (limited time offer) to drive urgency should not be overused. Recently I received over half a dozen emails for a sandal sale. Yes it was a good deal, yet no, I’m not buying any sandals!

Here at Customer Portfolios we preach lights-out marketing. That means you can build automated programs that are triggered by behavior. With these you can still market to your customers when the office is closed and the lights are off. Now there’s good evidence that your customers just might see your email first thing in the morning, maybe before your company turns the lights on. That’s a nice coincidence. But it won’t work well unless you greet them by name, address them about what is meaningful to them, and make the offer relevant.

So is email marketing. All the companies we deal with have a pretty good level of learned confidence in key areas. They have confidence in their people and product. But they lack confidence in their customers and that confidence can only come from key learning’s about your customers and then applying that learning to email campaigns. In short: Determine what you need to learn per the overall strategy that we’ve been discussing over the past two weeks here on our blog, and sync it with the customer lifecycle.

Here’s what you need to accomplish key customer learnings for an improved emails campaigns:

• Go beyond the basics: Every company gets the basics of name, address, and maybe even birthdays. But if you go beyond it you can implement the kind of surprise and delight tactics we discussed on our last segment that make email campaigns fun for your customers. Find out things about them that can be tied to their relationship with your brand, like their favorite holiday, book, musician, and even their hometown. This information opens up a lot of information that can be used to customize future campaigns. 

• Get preferences: This is very important in many areas of marketing, but critical in email marketing. Suppose a catalog apparel marketer is getting ready to redesign its website. They need to know the preferences of all their customers to know how often they want to receive emails inviting them to go that new site, and it will also need to know whether they still want to get that print version of the catalog that has been the foundations of its business. 

• Value Future Behaviors: Incentivize the customer via a solid value exchange to provide you information about their behavior (Lifecycle) and use this information to be relevant (targeting.) This doesn’t require a million dollar budget.  It can be done with integrated, closed-loop marketing. It can also be done with cleaver, bootstrap promotional marketing. It can even be done with a simple Thank You letter.

Remember that email is a process not an event. It is a relationship rather than a one-off conversion attempt. Learning as much about your customer as possible will give you the confidence necessary to go the whole round of 18 holes and end up in the lead vs. behind your competition.

I’ll be the first to admit that I take this email stuff pretty seriously. That’s because it is so underutilized and poorly executed by so many companies and I passionately believe it is essential to an effective customer strategy. But at this point, after we’ve posted six serious ways that your company can improve its email efforts, let’s lighten up.

I’m not suggesting that your casual dining chain hire joke writers for your email campaign. And I don’t think taking a comedic turn when you’ve spent years cultivating a serious tone as a high-end fashion retailer is advisable. Fun has everything to do with a concept I call “surprise and delight.” It’s kind of like the “shock and awe” of email marketing.

Surprise and delight means that every now and then you’re going to extend an offer, a discount, an experience, or an information package that is unexpected. This experience must be worth the customer’s while, not a frivolous venture. Like anything else it is also based on data. 

There are two kinds of surprise and delight. The first is somewhat random but still based on customer data. Example: A fashion retailer can spice up the dog days of midsummer with an unscheduled email to its most valuable customer segments based on total revenue as a “summer recess” discount. That makes your company more valued and less predictable. And it just might keep those customers on watch for the next campaign you send on the normal schedule.

The second kind is an “earned” surprise and delight. In this case, a company can set an internal marker for a certain set of customers based on their behavior. You must don’t need to let the customers know you’re doing it. Example: If a casual dining chain wants to spike its happy hour business, it can email an offer for a “martini night” for its customer that have shown the biggest percentage revenue jump, or even for the customers that have most recently joined its loyalty program.

The element of surprise is one that some companies have quite frankly abused. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Gain a trusted relationship by running a quality email program based on data and value, and you can move to surprise and delight. More work for you maybe, but a lot of fun for your customers.

If only tracking campaign response was this easy.  Problem is, too many sales and marketing executives actually expect these kinds of results from explicit campaign response tracking.  A customer will typically receive many communications and specific campaign response might be an unreasonable expectation in a multichannel world. For example, during their repurchase cycle when a company is trying to get a customer to buy a second and even third time they will receive catalogs, post cards, emails and perhaps even phone calls.  Here at Customer Portfolios we associate source codes to each piece of communication so that when a customer makes a purchase, we know the code, verbally or digitally, and we can relate it to the appropriate campaign.  The only problem is that most customers aren’t interested in helping us measure, or as we call it, close the loop (as most customers don’t even know what the “loop” is).  They don’t drive to the mall with one, two or even six catalogs in their hands in order to indicate which one got them there. 

With a marketing database in place you can have the ability to see all. Frequently we talk about having a 360 degree view of the customer and their behavior. We can see the communications that have been sent to a customer along with all resulting behavior and purchases made by that individual customer or their household.  So why rely strictly on the customer to tell us why they bought when we can logically come to that conclusion ourselves by just looking at the communications leading up to the order?  With a database, designed for analysis, we have a complete view of all customer behavior. It is not based on a random anecdote or occasional sales report. 

This is where implicit measurement comes into play. Implicit response analysis takes into account the communications a customer has received, the time they received them and the typical response curve for that type of messaging.  Suppose a customer receives an email or catalog regarding a fall clearance sale. She goes to a store over the weekend and buys an item included in the catalog and email. It’s reasonable to say that the email had something to do with that purchase.  However, odds are that there is going to be no indication from the customer that they even saw the catalog or got an email.  The implicit matchback would identify this transaction as being related to both the email and the catalog and give credit where credit is due. That credit is implied and it’s OK to credit to both efforts. 

Another benefit to using implicit response tracking is the ability to understand how complementary campaigns affect overall customer conversion.  Catalogs certainly provide a customer with many suggestions for upcoming styles and new product releases.  However, these customers are flooded with communications at all times and there is a high likelihood that they will get distracted and ultimately move on to another brand or simply forget how excited they were about a product. A follow up post card or email that strikes the customer while they are in front of a computer and reminds them of the product that they were interested in can provide momentum for numerous additional orders.  By solely using explicit analysis there would be no way to understand the true value in the multiple touch points as only one source code could be captured.  By implicitly tracking customer response we could see that customers who received the email and catalog generated a significant increase in conversion rate compared to customers who received just one or the other.

Ultimately explicit response behavior is valuable.  If a customer raises their hand and indicates a specific promotion drove them to buy a specific item then there is no question about their motives.  However, the explicit behavior should also be used to establish standard response curves, which enable measurement of customer behavior that results from a single or multiple communications.  

So take that store tour, and talk to your customers. But understand that the truth about your customers is deeper and more data driven. 

The single view should enable analytics for the purpose of marketing. The focus of those analytics should always be our customer. Now, we all know that I am not like you and you are not like the person sitting next to you and so on. The analysis will show us how different we are. Yes, there are demographic differences and psychographic nuances, yet what really matters to your business is behavior. My behavior may be motivated by discounts (frugal Yankee) and you may be driven by quality (you want the best.) Knowing where a customer is along that specific lifecycle will also impact what they buy. If I’ve made 10 purchases and that person sitting next to you is another frugal Yankee, and they’ve only just made their first purchase, then we will most likely purchase something similar, yet different. The single view and the analysis will provide the strategic insight that can be translated down to actual tactics.

This insight gained from preference, lifecycle and actual behavior will also help to show which channel is optimum for marketing. Because of the price, we are tempted to use email for all customers, all the time. Sure, every campaign will generate an average level of incremental sales, while causing only “some customers” to opt-out. But that is a shortsighted and in the end economically inefficient way to view email for catalog marketing. Every customer that has engaged at the level of joining your email list is a good customer. When you lose a few because of an irrelevant email, those few build up over a short period of time. Eventually it will drive down your brand’s reputation. 

For catalogs the cost of printing and mailing does add up to a real number, often significant. Catalogs should be used only for those customers that are real buyers. Targeting beyond RFM is needed. Targeting should use the single view of the customer for segmentation, opportunity analysis, predictive customer and product modeling, and more. This will really show companies whether that print catalog represents value. It will also show who should receive emails echoing our catalogs, along with the appropriate associated offer level, the product to be featured, and the appropriate timing.

Now that we have dynamic catalogs and emails reaching out to targeted customers with different messages, offers, products and timing, we have cause to use both sides of our collective brains. Failing to do so will lead to a split brand personality. 

There’s a famous Hollywood story about Jeffrey Katzenberg, the SKG film mogul, who has been known for his obsessive work habits and his demands of the same from direct reports. It was said he had a sign on his wall that read: “If you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.”

Whether or not its true, it’s a good idea to plainly state the rules that a company will insist on when it comes to marketing, specifically customers and email. The days of plaques on the walls have been thankfully replaced by on-board training, company mission statements, Salesforce.com and websites, but I wonder how many companies have actually set in the stone the rules that are absolutely unbreakable when it comes to customers and how they will be communicated with email or other outbound channels. For example: Don’t blast and broadcast! No emails without opt-ins. Respect frequency requests. Honor unsubscribe requests. Communicate value. Make it special. Our whole series of email improvements could serve as an example of these rules. Every company will have its own spin on these rules, but it’s most important that you have them for two primary reasons: 1) the person often responsible for creating the email content may not be privy to the big picture and 2) because after all the people who are receiving the emails are often our good to best customers whom we should respect.

I recommend that every company demand that sales and marketing stakeholders meet and decide on what the email communication rules will be. They should then be readily accessible not only to sales and marketing but to customers as well. If customers know a company is acting in its best interest, they will logically be more comfortable exchanging the information necessary for you to execute an effective email campaign. This is especially important for retailers. Rules such as “we will never send you more than one email a week” or “we will always provide value” signal and formalize how you are going to treat customers. Additionally, the rules can come with a promise of “let us know if we are breaking our own rules; we want you to let us know.”

Customer rules accomplish the following three important best practices for all marketing, but especially for email marketing:

They formalizes executive buy-in. Sales people especially will want to pressure email rules to try and gain extra revenue. If they are given an opportunity to participate in setting the rules they won’t be able to break them as easily. 

They allow email tasks to be more effectively delegated. Posted rules will allow lower level managers and assistants to execute email programs with confidence. The margin of error is significantly reduced.

They establish a commitment to discipline and customer centricity. Like the Katzenberg sign mentioned earlier, words have a spirit and intent. Committing to email customer rules goes beyond words. They convey a higher purpose for email. It tells employees and customers that we’re emailing to provide value rather than just broadcasting, and we’re doing it with the goal of building a long-term relationship. 

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. 

Today the print catalog is still a powerful tool that contributes to converting the coveted sale. Although it no longer stands alone, it feeds the mix of outbound marketing channels, including email, phone, text, and social media. Additionally, the impact of the catalog on consumer's lives and the company's database can vary wildly, depending on the data, segmentation analysis and lifecycle channel understanding that goes into the targeting of those that will receive a company's catalog.

Certainly there is skill in the development process and execution that can generate substantial revenue from catalogs. But that revenue by itself pales next to the opportunity of using a print catalog to feed a multichannel retail engine, revving on customer data and its relevant opportunity for high-octane cross-promotions and loyalty programs. The real opportunity is to move beyond the standard catalog mantra of R-F-M (recency of last purchase, frequency of purchases and monetary value of purchases) to segmentation by past purchases, channel preference, lifecycle stage, and next best offer modeling. This is made possible with a marketing database foundation that is fully integrated with all the touchpoints providing a single view of each customer. This view allows for analysis of the customer showing what they have done, what they will do and then showing if they actually did do it. The up-side is infinite.

The opportunity now is to use the catalog in the marketing mix for targeting those customers that are most likely to convert via the most relevant marketing “push”, while avoiding those we know will convert with just an email, postcard or on their own with no encouragement. The approach is as traditional as the print catalog, and as old-fashioned as thrift. But with the right mix of print, online, and even socially enabled marketing catalog marketers can  target the right customers with the right catalog to earn decidedly modern revenue. 

In our last post on email marketing for retailers we talked about the commitment to a meaningful customer value exchange. That means your brand is going beyond asking a customer to join your list to receive “special offers” which are given to everyone, which can easily be done via in-store signage announcing the same offer. The exchange entails the customer providing you with their email and you, the brand, committing to give them something of real value, such as access to a limited product offering that the public does not have. Now the opted-in customer feels special, feels happy, feels like they have done the right thing. Brands need to use email to continually make the customer feel special, and not like just another email address receiving just another email blast.

A brand that has a customer strategy in place, supported by an articulated customer value exchange, needs to use these to grow and retain their customers. This is done by establishing a customer’s baseline behavior, setting their lifecycle direction and then measuring action and success. Blind investment into providing a customer value will make them happy, but this approach does not work if it loses the brand money. A brand that lacks an understanding of their customers must establish a set of baseline behaviors that will tell us what they do today. When we know this, we then need to use this to determine what we want them to do next. This is what we call their lifecycle direction.

Here’s what I mean. Suppose a casual food restaurant has a successful bar and dining business that they wish to continue to grow. They can market to their customers by blasting via all channels with a message like “come in more!” yet this will not really be meaningful to anyone, nor will it be effective. Using email well, the brand can target and measure based on a customer’s behavior and their expressed opinion. 

The baseline behavior can be established by measuring response to email as a whole, by the specific offers clicked on and downloaded, and by actual follow-through usage of the offers. (Note, usage can be measured via integration with the POS and payment system, yet it can also be done with collection and tabulation of paper based offers.) This will enable a breakdown of customers by their behavior; the below graph shows a simple example illustration of this:

In this example a Heavy customer is more valuable than a Medium customer, who is more valuable than a Light. Bar customers are less valuable than Dining and their behavior and product make-up are quite different. 

Now that we have this baseline behavior understanding of our customers, what do we do? What is the next best offer that we should give them? What is their appropriate lifecycle direction? We would like for all our customers to immediately become heavy dining customers, but this not practical in that it is too big of a change for most. A customer’s migration through their lifecycle is typically made up of numerous stages, each being a small change or step forward vs. a large leap. The lifecycle direction plan for our casual food restaurant example could start a positive migration in visit frequency (light to medium) being easier, and visit type (bar to dining) being harder.

Within this framework there are numerous variables, such as time of day, day of week, number of people in party, etc., yet the goal is to grow incremental behavior and, once a new level has been reached to maintain it going forward. Obviously there will be ebbs and flows in behavior, but now we have a means of generating insight, testing offers, targeting our marketing efforts and measuring the results and effectiveness. 

Email is a critical component within this plan. It is fast, flexible, targetable and measurable. We can use it to help establish our baseline behavior and to migrate our customers along their lifecycle direction, using a mix of primary, and secondary offers along with articulating the relevant value exchange. Anything else is a monologue when it's a customer dialogue that counts. 

I saw another interesting research study today that reported that 50% of email users delete marketing emails within two seconds of opening them. That’s according to Litmus Analytics. I’d hate to be one of those companies. It means they’ve engaged half their customers powerfully enough to get them to take that necessary step. But it means the email content is failing.

Any company suffering from a high deletion rate has most likely made a critical mistake that relates to my June 19 post on improving retail email practices. That one pointed out the need to drastically improve your understanding of the customer lifecycle. All customers are not the same. They don’t buy the same products as their neighbor or colleague now, and they won’t have the same value to your company a year from now. Yet, too many companies send the same email to the same customer at the same time. That will crash your open rate for sure.

I’ll also bet that companies who have high deletion rates do not consider the value exchange inherent in email marketing. You, the retailer, are sending your customers much more than an email. You sending them communications that promises value. They provide value by giving you their money, and maybe even an ongoing stream of information. If you are not giving them a valuable communication in return, of course they aren’t going to you’re your email or share it. They’ll hit the delete button as a force of habit. And you have wasted precious time, effort, personnel and customer equity.

A commitment to value exchange means your company is going beyond asking a customer to join your list with the possibility that they will be invited to special events or extended a discount at some point. Retailing is much more immediate than that. You need to use email to make the customer feel special. And there’s no magic algorithm to do it.

Here’s three ways to improve what I call your value exchange quotient (VQ).

1. Base your frequency on customer data. If I say “buy” twice, that translates to “bye-bye.” Email cannot be yet another way to nag customers into a purchase or information-based relationship. Use customer data to understand how often different customers want to receive an email. It’s not about your email marketing program that says “blast the back-to-school discount every week starting August 15.” It’s about the customer data that indicates the email list members that have school-aged kids, and have responded to frequent emails in the past.
2.  Attach an offer. Even if you properly segment your list and send relevant timely messages, include a compelling offer. Just letting the customer know there’s a back to school offer is not enough. Offer a loyalty program if the customer has more than two kids, for example. Offer a discount for holiday purchases to keep the back-to-school customer coming back.
3. Work hard and work smart. I use the exercise analogy. The guy who’s 30 pounds overweight and drinking beer every night in front of the TV is not going to run a marathon next week. But he could go for a walk instead of drinking beer. If you have not been running an email program that extends value now, don’t expect that you will win awards for one next month. But you can begin to identify the communications that will be valuable to them and move customers toward higher value to your company. That takes hard work, rigorous analysis, and always striving for the next level of value. 

Seems like just when companies get used to a technology and a customer strategy to apply it to, everything changes. But as always there’s customer opportunity in what seems to be a technology chaos. It is with this spirit that companies need to approach the busy intersection of email and social media.

Customers are opening email, forwarding email, and posting about the content on social networks. As we’ve written about before, email is amplified. Now we see data to back it up. Technology has amplified email. In fact email messages that include options to share content on social media sites drive significant increases in click-throughs according to a new study released today by GetResponse, an email marketing firm.

Specifically, the company’s study of 500 million e-mails sent using the service found that emails that included options like share on Facebook or Twitter generated a 30% higher click-through rate than emails without them. Moreover, when e-mails included at least three different sharing options, publishers experienced a 55% higher CTR on average.

Despite these findings, GetResponse reports that only 11.2% of emails actually offer three or more sharing options. That’s up a bit from stats published last year on the same subject, but still low considering what are becoming increasingly clear benefits of social media integration.

As we have written about on this blog recently, it’s time for companies to consider the amplification effect and take advantage of it. We’ve partnered with a company called hearforward to develop a tool to accomplish, measure, and manage email amplification. Expect to read more about it in the near future.

On the surface it seems so manageable and straightforward. After all, BtoB marketing lists are certainly smaller than BtoC lists. The customer segments are fewer and it would seem that the opportunities for true one-to-one marketing are many. But BtoB marketing comes with some serious pitfalls. They are different than those presented by BtoC but nonetheless challenging.

I see three specific challenges that marketers will have to deal with in order to make BtoB marketing an effort that will yield real results in the form of lead creation and marketing ROI. 

Complexity of Transactions: BtoB is rarely a simple transaction. One to one consumer marketing is born out of the retail, direct to consumer world. In the pre-Internet days the biggest challenges associated with getting a direct marketing program off the ground was getting the data assembled, cleaned and standardized and pushed to a mailing house on time. As the process developed over the decades, this process became more commonly known as the Extract, Transfer, Load (ETL) process. At the end of the process, media would go out via postal service or phone and finally email. If all went according to plan, orders would come in through any one of the retail sales channels: store, customer service call center and finally Web. But BtoB companies are often selling complicated and more abstract things like “contracts” or “policies,” many products bundled together like chemicals or construction materials, or an even more abstract service. Typically, you want to have your marketing efforts driven by purchasing behavior and complex products and services make targeting those behaviors more difficult.

The introduction of the “organization” into the database adds a new dimension to the data, and a level of complexity. B2C data is relatively easy. The customer has a name, billing and shipping addresses, and a credit card number, with data integrity enforced in the transactional web environment or through a loyalty program where you can tie a card number or coupon back to the same individual each time. But in the BtoB world, you are selling to organizations rather than people. There is inevitably a many-to-many relationship between an organization record and a contact and resolving this not a simple matter. Add to this the layers of hierarchy in a company, divisions, acquisitions, satellite offices, home offices etc. and determining what contacts and addresses can be bundled together into a single sales opportunity is a formidable problem.

Measuring ROI is difficult under ideal conditions and in B2B can actually be contentious. In the B2C environment, there are opportunities for “explicit” measurement. Send an email, click on the email, place an order. This pattern is easy to track and search for in the B2C database and it is easy to create a link between the marketing effort and the result. In the B2B environment ROI has to be measured “implicitly” by guessing causality between outbound communications and a subsequent purchase. This is complicated by the fact the sale is closed by a sales team way downstream and potentially weeks or months from the initial marketing effort. Although many companies are working to close the ROI gap, it’s still an issue. B2B marketers need clear goals and clear outcomes before executing a plan and an agreed upon method for measuring success.  

The conventional wisdom is that anything a marketing team can do in the B2C world will translate to the multi-channel B2C environment, and possibly even be easier considering the smaller data volumes. That’s the myth. In reality, the challenges mentioned above are common stumbling blocks to launching a successful B2B marketing effort. The good news is none of these problems are deal breakers. A well designed and thought out process for managing these types of complexities can lead to profitable marketing programs.  

1. Acquire customers with an explicit value exchange and promise. For different customers you have to extend different offers without violating the overall strategy. So if part of your strategy is to attract high-income families, make sure your offers are relevant. Discounts may not matter. But something as simple as a family night that offers special desserts for the kids just might make all the difference between a good customer and a highly valuable customer. It depends on the value being promised.
2. Engage by following thru with promise. Customer service and experience should be part of any overall strategy but it often gets left behind when it comes to email. When the restaurant promises great service, and then attracts customers to experience it, it can’t just email them with an offer to come again. Send them and an email asking for them to rate that customer service.
3. Learn from your interactions. Email is among the most measureable marketing tools in the kit. But companies don’t use it. One of the best measures of business success is when customers show repeat behavior, but that doesn’t apply to email. Just because a customer opens an email tomorrow doesn’t mean next week’s email means anything. A company has to learn what the customer wants and know what will get them to take the next step. Think beyond opening the email.