Holiday season feels like a series of tactical maneuvers as marketers try to push customers and clients to commit and convert before year-end. There’s no more time for strategy or thinking, just a lot of putting out fires as you get the details done right. Of course, all this frenetic activity...
It’s so easy to get caught up in the details, the big and little decisions that need to be made every day and then tracked and managed and… well, you know. At the same time, as marketers we all want to focus on strategy, on the vision of what we are trying to achieve and who our audience really is and all the great thought leadership that goes along with that. It’s hard to find the balance when you’re stuck in the trenches. That’s why a guide can be helpful.
In the middle of rushing to send the latest announcement, update, sale email or whatever, it can be easy to forget the “who” and the “why”. But to maximize results, marketers need to know their audience well enough to know who they are sending to, and why that message will be important to that person. Do this by creating a customer journey for each segment of your audience.
Open rates across industries average somewhere between 20% and 25%, depending on which benchmark you look at. Not everyone is lucky enough to meet or exceed the benchmark though. Every once in a while, I meet a good marketer who has really bad open rates: between 1% and 5%. No, they aren’t spammers, but they’re stuck with the results of years of poor email marketing practices. What do you do if you’re stuck with bad open rates? Here are some ideas to revive your list:
I love when a marketer asks, "how should we measure this?"
Sometimes we get so caught up in opens, clicks, visitors, impressions, and all the other easy-to-get metrics that we forget what we wanted to accomplish in the first place. This is why it is so important to set up a formal approach to measurement before your marketing campaign launches. Yet a lot of marketers don't know where to start.
I’m starting to cringe every time I hear the phrase, “We could segment our audience based on that data”.
People hear that phrase and eyes light up and heads bob in agreement. In meetings with the CMO/SVP, the phrase is carefully proffered as a goal about to be fulfilled, and the CMO/SVP solemnly nods and pats everyone on the back for having done a good job.
What utterly useless, well-intentioned bunk.
If your company is in a very price-competitive industry segment, you are probably stuck on the promotion treadmill. On the promotion treadmill, every day is another set of promotions, you are forced to send emails more and more often to help make sales goals, and every email screams a discount. You're probably tired of hearing all the best-practice advocates telling you to jump off the treadmill and send lifecycle emails for engagement. Even if you think they have a point, that's not your decision to make. Your job is to move the needle on sales while still sending out the constant hail of promotions.
Over the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to help build out an entirely new attrition program. An attrition program tries to get customers who have left your product or service to come back – and it goes by a different name in every organization I’ve ever worked with.
I have the pleasure of working with some truly talented people. But just because you’re good at designing crisp logos or iconic product packaging or gorgeous posters doesn’t mean you know a thing about designing for direct marketing. It’s completely different. And lately, I’ve had the dubious pleasure of having to tell some of my most talented colleagues that they stink at email design.
"Progressive profiling is hailed as a marketing technique that boosts lead generation, improves marketing intelligence, generates more conversions, and helps you gain more information about subscribers over time."
Progressive profiling is hailed as a marketing technique that boosts lead generation, improves marketing intelligence, generates more conversions, and helps you gain more information about subscribers over time.
Wow. It’s like listening to a commercial for Ginsu knives: “And that’s not all!”
Progressive profiling isn’t all bad, but it isn’t as good as a Ginsu knife commercial would have you believe either. Here are some guidelines for when to use it, and when to look for other tactics.
Progressive Profiling Works When…
