Email is a personal channel. Most people have an email address that is unique to them and the inbox is their personal space that they want to protect. As a result of this deliverability has become a challenge and email marketing has had to evolve. No longer is it just about “batch and blast” to your customer base or prospects. Campaigns can now be segmented, the content can be dynamic and it can be delivered when the recipient is ready to receive it. At Extravision we are experts in email marketing automation and behavioural marketing.
Customer Life-Cycle
The journey that customers travel on from being totally unaware of your brand or product, through to considering a purchase, then making a purchase and then hopefully future purchases is called the customer lifecycle. The communications that the customer receives should help guide them through this journey as smoothly as possible. Knowing at which point a customer is at in the lifecycle is key to be able to send them the right message
Email Marketing Cycle
The customer lifecycle or email marketing lifecycle is ideally suited to automation and behavioural marketing. The largest part of a marketing budget is usually targeted at acquiring new customers and often retention and building the relationship with existing customers is overlooked. It costs so much to acquire a new customer, once you have them you want to keep them and build on the relationship.
Back in 2008, Jupiter Research released data that said that companies that engage in lifecycle marketing can generate up to 9 times more value from the marketing efforts than companies that don’t. This behavioural based strategy relies on delivering the right message at the right time to the right people
Email marketing allows you to do this in an intelligent and automated way like no other channel.
Successful email messages are those that are relevant to the recipient depending on the stage in the lifecycle and the customer value. Engaging customers when they are most eager to hear from you is integral to any lifecycle marketing campaign. Begin by mapping out key customer moments when people are most receptive to getting something from your brand.
There are 4 main stages in the email marketing lifecycle.
1. List Growth
This stage is the one that is most difficult for email marketing. Organic list growth is difficult but the rewards are worth it. Improve how you collect email addresses on your website by using targeted popups (yes I said popups but they are really overlays). This allows you to collect the all-important email address early in the browsing cycle. Remember these people must be opt in to receive marketing information from you. A faster way to grow your lists is by purchasing and renting lists from third parties. This should never be a replacement for own organic data and care must be taken when choosing suppliers.
2. Conversion
The first step in the conversion process should be a welcome email or a series of welcome emails immediately after the subscription. In the welcome message you can set expectations about how many emails they are likely to receive and an overview of the products and services you offer. A multi stage welcome can go further and its content can be dependent on how they interacted with the first welcome message.
Triggered emails such as cart, browse and form abandonment work are also part of your conversion arsenal. Research shows that around 15% of people receiving a cart abandonment email will click through to the website and 33% of these will go on to order.
3. Retention
Once somebody has become a customer you want to keep hold of them. You can look to segment your customers into one time customers, repeat customers and champion customers. One time customers are people who have only purchased once in the past from you. Repeat customers have made a second purchase and champion customers have made multiple purchases and are fully engaged with everything you do.
You should market differently to each of the above groups using the behavioural information you have about them. The aim is to try and move everybody up to become champion customers but clearly this isn’t going to happen for everyone.
4. Win-Back
Sometimes no matter what you do or how good your product or service is you will have people who disconnect and stop purchasing or reading any of your emails. This is often the hardest stage in the lifecycle and very often skipped in a marketing plan. The reason being that most of these people will not return no matter what you do, but the key is some will. And if you don’t try you will never know. It costs a lot to acquire a new customer so you should invest the time and effort to try and win them back if you can.
The real customer journey has many more “stops” and “detours” than just the main points above but this is a starting point. As with many things, you shouldn’t try to do everything at once. Start with a simple model, implement and test and then develop the model further. Using email marketing automation, once your messages are created and tested they can just be left to run and run, leaving you safe in the knowledge that your customers are receiving highly targeted content at the relevant time driving them then round the customer lifecyle.
