Engaging the Unengaged
By David Baker

With list attrition at or about 30 percent per year, people will fall off your customer email file for any number of reasons. In addition, you likely have a staggered set of customer groups that are not very engaged, or not at all engaged, with your business in the email channel.

Our goal as marketers is to incrementally engage as many people through the channel of their preference with as many diversified values as we can possibly entertain and support. There are many tactics to try to re-engage dormant or lapsed customers via email.

eCRM CASE STUDY – T. Rowe Price
By Jamie Schissler

Often a change in branding in one medium, such as a web site, results in fragmented consumer experiences in other channels. When this happened to T. Rowe Price, Razorfish eCRM stepped in to align their email communications with the new branding and business objectives, smoothing out the entire consumer experience.

Challenges

1. Fragmented consumer experiences across channels, segments, and lifecycle.
2. Email communications not aligned with new branding and business objectives.
3. Lack of governance around email production, legal, and suppression management.
4. Misalignment between prospects' expressed interest and corresponding communications.
5. Little insight into prospect conversion patterns and behavior.
6. Escalating direct mail costs.
7. Inability to respond to customers contextually and immediately based on market dynamics.

Solutions

Razorfish developed a customized email portfolio and supporting programs to enable quick and flexible communications across multiple prospect and customer touchpoints. The portfolio includes templates and triggered messages that drive customer value via efficiency and cost savings, while controlling brand look, tone and feel. The team also implemented governance standards around production, opt-in, and privacy controls.

Results

• Brand alignment of communications that created a consistent and positive multi-channel consumer experience.
• Implementation of transactional and value-add communications that speak directly to the needs of multiple discrete investor segments.
• Implementation of lead nurturing program to drive monetization and track consumer trends and behavior from initial online/offline inquiry through to conversion and customer engagement.
• Optimized email address capture.
• Maximized customer engagement and brand exposure via response rates that far exceeded industry averages.
• Reduction of communications costs via channel migration
• Driving incremental sales via email lead nurturing.

For more information on this case study, contact Jamie Schissler.

TECHNICAL CORNER – The Master Database By Ian McCollum

How do your clients ensure their email communications are personal, timely and efficiently delivered? And how do they do this with the least amount of reliance on IT resources?

The key is to create a master customer email database, which is mirrored at the email service provider (ESP) and updated regularly. The database must include all of the fields that will be used for targeting and personalization (first name, preferences, purchase history, etc.). To keep it current, a data transfer or update from the master list is performed on a set schedule. Ideally this is an automatic transfer of data to and from systems – but it can be as simple as batch transfers at predefined times.

Naturally, IT will be involved in the initial set-up. Once implemented, however, the regular data transfers will decrease the amount of time IT would otherwise need to spend creating individual lists for each email deployment.

Maintaining a database at the ESP allows the marketer, who has complete knowledge of the data, to target subscribers on any of the attributes stored in that database, without the involvement of IT. Additionally, it gives the marketer flexibility within the ESP platform and greater insight into subscriber data and engagement.

For additional information on ESP database setup and recommendations on data transfers, contact your local Strategy Director.

ASK THE EXPERT

Q. Is Social Media Killing Email?

A. Some feel that consumers using social media sites and collaboration tools equals less time spent in the inbox. However, I just returned from emceeing the Email Insider Summit (Media Post) where the theme of the event was "Social CRM and Email," and the email marketers weren't concerned about social media impacting their email marketing efforts. In fact, social media giants send out more email than most marketers, and rely on it as a key tool in communicating with customers and enabling communications in their network. At past Summits, we've had MySpace, Facebook, and smaller social media companies in attendance, trying to figure out how to use email better to support the growth and value of their social networking sites.

The fact is, email is still ingrained in our daily lives, across all customer segments - although some more than others. For marketers, traditionally email has been seen solely as a promotional vehicle, but today it is becoming an experience enabler. It enables purchase consideration, post-product perception, and repeat purchase, plus branding, content syndication, customer service, and transactional communication support.

Email is an enterprise channel, whereas social media is in its infancy as a CRM tool. Social media is largely a channel for opinion, connection, syndication and buzz monitoring. Early corporate adopters have proven it is good for customer service (Zappos and ComcastCares) and sales (Dell). The future of social media as a tool for the organization will center around Public Relations, Product Development and Market/Product research, all of which rely on communities of people and feedback. But the output is still very unstructured, and it remains hard to process marketing and optimization-based decision-making.

Email is a connection tool between generations. There are six generations living today: GI Generation (1901-1924), Silent Generation (1924-1942), Boom Generation (1943-1960), Generation X (1961-1981), Millennial (1982-2005), and Homeland (2005-). Instead of asking whether social media is killing the value of email, we should seek to understand which generation relies on email to make decisions, inform others, make purchases, get answers to product/service needs, and ask for help.

Then we can ask, How do we leverage social media to build communities, find out who our connectors are, who our content creators are, who our influencers are, and who our evangelists are? And, How do we leverage social media and email to build a cohesive experience that evolves by generational reliance on email? Each generation relies on email for different things and there are certain life stages that drive increased and decreased usage of email (such as getting a white collar job or moving away from home).

Email tracking provides empirical information for marketers - we know what you did with our email, and when you did it. We even know why, since the communication was targeted to your behavior (i.e. triggered message) or your interest (dynamic content/personalization). By contrast, social media is too unstructured to provide such insight, but the two channels combined will ultimately evolve to the point that they help inform the 360 degree view of the customer. This view will be driven by known demographics and past behaviors, channel interactions and how your social graphs influence these customer insights and direction.

Social media isn't killing email, but your approach to email marketing may be killing it! If you don't think strategically about its value to the business, value to the customer and the touchpoints it provides value to, you'll lose sight of the incredible value both these channels bring to the CRM experience.