Campaigner, a software-as-a-service email marketing solutions provider, today released a series of tips for those interested in improving their email marketing return on investment. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing continues to outperform all other direct marketing tactics with a return on investment of $48.29 for every dollar spent.
Email marketing successes, however, raise the challenge of developing innovative messages that stand out from the competition. Paying more attention to personalizing email messages can help. Aberdeen Group’s report, ‘Email Marketing: Get Personal with Your Customers’ finds that ninety-six percent of organizations believe that email personalization can improve email marketing performance,.
Email personalization helps marketers create a relationship with their customers by connecting with them on a one-to-one basis. Sending relevant and targeted communications to customers increases credibility and strengthens relationships over time. The Aberdeen Group study findings support this, revealing that marketers who personalize email campaigns have seen improvements in key metrics including click-throughs, open rates, conversion, customer retention and opt-in rates.
Luc Vezina, head of marketing for email service provider Campaigner, offers the following best practices that can help marketers take their email marketing programs to the next level with email personalization:
1. Identify - and listen to - high value customers - Don't just send customers your company's messages - listen to customers closely and address their needs, wants and interests directly with personal one-to-one email communications. You'll be able to identify high-value customers by proactively engaging them with surveys, forms, and customer satisfaction evaluations that allow you to gather more detailed profile information. Review what your most valuable customers want and you will be able to adapt your messaging to better target opportunities with highly personalized campaigns. |
2. Leverage your customer database - Using customer data to segment email lists is an effective practice marketers can use to improve their email marketing campaigns. For best results, your email database should contain as much customer information as possible, including demographic, behavioral and transactional data. Use this data to segment your lists and personalize campaigns for best results. |
3. Integrate CRM and other marketing technologies - Your CRM system contains valuable demographic, behavioral and transactional information about your customers. Use this data to personalize campaigns, then add web analytics, which can indicate how your customers might react to future campaigns, enabling you to better tailor your messages. |
4. Automate email personalization efforts - Follow-up messages can be sent automatically based on consumer behavior. These event and action-triggered emails - allow marketers to not only improve content targeting and personalization, but also the timing of email message delivery so you can reach customers at the right time in the buying cycle. |
5. Keep an eye on metrics - Think of metrics as the pulse of your email campaign. It is essential for marketers to watch metrics and alter campaigns when seeing a change in customer behavior. Marketers who use metrics have a better understanding of what interests their customers, and is one of the quickest ways to begin improving email personalization. |
“Incorporating personalization techniques can make a huge difference in the success of an email campaign. Personalizing emails allows marketers to connect with customers on a personal level – building meaningful relationships and brand loyalty,” said Luc Vezina, VP of Marketing and Product Management. “It is important for marketers to fully understand the benefits of best practices, such as email personalization, and integrate them in order to produce effective email campaigns.”
About Campaigner
Campaigner's software-as-a-service email marketing solutions enable organizations to have highly personalized one-to-one email dialogues with their customers, measure how they respond, and analyze those responses to interact in a more intelligent, automated way - resulting in more profitable relationships. It is part of a total Software as a Service (SaaS) business communications offered by Protus that also includes MyFax, the fastest-growing Internet fax service used by individuals, small, medium and large business, and the my1voice feature-rich hosted PBX service. Additional information is available at www.campaigner.com.
Contacts:
Tom Francoeur, 781-404-2405
tfrancoeur@topazpartners.com
or
Protus
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Sue Rutherford, 613-733-0000 x 519
srutherford@protus.com
