The realm of email marketing has always concerned itself with communicating with prospects on a personal level. But how is this to be achieved when a customer database stretches to tens of thousands, potentially even millions, of contacts? Reaching out to every contact on an individual level isn’t reasonable. Sometimes, in order to be more personal, it’s necessary to be more automated in your marketing efforts. Automation not only allows businesses to communicate with each customer about their own preferences, drives and actions, but with a minimal amount of manpower.
In order to understand how this is achieved, simply imagine two email campaigns – one with customer behaviour, but without automation, the other with automation but without behaviours. Without automation, the marketer has to manually send each campaign and could never respond to contacts in real-time based on their unique interests and behaviors – increasing the marketers workload and decreasing message relevancy.
It also prevents the creation of one database, instead necessitating the need for multiple databases divided by behaviours and preferences. This drastically increases the amount of work needed to reach all customers, driving down the ROI of a campaign while also preventing the creation of standard working practices. Meanwhile, a campaign without behaviours creates unwanted messages that lack relevance to a recipient, causing a measured drop in click-through, open rates and lead conversion.
To effectively utilise behavioural marketing in email, it is clear that behaviour must be combined with automation to enhance customer and prospect engagement. In order to facilitate this, tracking relevant online behaviour that feeds into a central database is a must. There are a number of key online channels that are the major platforms for behaviour tracking:
- Email – Start with the basics. Which emails is a recipient opening? Use this to determine preferred email content and formatting to enhance open rates and click-through. Also, when was the last time they interacted with an email? This should inform the style and content of a message as they may need reminding or prompting before they are ready to take action on any marketing messaging.
- Social – Which network did a recipient find you through? This should determine the nature of the content you wish them to share as each social network has different posting styles and sharing methods. Also, have they ever commented on a post, and if so what was the content of that post? Use this to gauge their main interest in your company, and deliver content accordingly.
- Website – What areas of the website has a recipient been to and have they downloaded any content? Again, this should heavily influence the types of deals and offers sent to a customer. For example, if a visitor to a travel website has only ever looked at skiing holidays, then send content that reflects this interest to encourage interaction.
- Mobile/Location – Foursquare use by customers can provide valuable insight into shopping behaviour. Finding out when and where contacts shop allows the sending of highly targeted deals relating to specific favourite shops and days of the week.
- CRM –A centralised database allows the combining of behaviour data from different strands of the business with the end goal being a comprehensive overview of all customer interactions with the company. This then allows marketing messaging to reflect conversations with any other company representatives. This can work the other way too, if messaging uncovers a customer that should be routed through to sales rep or online help centres, for example.
With such a comprehensive database compiled, marketing messages can then begin to be automated through the establishment of a rules based logic system. Depending on behaviours and actions upon receipt of messaging, customers can be sent down a wide variety of messaging paths specially tailored to provide content specific to them. Such a scheme facilitates the automation processes that will save labour and keep running costs down to a minimum. These changes can also be introduced gradually if a database is of such a large size that full scale implementation in one go is not possible, which also has the added benefit of allowing staff time to bed in with the new system and understand it comprehensively.
In this way, when placed alongside behaviour, automation can be the most powerful tool in an email marketer’s library. A combination of the two allows for highly targeted and relevant content to be sent to thousands of potential customers while reducing the manpower required to set-up and maintain such a system. This drives open and click-through rates, content engagement, lead generation and above all, a high ROI.
