Curatti

Is Your Email Strategy Stuck in the Past?

  • Ann Smarty

    • Key Takeaways:

    Both demand-generation marketers and marketing automation vendors are grappling with the question,

    “How do we turn generic broadcast emails into personal interactions?”

    More marketers are focusing on relevance and personalization for email programs

    While they still care about list growth, they’re also eager to turn email marketing into relevant conversations. For example, his customers want to:

    1. Tailor emails to the recipient’s interests. They want to leverage marketing automation to move past broadcast models. This means combining multi-track programs with behavioral data to deliver one-to-one messages in real-time.
    2. Personalize the early experiences of new email subscribers. Traditional, generic welcome emails are being replaced with multi-step onboarding programs based on demographics and behavior at the individual level.
    3. Use advanced segmentation with third-party data. More companies want to combine their data with that of third parties and leverage predictive modeling to create segments based on factors such as the likelihood of buying.

    The three initiatives above show why marketers are interested in integrating email and social media:

    For both B2B and B2C lead generation efforts, the result is email that is more fun or helpful, and more likely to drive sales.

    Marketing automation vendors are improving the integration of social media and email 

    It’s safe to say that marketing automation vendors are now investigating how social media and email can mesh.

    Let’s quickly look at some of the features email marketers need for better results:

    There are quite a few email marketing tools that offer these features.

    Social tactics add value to both B2B and B2C emails

    Using engagement triggers is key to improving your email marketing performance. Even though polls and sweepstakes are often considered B2C tactics, they could also be applied in some B2B situations.

    For example, visualize a poll that, with tongue-in-cheek humor, encourages a prospect to pick his biggest business challenge. That prospect’s answer might trigger a follow-up nurture stream targeted specifically to his concerns. It could also support a comfortable, positive conversation between the prospect and a member of the sales team.

    How about you? Do these developments stir your thoughts? What are you doing to bring more creativity and relevance to your email marketing programs?

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    Ann Smarty

    Brand and Community Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas
    Ann Smarty is the Community and Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She is also a host of two weekly Twitter chats (#VCBuzz on Tuesdays and #MYBlogU on Thursdays) and a regular speaker at the largest marketing conference Pubcon