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I became involved with e-mail marketing four years ago as part of a team of product and marketing experts given the responsibility of bringing this type of marketing to CheckFree. Our team was responsible for evaluation vendors and devising a system for delivering event-triggered campaigns to banking customers to entice them into using more banking electronic services.
After the successful completion and launch of this program I was tasked to integrate a similar process into our corporate marketing department. This tool would be used to deliver content to cross-divisional sales targets and events. I now manage and improve this process as part of my daily work life.
The Challenge
The biggest challenge for me is not only how this department functions, but how the corporate organization functions in general. At my level I couldn't directly affect how a client decided to market their e-mail campaign. Plus, being a B2B facing company that didn't put much stock in spending lots of cash on marketing didn't make things any easier.
The Solution
Starting small is certainly the name of the game here. First, I needed to understand how all of the pieces and parts of the campaigns work. I needed some type of metric. So, borrowing from the same principals and ground work that went into my e-mail production process I gathered data from both e-mail campaigns and all of our websites.
The first step was to increase the chance of a recipient finding something interesting to click, thus bringing up our click rate and our web traffic. A challenge, since many of our clients use campaigns as content dissemination, not as an active marketing tool. So, I began linking any text that would go back to a product, website, event - just about anything that would increase interest.
Educating our clients on best practices is important - where to put branding, positioning links, where to put emphasis in the campaign. All of these things are also part of increasing the chance of a successful campaign.
The Future
Where do I really want to go? I think some key things are to continue to build on statistics, finding new and better ways of tracking user reactions and getting a true conversion rate and ROI.
I want to see campaigns begin to cross-sell when possible. When we have events that showcase products, we have campaigns that focus on these products and leverage other products that businesses may want.
I would like to see more informational newsletters for both customers and consumers. Something that becomes more sticky and helps promote brand awareness. |
