New Survey Highlights the Importance of Adopting Lifecycle Marketing

While email marketing pundits have been preaching the importance of email relevancy for years, many marketers have been content with simply increasing the frequency of their one-size-fits-all email marketing campaigns to boost results. However, new survey data collected from more than 1,000 email marketing executives reveals that this tactic may finally be on the way out – or relegated to the more seedy corners of the email marketing industry.

According to the industry survey, nearly half of companies (46%) are already running automated, event-triggered lifecycle marketing programs – and these welcome, winback and post-purchase programs are some of the highest performing in an email marketer's arsenal. And for those companies not currently embracing lifecycle email marketing, 58% of them plan to start within the next 24 months.

For the half of you currently running lifecycle programs, these statistics should affirm your decision to invest in this powerful technique for reaching the right person with the right message at the right time during the customer lifecycle. The results should also prod you to expand beyond welcome programs, which are by far the highest adopted programs at 87%.  While welcome programs are critical, it's interesting to note that next highest – the post-purchase program – is only being used by half of those employing lifecycle marketing.

For the other half of you who have not yet invested the time and energy in creating automated, multi-stage lifecycle marketing programs, you are missing out on the potential of a 6X lift in performance that Gartner has estimated that these programs offer over traditional outbound programs, according to the research firm's April 2011 report "Top 7 CRM Marketing Processes for 2011."

The benefits of lifecycle marketing are also reflected in the survey results, with the vast majority of companies running lifecycle email programs (75%) reporting that they outperform batch-and-blast, outbound email programs. In particular, lifecycle marketing programs are cited as being valuable for increasing subscriber engagement (67%), campaign performance (55%), and customer satisfaction (54%).

Of course, lifecycle marketing does require an investment in getting access to customer data to drive the programs, the right solution to trigger and manage them, as well as the strategy and creative expertise to make them effective – and finding the resources (38%) and tools (26%) to make that happen are the two the principal reasons why companies are not currently sending lifecycle email messages.

Given the potential upside reported by Gartner, as well performance lifts ranging from 2X to 15X that StrongMail is seeing from our own customers, it's clear that the effort will generate a healthy return on investment. Plus, inaction could also lead to customer attrition to competitors who are successfully embracing the power of lifecycle marketing.  If you're not sure where to start, or don't have the resources in-house to launch a program, find out if your email service provider can provide the assistance and strategy you require. Once you start seeing the results that can be generated by touching a customer at just the right time, you'll be glad you did.

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New Multi-Channel Acquisition Marketing Strategies
How to Acquire New Customes and Turn Them Into Your Biggest Brand Advocates

Type: Live Webinar
Date: June 29
Time: 11am PT / 2pm ET

Successful customer acquisition in the age of social media, smart phones and smart inboxes comes down to evolving your existing programs to effectively leverage these powerful channels. This interactive webinar will demonstrate how leading brands are leveraging new strategies to acquire new customers and turn them into brand advocates. Don't miss this opportunity to hear big brand case studies and learn from the experts.

Event Info >>

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Is Your Email Mobile Ready?
By Kara Trivunovic, Sr. Director of Strategic Services

As an industry, we have been talking about the impact mobile is going to have on our email programs for years. And while true marketer–to–customer communications are increasing, it still isn't rivaling email as a messaging vehicle. However, mobile presentation and engagement are impacting the channel now, and if you are not considering it, you may be left in the dust. Below, find a few simple tips and tricks to making sure your email is mobile ready.

• How much of your audience is viewing on mobile?
  There are a number of tools out there that can help you determine how many recipients are viewing your email on mobile devices – like Mailbox IQ from IBM Unica (formerly Pivotal Veracity) or Litmus. Once you know the numbers &ndash you can assess the impact these best practices will have on your business.
• Does your email design and layout work with mobile rendering?
  We've changed the best practice for message width a handful of times over the course of the last ten years – and we are changing the recommendation again. We've gone from 300 pixels to 650 pixels wide back down to 350 – 425 pixels wide. While most mobile screens render 200 – 300 pixels, the narrower the HTML message, the better it adjusts to the screen size you are viewing – without dramatically impacting the view on a computer screen.
• Have you considered the "touch screen" impact?
  It isn't just iPhone's that have touch screen capabilities anymore. Tablets and desktop computers alike are getting in on the touch screen fun and your email needs to be finger friendly. Links and call–to–action buttons need to be easy to touch – without overtaking the entire screen.
• Can the recipient convert on the go?
  Your recipients are scanning your email on the go – is there an opportunity to use that to your advantage? If you have brick and mortar locations – consider featuring a location finder urging customers to stop in to take advantage of the offer today – if not, provide a mechanism for easy, online conversion that is safe, secure and simple.
• Are you saying too much?
  The best practice has historically been that promotional messages should fit in a single screen, but with mobile screens on the rise and the screen size on the decline, it is getting increasingly difficult to facilitate. It is true that email recipients scan...they don't read. That's even more true when they're on the go, so be mindful of keeping your message focused, targeted, relevant and brief.
• Do you leverage your pre–header correctly?
  "View this message on a mobile device" has become a pre–header staple that almost always links to a text version of the message. While this is an ok practice – is it really the best use of the most prime email real–estate? Probably not. Be sure to include teaser copy or offer summary information here. It will get the recipient engaged and reading further – no matter what device they are looking at.

While the list could go on and on, these are the questions you should be asking yourself most immediately. If you thought you were confined to your template before, your universe just got smaller. Bigger isn't always better and saying it in fewer words is often more effective. Start testing it out – and if you need help – our expert Strategy and Creative teams are here to help. Just contact your account manager with questions.

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Forrester Case Study:
InterContinental Hotels Group Consolidates Email and Data Management

In this detailed Forrester Research case study, find out how InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) increased revenue 16% and achieved a 50% open rate by embracing right–time marketing. Learn the strategies and implementation tactics they employed, including its consolidation of marketing and transactional email on one platform, direction integration with its Unica campaign management system, and unifying all customer data into a single database.

Download Today >>

What's the Secret Behind Good Deliverability Rates?
By Spencer Kollas, Director of Delivery Services

It's a question deliverability experts get asked all the time. While the specific tactics vary depending on what ISPs are leveraging at this moment in time to determine inbox placement - that actual answer is pretty simple...run a good email program. Not just a "CAN-SPAM" compliant program, a good, solid email program.

The inbox providers may change their algorithms periodically – but none of the criteria are unrealistic. They look at bounces (list hygiene), complaints (quality of content) and now... engagement. If you think the engagement criteria is a bunch of hooey – you are wrong. Yahoo! is actively leveraging it as a criteria and Gmail is beginning to as well. So what does it mean for you? Start managing your engagement metrics and segment and message accordingly.

Sounds easy enough – yet many marketers are not heading the advice. If you are not already doing so, we encourage you to take a little time to understand and manage engagement metrics that the inbox providers are monitoring – namely open, click and reply behavior from the recipient. Here are three easy steps to managing your engagement:

1. Identify any recipient in your database that has not opened or clicked a message in the last 6 months and segment them out as an "unengaged audience" target within MessageStudio.
2. Suppress the "unengaged audience" from all live production mailings.
3. Develop a messaging strategy to win back the unengaged audience.

You can also keep up with these developments and more by bookmarking or subscribing to StrongMail’s blog, Maximizing Deliverability.