Maturing an email marketing program means getting closer to customers and giving them what they want rather than what marketers might think they want. It involves gaining an understanding of:
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Whom you’re emailing
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Who responds
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How you can nurture them
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How to grow your program
Relationship One spoke with Liane Shayer, marketing manager at Protiviti, on episode 73 of the Inspired Marketing Podcast about what maturing an email marketing program entails.
To Shayer’s view, maturing an email marketing program involves nurturing existing clients and gaining new ones by demonstrating the value a brand can bring to their organizations as well as connecting various systems. When Protiviti expanded globally, it connected Oracle Eloqua, its CRM, and webinar provider in order to gain better insight into customer behavior across multiple channels and not just in email. These insights then informed their digital marketing campaigns as how to better convey the value Protiviti presents to clients.
Whom you should email and whom you shouldn’tOne of the first things to mature their email program that Shayer’s team did was look at how similar organizations performed with emails in order to set benchmarks. Next, they divided their segments into people who had engaged with them and those who hadn’t. They then began tracking those metrics and using that data to show marketing leads whom they should be emailing and whom they shouldn’t.
This helped with not just email metrics, but also because emailing people who don’t respond can hurt a business’s online brand and overall email deliverability. Instead, marketers should try to target people that care and respond.
As a part of this, Shayer’s team partnered with the analytics team to look at the data and gain a better understanding of what really drives the customer and why they might or might not respond to an email. To this end, the analytics team built integrated dashboards to help mature the marketing team’s understanding of their customers and their email behavior.
The most important steps along the wayShayer felt that three steps contributed greatly to her business’s email marketing maturity:
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Relationship building
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Education
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Communication
The marketing team partnering with the analytics team served as a prime example of relationship building. However, email marketing maturity calls for multiple teams from across the organization to work together. Shayer had to work with IT on various system integrations. Given she was working with people outside of marketing, she sought to help them understand what they should be focused on when sending emails, such as targeting those who would respond. She also helped people understand how to use Oracle Eloqua and its marketing automaton to build out campaigns.
Shayer’s team held email production meetings every week to keep everyone updated on what was going on, looked at their messaging to see if there was any overlap in campaigns, and determined if everything fit together.
In order to help with understanding all of this, Shayer and her team put together slide decks about such topics as:
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What’s a campaign?
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What are your campaign objectives and how to get email metrics to meet benchmarks
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How email can work with other channels
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Segmentation and how to adjust email campaigns based on customer behavior (send more, send less, send at different times, different content, etc.)
Shayer’s team also hosted workshops to help their colleagues understand how to put a good email together, what is good subject line, and what a good CTA is and where it should go.
Going forwardWith their email marketing program maturing, Shayer is looking forward to testing out new personas and improving the customer journey where appropriate based upon the data. She hopes that her organization’s relationships with its customers can only deepen thanks to their email marketing.
Find out how to further level up your email marketing by and “Do More with Email Deliverability and Privacy.”
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