An effective e-mail marketing strategy should take a holistic approach that includes all e-mails sent to the customer, whether marketing, customer service or transactional. However, this can be a daunting undertaking for companies that aren’t structured that way.
Only with a centralized approach can an organization have the visibility and control needed to deploy and enforce an e-mail strategy across all departments and channels. Sending a marketing e-mail to a customer without taking into account a recent purchase or an outstanding customer service request can undermine the relationship you’ve worked so hard to create.
Use these five reasons to start the discussion in your firm:
Improve customer relationships. A centralized e-mail platform can provide you with centralization tools to limit the amount and frequency of e-mail each customer receives, which can stave off customer burnout, complaints and unsubscribes. Being able to temporarily suspend marketing messages while a customer is resolving a problem with customer service can go long way.
Increase sales. Centralization gives you valuable insight into customer behavior across all departments, which can be leveraged to send relevant and timely marketing offers. It also makes it easier for marketers to fully leverage transactional data to insert marketing messages into product confirmation e-mails or to customize marketing e-mails based on past purchases.
Reduce customer service costs. Each call into customer service reduces the profitability of the customer relationship. Centralization helps reduce those calls by enabling you to identify problems in real-time. For example, if shipping is delayed for a product, let the customer know before he expects to receive it.
Maintain a consistent brand. Building a brand requires tight controls over how the company is portrayed in all external communications. Without a centralized approach, there is no way to ensure that customer service is using, say, your new logo and tagline. Centralization allows marketing to maintain and carefully manage one approved repository of message templates and content blocks.
Maximize e-mail deliverability . The best way to get your legitimate e-mail past the filters put in place by the ISPs is to engage in best practices and maintain a positive sender reputation. If you’re unaware of the e-mail sent by other departments or unable to control it, you are putting your reputation at jeopardy.
Centralizing your e-mail on one platform empowers the savvy marketer to leverage all customer data across all departments to deliver appropriate and relevant communications.
Tricia Robinson Pridemore is vice president of market and product strategy at StrongMail. Reach her at [email protected].
