If you’re in the business of email marketing, there’s no doubt you’ve heard the buzz around lifecycle messaging, personalization, clickstream data, triggered messages, and the like. The ultimate goal of these tactics is to provide relevant messages at the right time. And the beauty of email marketing is that it can be done efficiently (often automated).
You probably understand these concepts and realize how they could benefit your business. However, putting these concepts into practice often never makes it to the drawing board. The problem is often that there’s a shortage of actionable data. But this doesn’t have to be the case in the future. Start developing a strategy now and you could be reaping the benefits of more relevant and sophisticated campaigns before you know it.
Start by asking yourself what types of campaigns would be relevant to your subscribers. Content that’s targeted to personal interests, lifecycle campaigns to new customers of certain product lines – the list is endless.
Second, understand what data would be needed to support these programs. Maybe you need something as simple as a ZIP code to target content by region. Maybe you need to know what products subscribers bought and when they bought them.
Then develop a data wish list, categorized in order of importance. Your list of data attributes could be as simple as this: first name, last name, gender, city, state, products purchased, dates of purchases. Some email marketers only have an email address to work with, so leveraging those additional attributes would really add some color to email programs.
The next step goes from the theoretical to practical – getting the data. Sometimes the shortage of actionable data is merely perceived, and the data you require is hidden in some obscure database at your company. It’s wise to do some detective work and talk with your IT folks to see if it exists, and how you can access it. If the data doesn’t exist, develop strategies on how it can be collected. Adding optional questions to your registration page and appending data from a third-party database marketing provider are two good options.
This last step can be the most difficult. If you hit a roadblock with IT, your effort isn’t wasted. Show your superiors the work you’ve done so far and the relevant campaigns and ROI that would result if you had access to the data on your wish list. A little executive support will give your project momentum and hopefully get you the data needed to take your email program to the next level.
Tags: actionable_data, clickstream_data, data-strategy, database-marketing, email marketing, email strategy, email-marketing-data, email_programs, erik gabrielson, marketing-data, relevant_messages
