Guest comment: Tips for email marketing success when Saturday comes

For those of you who don't know me (which is probably quite of few of you ), I am from  the home counties, but due to my post Royal Air Force dwelling, I am a Sheffield Wednesday fan.  Being a Wednesday fan is not easy. In fact it’s more difficult than trying to run an effective email marketing programme without a customer database. Or a computer, for that matter. Unfortunately, I dragged my son into my obsession; he is 18 and holds a season ticket for Wednesday, poor kid. This season is a perfect example of the suffering we go through.
 
My son and I frequently make the three-hour trip to Hillsborough, Wednesday’s home ground, where the team have won just eight matches all season. Our form has been so bad that, should we lose our final match of the season, then the nightmare of relegation will become reality. As any football fan will know, watching a game like this is one of the most torturous experiences imaginable.

Fortunately, not all of life’s pursuits leave you feeling so helpless. As you look at your email marketing programme, consider how you are filling your key positions in order to drive success and keep your customers (like me and my son freezing on the terraces) happy.

The Gaffer - YOU!

In football the head coach, the gaffer, is the master tactician, sizing up the opposition, barking out instructions and in general making sure that the team is delivering in all areas of the pitch. Nowadays, most successful football teams have cherry-picked the best coaches from around the world, guys the club have invested millions in to lead them to glory. If you are running your organisation's email programme, are you and your company investing in your skills to make sure you are the star coach on whom your team can rely?

Running an effective email programme requires expertise in delivery, customer engagement, email strategy, social media, mobile marketing, database management, process automation and a host of other disciplines.  Be sure you are attending events on subjects like these that affect the email space.  Email Service Providers are constantly hosting webinars sharing the latest case studies and best practices from the most successful companies in our field.  Remember, top coaches never stop working, and never miss a training session. As an owner of your company's email marketing strategy, you cannot take a break, either.  All positions look to you for guidance -- are you up to the task?  

The Attack - Innovation

Any UK football fan will surely agree that the underlying charm of the sport is its unpredictability. Any team can win, anytime, no matter how great the opponent, provided they put together an attack with the desire to put the ball in the net through any means possible.  In the email space innovation is the great equaliser, creating a level playing field for large and small brands.  As email marketers, your competitors are hard at work trying to take mind share away from your brand and steer it towards theirs.  You need to invest in innovative ways to drive relevance, increased reach and automation into your email programs. Innovation in email marketing is happening in a number of areas all around us.  

Social media has been integrated effectively in a number of programmes, enabling email marketers to extend programme reach, engage new customers and influence purchase decisions. In fact, we are seeing social channels add an acquisition element to email marketing that does not introduce risks to a mailer's reputation nor affect delivery performance. Mobile, while still commanding a small part of the corporate marketing budget, also seems to be driving a significant amount of buzz.  

Meanwhile, Omniture, Coremetrics, BazzarVoice and others are making it easier for marketers to automate communications processes and content creation, creating a seamless experience between the corporate Web, ecommerce sites and email.  As the boss of your email programme, innovation needs to be top of mind or you risk losing subscribers and customers to the competition.  

The Defence -The Database

The best attack in the world is destined to fail if the side is missing possibly the most critical group in football, the defence. Quite simply, if you don’t concede you can’t lose, and top defences are the foundations upon which every attack is built, every goal scored and every success achieved. The defence in our business is the database.  

The attributes that your company collects on each of your customers (and your access to that data) is the key to any meaningful email programme.  Exceptional email marketers understand the profile of their best customers and apply that knowledge to drive content within email programs.  Since customer attributes change frequently, updates are automatically applied to the data they leverage for email, allowing automation to be leveraged within communication streams.  More importantly, the best email programmes often leverage data inputs from multiple sources.  

US retailer, FootSmart.com recently shared programmes that leveraged CRM data, web analytics data and automation to implement an incredibly effective cart abandonment program.  There is no way the gaffer at FootSmart could have put this together without access to data.  Data management and access remains a challenge for many email marketers.  I would adopt the strategy of many top coaches on this one.  Find the team responsible for database management and access at your company and take them all out to dinner. The investment will pay off, trust me.

As you head into the email marketing arena, take comfort in the fact that you are the boss in the dug-out, your star performers will never tire and your tactics will come off exactly as you instruct. In order to achieve results, continue to invest in yourself as the gaffer, focus your organisation on innovation and get your team access to the data that drives email relevance. If you put team like that out each week, I guarantee that when that crucial moment comes, your fans will be singing your name all the way back down the M1.

by Paul Bates

UK MD

StrongMail systems

www.strongmail.com

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