Your job as a marketer is to communicate with customers in a way that's most likely to engage them, and ultimately entice them to make a purchase. Today, your technology team has access to tools that actually make it possible to do that at the individual level, suggesting what time of day or week your customer is likely to engage, which email subject lines are most appealing, and which products they'd like to buy.
The best companies are combining their marketing and IT departments in a way that directly leads to massive engagement and revenue increases because they're looking at the entire picture. They're using their internal data, outside data, and analytics to show a complete customer profile.
As digital marketing becomes ascendant, the relationship between marketing and IT departments will become more dependent. To strategize, execute, analyze, and apply the latest findings, marketers are reliant on the data that IT departments provide. It takes teamwork to properly use that data and draw insights for future campaigns.
To ensure that both departments are working toward the same goal of delivering the most marketing impact, they should keep in mind the following.
Don't re-create the wheel
Marketers are too often divorced from the true analytics or data that drives their business. Consumers like social media, so marketers try to apply revenue models to it. How much is a Twitter follower or Facebook "Like" really worth? It's hard to say, because we're missing true KPIs for them. It's easy to see the number of followers and Likes rise and fall, but where is the tie to ROI?
Email is less sexy, but research shows that it drives a better return than social. Because consumers opt into it, they're more likely looking for the deals you're offering, as long as you've paid attention to their preferences. Using the mounds of data sitting in your database, it is easy to work with your IT department to apply it, making each message more relevant to each customer.
IT can provide data on best time of day to deliver email to the individual customer, which deals or offers each customer prefers, whether they're male or female, detailed household composition and more. By relaying those demographics and preferences back to marketing, the two teams can deliver relevant content that drives sales.
Work together to use the data you've already got.
Use the data you've got
Though it's easy to put email campaigns on autopilot, it's also very costly. It seems as if email campaigns are relatively inexpensive, but in reality an unsubscribe or spam click depreciates the value of your marketing asset: your email list.
Batching and blasting email to a full list all the time increases the number of unsubscribes and can lead to spam penalties from inbox providers. One recent client recognized the return from sending proper email and decided to send as much as possible to everyone in hopes of recording more sales. Without consulting IT about open rates and unsubscribes, it decided the amount of unsubscribes couldn't possibly be enough to discontinue the poor practice of putting the program on autopilot. Unfortunately, after close-cost analysis, the real cost of blasting irrelevant content to their customers was millions of dollars per week in customer loss.
Working with IT to derive best-practices for sending to segments of customers alleviates this cost for marketers. They won't be sending the same email to every customer every time, which decreases the likelihood of spam penalties and unsubscribes. They are more likely to send email when the customer is engaged.
And, most important, marketers' email lists retain their value when customers aren't barraged with irrelevant email.
Work together to find deliverability best-practices and save cost.
Treat different customers differently
Finally, the partnership between marketing and IT can provide insight into individual customers' preferences. When a customer receives product recommendations, they must be relevant. IT provides the ability to analyze the time of day each email is opened. With this insight, it is possible to actually share products when that customer is most apt to buy.
Consider this scenario: A customer opens her email at her preferred time, sees that the email has been customized to offer the products she likes the most, and it includes a discount code, too. That customer has likely just been converted to a sale.
When working with the tech team to develop criteria for personalization, marketers can achieve that level of transparency and personalization at every point of interaction.
Although it sounds farfetched that this level of personalization can be achieved without spending the entire marketing budget or hiring a team of data analysts, the prevalence of digital marketing tools has actually made it feasible. In fact, marketing increasingly has control of its own destiny. Today's best marketers are using tools to pull the necessary data, analyze it in real-time, and optimize their customer communication.
Often, it takes a little time to analyze data you already own, but personalization can be as easy as appending an email personalization tool to your current ESP program. Thanks to the partnership between the math people and marketing people, customers can expect to receive messages, content, and deals they really care about.
Work together to find more sales potential.
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Marketing continues to become more complex as digital takes over, so it's important to keep in mind the goal of engaging customers, building loyalty, and creating brand advocates. Incorporating technology promises data-driven marketing that targets and communicates the messages that resonate best with your audiences while continuing to drive revenue.
