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.