E-mail on Steroids

[Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the October 2007 issue of FundRaising Success sister publication Target Marketing, and is written from a for-profit point of view. The solid tips hold equally true for nonprofit mailers.]

Do you monitor your competitors’ e-mail programs? If so, you may note some appear to be addicted to frequency and often send several messages a week. Under most circumstances, this is a misguided attempt to keep in front of their e-mail list. Relevance always trumps frequency.

Quantity does not equal quality. Successful marketers don’t push their messages. Instead, they strive to understand their subscribers’ needs, preferences and behaviors — and they approach e-mail as a vehicle that allows them to tune into the interests of their e-mail recipients.

To customize and deepen your e-mail relationship with your subscribers, you’ll want to take advantage of two sophisticated e-mail techniques that should be a part of your marketing arsenal: triggered messaging and dynamic personalization. These two capabilities allow you to communicate with your e-mail subscribers based on the information they volunteered during sign-up, what you know about how they interact with your e-mails and what your Web analytics tell you about what they do on your site.

Right-time marketing
Triggered messaging and dynamic personalization give you the ability to serve the right message to the right person at the right time. The beauty of these techniques is that they’re automated. You create the “rules” for which e-mails or content will be delivered based on certain customer actions or information. You create the specific messages or content clips and load them into your e-mail deployment system. Then the appropriate e-mail or content is sent automatically. Your customer receives a timely communication, and the speed of your responsiveness can drive instant customer response.

Think of dynamic personalization and triggered messaging as two powerful marketing tools that can react to each person on your e-mail list in real time. You can take advantage of them to nurture the relationship and actively persuade prospects to become customers.