I’ve always said that relevancy is key - it’s a major factor in recipient satisfaction. You need to know who your recipients are and what they want - no small task. Understanding this on a macro scale is a necessity for your business, but understanding each individual is where you need to be for email marketing.
In order to do this you will need to have data for your customers - accurate data. Once you have data for your customers you can start to segment them into meaningful groups. With your customers broken down into groups, you can begin to market to them on their own terms, which makes perfect sense, right?
Although getting that data can be tough, it’s maintaining it that’s the trick. The data that is creating relevant emails today will be creating stale, out of touch messages in a few weeks. You don’t want to send a renewal notice to some one who renewed their contract last week. So you not only need to identify and import useful data, you need to keep updating it - but how?
This is often done by exporting data from disparate systems and uploading it into a datamart. That can be a real hassle, you need to do manual uploads every week, every day, or at least before an email send, to keep the data fresh. A better option is to integrate your email marketing platform with your external systems. Often implemented via an API (Application Programming Interface), integrations are a great way to automate the data flow.
Integrations are a very common and effective way to resolve this problem, look at any ESP and you’ll see an API offering, it’s something that many of our clients utilize. However, downside of APIs is that they can take quite a bit of time and effort, not mention a resource with programming capabilities. Even if you have these resources, you may not be able to free them up.
There is one last way to push data to your account, it’s quite a bit simpler. It actually works in a way quite similar to how opens or conversions are tracked. A hidden ‘web-bug’, as it is often called, is placed on a page within your website. Each web-bug can update a contact’s information as they surf pages, work through conversion paths, or fill in forms.
This method is extremely powerful because people are actually updating their own information in real-time as they use your website.
At Bronto, we call this feature Direct Update, and you can place as many of them as you want through out your website. Each update can set the value of any field, add or subtract from number field, and coming soon is the ability to append to a text field.
When you are creating these Direct Updates, remember that you are answering questions that you want to segment on, such as:
- Who has looked at “product x” recently?
- How much have they purchased?
- Which departments have they purchased from?
- When was their last visit to our website?
- And many, many more…
Once these are set up you won’t just have answers to these questions, you’ll have answers that are accurate down to the second that the message is sent. Couple that with segmentation and a dash of API you’ve got a recipe for relevancy that can’t be beat.
Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto
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