Influence the client journey with your email strategy.
What is the goal of your email strategy? For most, the answer is probably sales, but this should not be the only answer.
For starters, you should remember that emails have another general goal: keeping your clients happy (to generate more sales, of course).
List Your Goals and KPIs
Among other commonly-cited goals, you almost always find up-selling (persuading the customer to buy a more premium product or service) and cross-selling (selling additional products).
With cross-selling, up-selling, and client satisfaction, you already have various reasons and ideas for running campaigns, whether these are ad-hoc (one-off, relating to a single activity) or automatic.
You can quickly break these general goals into much more detailed ones. To do this, ask yourself how your email strategy can benefit your customer or your company.
Depending on the nature of your business, the response may vary. For example:
Reminding customers about an abandoned shopping cart or an incomplete form (to improve the conversion rate and customer satisfaction).
Informing about a customer benefit (to generate additional sales).
Simplifying the purchasing process (to reduce the bounce rate).
Reducing call-center waiting times (thereby reducing associated costs).
Asking the recipient to share more information, such as product reviews (to build customer loyalty).
To achieve these goals, you'll need to turn the responses into key performance indicators (KPIs) to chart your progress.
Consider an airline that wants to implement an email strategy. They might include the following KPIs on its performance dashboard:
The number of tickets.
Average transaction value.
Progression in the percentage of loyalty scheme members.
Increase in the percentage uptake of cancelation insurance.
Reduction in the percentage using the after-sales service.
Increases in the frequency of purchase.
The Different Types of Data Available
As mentioned, data is vital for your email strategy and to make your messaging more relevant.
It is important to know which data you can access, how relevant it is, the completion rate on your contact forms, and also whether this data is reliable (you won’t want to ask a client to leave a review on TripAdvisor if they’ve had a terrible time in your hotel).
You can sort data into different categories. The table below shows some examples from the airline to illustrate these categories:
Data category | Description | Examples of data |
Declared | This is data that your client or prospective client has actively given to you, e.g., in a form, while purchasing, or as part of an interaction with a company employee. | Name, sex, age, telephone number, email address, etc. This could also include stated preferences. |
Behavioral | Deduce this type of data from your existing or prospective clients’ behavior. It may not have been intentionally given to you and is typically the most insightful data. | Opens, clicks from the emails, pages visited on your website, geolocation, etc. |
Transactional | Any data linked to purchasing on or offline. | Date of purchase, place of departure, place of arrival, destinations, date of travel, date of reservation, amount spent, average amount spent, number of passengers, optional services, etc. |
Internal | Internal data is data you have but cannot directly link to a contact, such as a list of points of sale, your product catalog, etc. It can help you personalize your messaging. | Destinations brochure, real-time delays, plane type, etc. |
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Identify Your Available Communication Channels
Once you’ve listed all of your usable data, you need to think about channels.
One of these channels is email. However, no channel should operate in isolation from the rest of the customer’s journey with your business. They need others to operate (without the website, no forms, no data collection).
Looking at the advantages of email (targeting an individual with an entirely personalized message at any given time), you can quickly see that other channels can do the same: text messages, mobile notifications, web notifications, social media, etc.
It’s important to consider emails within this ecosystem. Which channels are readily available and easy to implement? Which channels would complement each other? It is something you should consider when running your campaigns.
Adapt Your Strategy According to Your Client Lifecycle
Clients come and – unfortunately – clients go. That said, why do most brands fail to adjust their communication depending on what stage their client is at?
Over a decade ago, I ran campaigns for a car manufacturer. This company sent out campaigns twice a month to tell customers about the latest products and developments. This meant that you would receive emails about other cars two weeks later if you bought a car at the beginning of the month. Not very logical when you consider that it will be between three and five years before clients buy a new car.
Even for businesses without a sales cycle as long as the automotive sector, it’s essential to adapt how you communicate according to where the customer is in their relationship with you.
Points in Client Lifecycle
Some points are more important than others, and you should consider these when creating ad-hoc and automated campaigns:
Sign up: As this is your first opportunity to communicate with your new contact, it is a precious one.
First purchase: This is when they first become your customer; if this goes badly, there won’t be a second!
Cart abandonment: Almost three in four customers abandon their cart. They were interested, but they had some doubts or concerns - or even just interruptions! And you were so close! Reassure them.
Birthdays: This is an important day that comes around every year, so be sure to wish your customers a happy birthday!
Create an Email Calendar
An email calendar is a schedule of all the emails you plan to send out over the next four to six months (or more, if you’re able to plan further ahead). The idea is to spread out your emails evenly.
To create your schedule, you will need to draw on the following:
Company events: product launches, new partnerships, meetings, training sessions, promotions, clearance, new arrivals, etc.
Shared events: holidays, sporting events (Wimbledon, World Cup, etc.), annual international days.
For every campaign, consider sending a follow-up email. In general, follow-ups are sent out for marketing campaigns 24-48 hours after the initial email. These reminders are mainly sent to people who didn’t open the first email, usually with a different subject line. You can also expand this technique for more precise targeting:
Non-openers (NO)
Clickers (C)
Non-clickers openers (NCO)
Below is an example of a mailing schedule:
Date | Target | Volume | Type of campaign | Contents |
02/01/2021 | All contacts | 123,000 | Relational | Happy New Year |
07/01/2021 | Clients of 6 months plus | 45,000 | Customer benefit | New loyalty bonus |
09/01/2021 | Prospective clients | 14,000 | Promotion | Flash sale |
11/01/2021 | All contacts | 123,000 | Promotion | Advent calendar of offers |
Let’s Recap!
Sales should not be your only goal – consider client satisfaction, up-selling, and cross-selling.
Turn your goals into KPIs.
It’s not only the declared data that’s useful.
Don’t forget that channels can complement one another.
Think about your recipient on their customer journey.
Spread out your emails by creating a schedule that stretches over several months.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at how to draft an effective campaign brief.
