By Justin Gray, Maas Impact

Here’s how to spend less time managing your marketing technology and more time being creative and strategic with your email campaign.

1. Forget the “batch and blast” technique and consider your email campaigns as part of a conversation. Begin to think of each email campaign you send out as part of an ongoing dialogue with each prospect. The way to keep the conversation going is to listen (how are recipients responding to the campaign), be relevant (what are their profiles and interests), and engage them in meaningful ways (if they visit your product page, your next communication should focus on products, not your blog).

2. Move beyond open and click-through rates – what else are your prospects and customers doing? The standard email success metrics are great, but explore all the valuable information available to you. After each email campaign, see where prospects went on your Web site, how often they visit, and whether there are new ways to think about how to segment your prospects based on the behaviors they exhibit.

3. While we’re on the topic of segmentation… Combine the “standard” segmentation approaches (lead source, industry, etc.) with behavioral data (e.g. who opened up an email, downloaded or, spent more than 30 minutes on your site and visited more than 3 pages) to create more complex segmentation strategies. The sky’s really the limit here, so have some fun with it.

4. Automate what you can and leave more time for creativity and strategy. Use your marketing automation solution as the extra marketing resource you never had. Set up automated campaigns based on event and behavioral triggers and rest assured that you’re building up relationships with prospects every time.

5. Mix up your campaign styles and methods. Experiment with a variety of email campaign types, some from marketing (HTML), some from sales (Outlook), and even some from you! You’d be surprised how receptive people can be when they know the message is coming from a real person— even a “marketer.”

You don’t have to be traditional in your email campaign. Creativity gets rewarded.

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Justin Gray is the Chief Brand Officer for MaaS Impact.  Justin’s vision is to transform traditional ‘grassroots’ marketing efforts through the use of cloud based marketing solutions. MaaS Impact  specializes in outsourcing the core functions of a marketing department either through on-demand solutions, consulting or both.  www.maasimpact.com .

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Sunday, March 7th, 2010, 7:36 am   |   Email marketing, Marketing Techniques  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback