Research by Hasouneh & Alqeed (2010) measures the effectiveness of e-mail direct marketing in building a good customer relationship and I thought this a relevant and interesting topic to investigate further. This blog will explore the steps to take to improve your customer relationship with e-mail marketing.
I think direct e-mail marketing needs to be timed correctly and include relevant content to the customer.
1. Godin (1999) explores the steps to permission marketing and starts by saying that a free incentive should be offered which should prevent the user from ignoring the e-mail.
For a recent example, with Snapfish I was first offered 50 free prints for registering…
This appears a good incentive but I didn’t actually complete the free order, as I signed up to Snapfish to create personalised cards not to print photos. As they didn’t ask when registering what I was interested in, they wouldn’t have known this. Perhaps they ought to consider this and include a tick box on the registration to identify what service their customers are most interested in.
Remember to find out what your customers are actually interested in!
2. After gaining the attention of the customer through an incentive, this is now the opportunity to inform them about your product. Every step must be useful, interesting and relevant.
With Asos, they often e-mail me about their products so this is probably them sending useful, interesting and relevant content trying to make me purchase!
Again, make sure you know what your customers are interested in so that what you send is suitable, as this is more likely to lead to sales!
3. The third step involves reinstating the incentive as these expire quickly so the incentive may need to be altered to meet the demands of the customer.
With New Look, I have been a customer for a while so after initial registration I was then offered 20% off in a future e-mail after not ordering for a while as this incentive was more likely to entice me in!
In the past they have offered me free delivery which doesn’t really entice me so now they know to offer money off and I am much more likely to browse their website and purchase!
4. After this, it is important to gather more permission based information from the customer. Mohammadi et al. (2013) emphasise on the importance of using all the customer information available to focus on personalisation so the customer is more engaged with the e-mail and can actually relate to the content.
eBay area company normally quite good with personalisation.
The e-mail is personalised to my username and normally the products displayed are related to what I am watching or what I have been searching. In this case, eBay didn’t take the opportunity to do this as with the above items, I have no interest in any of them so it would have been more beneficial to me and eBay to send relevant content!
5. Finally, this is all used to turn the situation into a profitable one for both parties and as Godin (1999) states, you may now live happily ever after by repeating the process and selling the customer more and more products.
How many times do I shop online with New Look or Asos for example? Well, the more incentives I get, the more I shop!
For some extra reading, Goodman (2014) explores the ways to increase direct mail marketing response rates in the following post, interesting read: http://bit.ly/1DVhZIL
References:
Godin, S. (1999). Permission marketing: Turning strangers into friends and friends into customers. Simon & Schuster
Goodman, K. (2014). 9 Steps to Increase Your Direct Mail Marketing Campaign Response Rates. [Online] Available at: http://bit.ly/1DVhZIL [Accessed 2 April 2015]
Mohammadi, M., Malekian, K., Nosrati, M., & Karimi, R. (2013). Email Marketing as a popular type of small business advertisement: A short review. Australian journal of basic and applied sciences, 7(4), 786-790.