Dynamic Email Marketing

In today’s Web 2.0 era of two-way communications, an email marketing message is an invitation to begin or continue a conversation, and a vital tool for building lasting and profitable customer relationships.

Savvy email marketers – like yourself – recognize the exciting opportunities inherent in Web 2.0 thinking, such as implementing sophisticated campaigns that incorporate Web analytics, dynamic content or survey data. And robust email marketing solutions have kept pace, allowing you to create, execute and measure campaigns more quickly, easily and efficiently than ever before.

With hard data at your fingertips, you can use dynamic content to greatly increase the relevancy of your email messages and; as a result, increase your click-through rates and ROI.

1. Add relevant recipient data.

In order to create emails using dynamic content, you need profiling data on all of your subscribers and the more profiling data you have, the more targeted your campaigns can be. From this point forward, rather than focusing strictly on the size and growth of your email list, you should focus on adding relevant recipient data. Ask yourself:

• What do I want to know about each recipient?
• How can the necessary data be gathered and incorporated into my list?
• How can I act on the data?
• How will I analyze my results?”

2. Add data from other marketing platforms

One way to add actionable customer information to your database is to integrate with other marketing platforms, such as Web analytics, e-commerce or survey tools. Many email service providers have partnerships and APIs in place to facilitate this technical integration between the email solution and other platforms.

By creating new fields in your email database that correspond to the data points in other systems, you can easily enhance your data, which enables you to better target email marketing campaigns and provide a richer experience for email recipients.

3. Talk directly and specifically to each customer

Personalizing individual messages was the first step in talking to customers. But now, with dynamic content, you can deliver completely different messages to each recipient within a single campaign. Where consumers continually demand higher levels of relevance, dynamic email campaigns help companies enhance customer relationships, loyalty and lifetime value.

Based on specific recipient characteristics, dynamic content allows you to build your messages piece by piece. New technologies at many mainstream ESPs simplify the process, which originally met resistance due to its complexities. Bottom Line: By improving targeting, controlling frequency and driving relevancy, you can send fewer emails and get better response.

4. Analyze a broad spectrum of results

To understand more specifically how your mailings are performing and boost results, you must look beyond opens and clicks. Some questions to ask include:

• How do the open, click and conversion rates of frequent purchasers compare to those of occasional purchasers?
• Are there geographic differences in results?
• How do demographics such as gender, income level and age impact someone’s likelihood to forward an email or click on a specific link?

By analyzing responses, you can dramatically improve targeting and deliver highly relevant email that generates much higher response rates and returns.

5. Don't forget to build your brand

In addition to generating tangible returns, every email also creates a brand impression, and email’s ability to inspire brand recognition and loyalty, as well as generate sales, has far-reaching implications for companies and marketing organizations. To build a strong brand through email marketing, consider these best practices:

• Use your brand name in the email subject and/or “from” line.
• Position your company logo prominently, and make sure that it is always visible within the email preview pane.
• Use visual brand attributes that evoke your brand consistently across marketing channels. Email campaigns that look and feel like your company’s other online and offline campaigns will enhance recognition and boost the results of multi-channel marketing efforts.
• Above all, establish and cultivate trust. Your customer’s inbox should be treated respectfully by always delivering relevant messages at an appropriate frequency.