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Neil Rosen is the founder, president and CEO of eWayDirect, the eMindshare partner for online marketers. He is responsible for setting the company's strategic direction and for the development of new products. This is the third new venture he has founded and guided to success. With continued entrepreneurial enthusiasm and a proven track record of successful ventures, Neil opened eWayDirect, Inc. in 2000. Neil is the author of the upcoming business book, Chatter Marketing: The Ultimate Online Business Marketing Strategy for 2011 and Beyond, to be published later this year by the Greenleaf Book Group.

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Resends: Putting the R Back in CRM

Written on
Mar 22, 2011 
Author
Neil Rosen  |
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Resends: Putting the R Back in CRM

r_smallADOTAS – Currently, the traditional customer relationship model is being cannibalized by “buy now” technologies that elevate products in importance over brand, and emarketers are realizing that they can’t just transact business as usual and expect to attract and retain a loyal customer base.

The old model was about engaging customers with your brand in order to sell them products. This was done by keeping the promises you make, giving the consumer a great buying experience with reasonable prices and excellent quality, and following up with ongoing communications to make sure that the customer is satisfied and will return again to purchase.

In addition, marketers usually knew their competition as well as they knew their best friends, and could rely upon an unwritten protocol that kept competition fierce but within some clearly defined boundaries. If you sold widgets, it was the other widget manufacturers who were your competition.

What changed? Only the entire purchasing paradigm! Now along with their direct competitors, everyone has competition from third-party vendors like Groupon and Gilt, and other daily-deal sites, and eBay and other auction sites, and all the product review sites, leaving brand loyalty to take second place to convenience for most online shoppers. And it leaves brand companies wondering what happened, and what they need to do to get the customer back.

So what is one way emarketers put the “R” back into CRM?

Put extra strategy into your email marketing with highly targeted resends. There are any number of reasons why a subscriber may not have opened or clicked on an email. The customer may have been busy when the email came in; the subject line may not have appealed to her at that particular moment; he might have been offline and discarded it when he turned on his mail program. Emails get lost, emails get ignored, emails get mislaid, even wanted email, even timely emails with exactly the content and offer the consumer is looking for.

Resending campaigns to those who didn’t open the first time, using a different subject line but the same creative, is a great way to catch up with those customers who fall into the above categories.

Resending the email campaign does a number of things:

  • It adds convenience to the customer’s experience; he doesn’t have to go through his inbox looking for the email
  • It allows the customer to see the offer in a slightly different light by changing the subject line on the email
  • It creates another touchpoint opportunity between the customer and the retailer

This last point is far from insignificant. The old “rule of seven” is still alive and well in marketing — there must be seven touchpoints between the customer and the marketer before the customer really “gets” the message. This doesn’t mean that online retailers should inundate their customers with emails — far from it.

It means that the “R” of CRM directs the marketer’s actions in creating resend campaigns. Who opened but did not click? That group needs one message. Who didn’t open at all? That group needs a different message.

How about sending resends to people who did open but didn’t take the next step? These people showed an interest by opening, but once they did, they saw the email it wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. This creates an opportunity for the marketer to broaden the offer. If the initial offer was for a cookbook, add a few other cookbooks with the same offer to the resend. Customers may have opened the initial cookbook offer, but the Great Chicken Recipe wasn’t exciting to them.

Segmenting the email list in this way goes miles toward assuring your customers that they are, each one of them, important to you, and that you want to make their shopping experiences positive, convenient, and satisfying.

And the best news is that it’s not just good for CRM—it’s good for your bottom line as well. Resends can boost your open rate by as much as 50%! Resending is an easy low-cost way to remind subscribers of your great offer… and gain additional revenue.

Resends help put the “R” back into CRM because they keeps your offers in the front of your customers’ minds, as well as assure them that you are aware of and looking out for their convenience. And who isn’t looking for more convenience?





Reader Comments.

There’s no doubt that email marketing works. In addition to the traditional email marketing (mass email) one should look at another marketing opportunity and that is the emails we all send from our corporate email addresses every day. I represent a company that has developed a solution for just those emails and thus this post.
The basic idea behind wrapmail is to utilize the facts that all businesses have websites and employees that send emails every day. These emails can become complete marketing tools and help promote, brand, sell and cross-sell in addition to drive traffic to the website and conduct research. Wrapmail is available for free at http://www.wrapmail.com

Posted by Rolv Heggenhougen | 12:34 pm on March 23, 2011.

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