Five New Year's resolutions to elevate your marketing automation strategies

I couldn’t agree more with that quote. The ecommerce industry is changing, and believe it or not, 319.6 billion emails are sent every day. To put into perspective, 10.5 million emails have already been sent in the 3 seconds you took reading this sentence. Moreover, several businesses have seen fantastic results, in fact, Mr. Beer reported an 800% increase in customer orders.

So, what is Electronic Direct Mail marketing?

Electronic Direct Mail (EDM) is a form of digital marketing strategy that businesses implement to promote products to a list of potential customers (who are opted-in) via email. In addition to EDMs, brands can also target customers across various channels through cross-channel marketing.

Do you know it takes between 6 to 8 touchpoints before converting subscribers to an actual paying customer?

If you do a bit of research around EDM marketing, you’ll notice they often talk about batch and blast. Traditionally, as the names suggest, an email blast means sending a single email to your entire database irrespective of the customer’s preference or interests.

To put it simply: Never do this. Never ever!

At Dotdigital, our prospecting emails are personalized on a one-to-one level, and as far as the marketers are concerned, it’s the only way to send effective emails.

How to create an EDM marketing campaign?

EDM marketing campaigns are a cost-effective way to garner conversions and to build brand loyalty with a specific pool of customers. With consistent messaging, your EDM campaign is more likely to be top of mind for a customer while they make a purchase decision. Let’s take you through the basics of creating an EDM marketing campaign.

1. Start with your customers’ data

Building an email list can take time, therefore you might be tempted to buy data. DON’T.

We strongly advise you against buying data as this will be detrimental to your brand’s image, it goes against data privacy laws, including PDPA guidelines, and your domain might get punished for delivering emails to inactive email addresses.

Your data needs to have been fully opted in, cleaned (valid syntax, no duplication), and you should have reached a sizable pool of 1,000 subscribers to move on to the next step. If not sure, you can always refer to our guide on how to grow your database quickly.

2. Segmentation

Once the data is collected and based on your customer behavioral traits, identify the segments you need to build. These should then be funneled into your core demographic audience groups based on age, gender, interest, or location.

For example, customers who spent a certain amount over six months, OR recently bought a soundbar, OR have visited your site to look at subwoofers.

You can then begin planning and building out more advanced segments to ensure you’re sending targeted and relevant messages. These can be based on RFM analysis tools, lead scoring, or even web behaviors. By knowing what segments you can and want to target, you can better plan your messaging and the channels you’ll send them through.

3. Personalize your emails

Personalization depends highly on customer-generated data. A thorough understanding of your customer’s interest and source will enable you to personalize your customer interactions.

For example, Matthew is a total techie. He always splurges on new technologies as soon as the pre-order hits the site. You might want to prepare bespoke VVIP codes for your pre-order campaign to send to Matthew, making him feel special and valued as a customer.

4. Track your click and open rates

Be sure to implement tracking before sending an email. Without UTM codes and tracking pixels, you can’t monitor the success of your EDM marketing and improve performance over time.

The word on the street is the upcoming iOS 15 update will likely impact open rates. The soon-to-be-released update will enable iPhone users to hide their IP and email addresses and turn off open tracking. Therefore, it’s critical to start preparing now and integrate best practices to adapt to the changes ahead.

5. Create your campaign

You will need email marketing software (with or without automation) to create your campaigns. Gone are the days where you send plain text or nicely designed HTML emails. Now, most platforms are drag and drop, and you can create a no-code EDM within minutes.

But what you pay for is what you get, and if you are forecasting email marketing to bring you $30,000 in revenue and are only willing to spend $100 to solve a problem, you might not get the best-optimized solution for you to hit your goals.

Customer-centric approach

Customer-centric marketing is more than just a buzzword. It should be at the heart of everything you do, every journey you create, and every message you send.

The only way you can begin to achieve this is by understanding how your customers interact with your brand. It’s essential to consider your ideal journey and what other steps the customer may take.

From the point of subscription to post-purchase and beyond, what are your key touchpoints, and where else can customers find you? This will help you identify your existing channels and where you need to focus your efforts. It will also help you see any potential gaps where you can expand your channel offering.

By taking the time to learn about the customer journey, you’ll create consistent messaging and branding across every channel.

When is the right time to start? The answer is – yesterday!

There will never be the best optimal time to begin your journey in marketing automation; in this day and age, this has become a must-have. I hope you have found the blog helpful in your digital transformation strategy for 2021 and beyond.

If you’d like to find out more, feel free to contact me to have a quick chat. If you’d like to see Dotdigital in action, click here.

I have put together this blog, ‘5 New Year’s resolutions,’ taking inspiration from some of our customer success stories. I hope these resolutions will help you set in place your marketing strategies for the new year, to ensure you hit your marketing goals for 2021.

New Year’s resolution #1: Automate and retarget

• How can I talk to my customers via different touchpoints?
• How can I keep customers engaged with my brand?
• How do I build brand advocates and loyalty?

If these are questions that you are looking to answer, consider checking out our client TRAPO, the Malaysia-based leading car accessories provider in Asia.

TRAPO needed to move from its existing complex ecommerce website to a much simpler, centralized and personalized system. Additionally, the company was on the lookout for a platform that would easily sync with all the other marketing tools it had in place to better streamline the process. By centralizing their marketing, TRAPO automated its communications and retargeted its customers via different touchpoints, improving brand loyalty and skyrocketing revenue by 300%.

“The challenge for us as a business was the delivery of consistent and constant customer engagement. And with the industry becoming increasingly competitive, the key is to remain relevant and keep the audience engaged. However, with dotdigital on board, we were able to achieve that competitive edge with our creative and tailormade campaigns,” said Ionut Danifeld, Chief Marketing Officer at TRAPO Asia.

Read the full customer success story.

New Year’s resolution #2: Personalize and segment

Perhaps most important for digital marketers, is staying ahead of the game by keeping up to date with the latest market trends.

As digital marketers, we look to constantly improve processes to help drive efficiency and conversion. To start, we should identify a couple of goals we’d like to fundamentally achieve. For example:

• Gain a competitive edge over competitors
• Streamline current processes
• Run more targeted campaigns to drive more conversions

Understanding of your customers’ interests will drive more revenue when you send marketing communications to them via dynamic content, catered uniquely to their individual needs. For example, Australia’s largest sampling service, bellabox, personalized its communications and segmented customer profiles, witnessing a 22.5% return rate and a click-through open rate of 51%. This in turn led to an increase in email marketing revenue of 156% in the past 12 months to August 2020.

“Our partnership with dotdigital has been highly rewarding and has enabled us to overcome challenges, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. dotdigital has not only allowed us to update our email marketing creatives and create strong retention strategies, but also capitalize on lapsed customers and win them back. Recently, we hit a milestone by selling three million boxes! I can’t wait to see where we go from here,” added Alana, Customer Marketing Manager at bellabox.

Read the full bellabox customer success story.

New Year’s resolution #3: Capture abandoned cart customers

• 56% of brands don’t send cart recovery emails. Are you one of them?
• Are you leaving easy money on the table?

These are the questions we should be asking as digital marketers.

Did you know that 79% of carts are abandoned globally? By deploying abandoned cart automation, businesses see a huge conversion recovery ratio.

Furniture retailer Miss Amara partnered with dotdigital to explore its automation functionalities and solutions. By using dotdigital, Miss Amara is currently running automated abandoned cart programs, allowing them to recover 51.6% of carts abandoned, which directly translates to $6,998,817 in recovered revenue!

Read the full customer success story here.

New Year’s resolution #4: Recency, frequency, and monetary analysis

We often find clients not utilizing their data to engage with their customers more relevantly.

Australian natural health retailer Caruso’s Natural Health’s ‘Singles’ Day campaign’ focused on an omnichannel strategy, customer engagement, and digital support. The key differences became evident once dotdigital implemented its latest recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) value model and dashboards. By using RFM analysis, Caruso’s Natural Health had an in-depth understanding of its customers based on clear customer segments. Through this, Caruso’s Natural Health saw a 25% increase in revenue.

By taking the RFM approach, you will gain a clear understanding of your champion vs. inactive customers. Using this knowledge, you can start rewarding your customers for their loyalty. For example, to ensure you don’t erode revenue you might want to send a larger discount offer to re-engage your inactive customers, as opposed to your champion customers, who are already spending big with you.

Diana Uribe, Digital Specialist at Caruso’s Natural Health said, “We wanted to use dotdigital to understand how to better communicate with our customers in a conceptual and personal manner. The RFM personas have enabled us to refine our customer database and build improved segments while delivering tailored campaigns for existing and new customers alike.”

Read the full Caruso’s Natural Health customer success story.

New Year’s resolution #5: Utilize product recommendations

Finally, product recommendations!

This is an essential step for all digital marketers to deploy as it provides upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

The world’s most successful non-alcohol spirit distributor, Lyre’s, does this perfectly by sending across campaigns with relevant product recommendations. With an ever-growing product line up, Lyre’s used dotdigital’s product recommendation algorithm to upsell and cross-sell to its customers, by recommending the next best product. Through this, Lyre’s saw a 53% increase in conversion rates and 65% growth in click-to-open rates.

Ashleigh Murray, VP Global eCommerce at Lyre’s, “Memorable customer experience remains a top priority for businesses, which is impossible to achieve without the proper understanding of who your customers are. As the industry becomes competitive and content-driven, it’s important to remain relevant and engaging at the same time. Partnering with dotdigital enabled us to leverage the data collected through the automation tools, segment them, and create highly engaging content for our customers.”

Read the Lyre’s customer success story.

I hope you can utilise these 5 “New Year’s Resolutions” achieve your digital marketing goals for 2021 and help you drive revenue for your business in 2021. We are happy that this post was picked as one of top pieces to be included in the email marketing trends post for 2021 from emailmonday. Be sure to check it out for even more trends and predictions.

If you’d like to find out more, feel free to contact me at aloysius.soh@dotdigital.com to have a quick chat, or sales@dotdigital.com if you’re outside APAC. If you’d like a quick demo of Dotdigital.