This Could be the Start of Something Big! - Making the Most of Email Welcome Campaigns
This blog post about Email Campaigns is brought to you by Dylan and Stream:20, who are recruiting an Email Consultant, see Chinwag Jobs for more information.
Would you turn up to a first date with a spare set of house keys to hand over? Or immediately launch into conversation about which school to send your future children to? Hopefully not. There's a time and a place and that certainly isn't it.
The key to lifecycle management is putting a face to the names in your database. Just like you have different relationships with different people at different times in your life, so you should reflect this in your email marketing strategy.
A lot of time, effort and money is put into newsletters and standardised communication with customers/users/members which bear no relation to where in the chain recipients are. While these certainly have a place once the user is familiar with your product/comms, many businesses are missing a trick.
Now back to that cheesy dating analogy. Your eyes meet across a crowded room, you spend the evening talking, laughing, flicking your hair. You exchange numbers and head home, excited about what the future holds. A week goes by. Nothing. Two weeks. Nothing. Suddenly, out of the blue your date calls to tell you that they're selling their car - are you interested?. What?! They're clearly mad so you delete their number and hope never to hear from them again.
OK, so it's a slightly laboured explanation but it's impossible to overstate the importance of welcome campaigns.
New list members are keen, fired up and raring to go, they just need pointing in the right direction. A classic welcome campaign might be split into four:
- Hi there, how's it going? Welcome to 'XYZ', it's great to have you. Why not visit us/tell us a bit more about yourself (preference centre). We'd like to send you three more messages over the next 'X' days (setting expectations).
- Hey, it's us again. We'd love to tell you more about us and help you out (educational).
- So it's been 'X' days, hope you're having a good time. I saw this and thought of you (up-sell/x-sell).
- Hope everything's going well. I'm going to leave you to it for a bit, but why not keep looking at this/let us know what you think? (encouraging ongoing engagement - reviews, forums, social). We'll be in touch soon with a newsletter.
Apart from anything else, it's just good manners. And it makes you look less like a nutter.
A word from Stream:20:
...Aside from being frequent daters, the Stream:20 Email team consult to some of Europe's largest email marketing programs and the client list is growing. If you have ever considered putting your talent to work on the full eCRM spectrum - it might be worth having a word with Stream:20.
Photo (cc) LAC/BAC
