eBook - Silverpop

Email Evangelist: Your Other
Marketing Role
I can see many places in
Q: my company where email,
or a better implementation
of email, could solve so many
problems. Should I offer my
team’s email expertise, or does
that cross too many boundaries?
As marketers, we get so wrapped up in
A: the daily issues of email, such as promotions,
deliverability and list growth, that we
often don’t see all the ways email can help meet
other departmental goals and objectives.
But that immersion has also taught us more
than anyone else about how email works and
what its possibilities are. We need to find opportunities
in other departments where email can
drive value and achieve business objectives.
By turning into the resident email expert, you
not only get the chance to solve serious problems
in other departments but also to shore up
email as a valuable channel.
You’ll need to spend time with other department
heads, finding out their pain points, learning
what they hope to achieve, and devising
ways to incorporate your email resources into
the process.
These may be standard goals such as working
with finance to determine ways to help increase
profit margins. Or it might be helping reduce
customer support tickets for frequently asked
questions or issues.
The following are just a few examples of areas
where you can use email to help other departments
achieve their business goals:
Finance/MIS/HR:
Finance and MIS are typically looking to reduce
costs, while HR is focused on employee retention,
satisfaction and recruitment.
• Identify and promote higher-margin products
or premium services and match your
subscriber database with purchase history or
Web activity to identify good prospects.
• Timely and cost-effective communications to
investors and other stakeholders.
• Your CFO is probably very focused on reducing
travel costs, underutilized software licenses,
etc. Employee newsletters can be extremely
effective in educating your workforce and
communicating these corporate initiatives.
• Beyond the employee newsletter, human
resources can tap into other external newsletters
to help communicate corporate values and
open positions to help in recruitment efforts.
Customer Support/Training:
Email can help trim costs without sacrificing customer
contact by driving subscribers to automated
services, online customer support/FAQs and online
bill payment.
One of our clients has calculated that outbound
email costs 1/60th of what it costs for call-center
reps to make outbound calls.
• Promote surveys via email to measure customer
satisfaction and use of products and
services.
• Newsletters can educate customers on how
to use specific features, with links to user forums
and social-media channels where users
can post questions and advice.
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