eBook - Silverpop

What NASCAR Can Teach You
About Email Organization
I want to revamp our
Q: email program for greater
performance, but how do I
know whether I have the right
technology, resources and
creative partners in place to
reach our goals and achieve
success?
One key to answering this question is
A: determining how much you’ll need to
have your own hands in the marketing mix.
The old enterprise email marketing model,
where most correspondences were one-off
broadcast messages, is being replaced.
That approach, basically, was this: “We’ve got
five product emails we’ve got to push out this
week, let’s toss them over to the agency or
creative ESP team, send them off and move on
to the next communication.” That isn’t going
to work much longer.
In its place is a move toward multifaceted
programs and campaigns that are triggered
by customer behaviors. That relates directly to
one of the biggest trends among savvy email
marketers: creating more behavior-based and
automated programs.
These campaigns are much more strategic,
requiring a deep knowledge of the business.
They need to be designed, tweaked,
monitored and continually optimized by
someone who understands the intricacies of
the company.
In addition, transitioning from batch-and-blast
emails to more behavior-based automated
programs typically requires working closely
with your IT team as you’re pulling data from
multiple sources (CRM, e-commerce, business
intelligence and more).
Much of this work is front-loaded as your email
strategy changes, but it’s also critical that you have
internal control over these relationships so you can
make changes quickly.
For these reasons, sophisticated campaigns are
more difficult to fully outsource. Think of email
marketers as NASCAR drivers. Their pit crews
are essential members of the team, but during
the actual race, the driver is the one in there with
his hands on the wheel maneuvering a high-tech
piece of machinery at high speeds and in heavy
traffic.
A race-car driver has to adjust on the fly to track
conditions, vehicle performance and other
drivers. So, too, must an email marketer juggle
many different messaging tracks and data points
simultaneously, requiring quick mid-course
adjustments to keep a few laps ahead of the
competition?
So, while a full-service model might make sense
for some of those “throw-it-over-the-wall”
companies, others will want to focus on improving
efficiency and performance by maintaining greater
control of their integrated email marketing efforts.
That’s because YOU know your audience best and
will benefit from a solution that puts the power in
your hands so you can, for example, modify postpurchase
email campaigns that drive revenue on
the fly.
How does that translate in terms of making sure
you have the right tools, team and resources in
place? In my experience, it’s difficult for a vendor
to be both a best-in-class software provider and a
world-class agency.
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