Posted by Gareth Cutter on 21st August 2009 to
Best Practice Sometimes we like to take practical examples of email marketing strategy in action, just to demonstrate to readers how effective email marketing can be at driving responses. We recently helped one of our clients create a winning strategy that incorporated not one, two or even three email marketing tactics – but a grand total of four.
This particular client wanted to:
- Learn more about the people on its mailing list
- Use this intelligence to target contacts more effectively
- Give recipients the option to 'opt-in' to similar offers from partner companies
- Strengthen its brand at the same time
A set of objectives this broad needed a strategy to match: when our client broadcast the email, we made sure we a) had a suitable incentive for people to share information and b) focused on a strong call to action.
1) Recipients were notified of a competition our client was running via email, which they could enter simply by clicking through a link in the email to a landing page, hence the strong call to action.
2) Recipients were then asked to fill in a number of fields in a data capture form; this allowed our client to collect the data they wanted for profiling and segmentation.
3) An 'opt-in' box was also included in the form, asking entrants whether they would like to receive notification of similar offers from partner companies.
4) The final email marketing tactic was to send a confirmation email to entrants, notifying them of their successful entry automatically. This was done through the use of auto-responders, which included personalisation fields and made the email relevant to each individual recipient.
This 'four step' strategy was successful in engaging the mailing list and spreading virally across the Internet, so our client was able to gather information on a much broader segment of the population by using a landing page that was accessible to anyone with the URL. While there's some truth to the statement, 'less is more', this just goes to show that sometimes it’s best to go with all guns blazing, combining multiple email marketing tactics to drive the response you want.
