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Develop an Email Marketing Strategy
Give marketing the help it needs without getting dragged into the IT weeds.
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Introduction
Most enterprises need an email marketing service or bureau (EMB). It’s not if,
it’s when. IT leaders must ensure that marketing gets the tool it needs while
minimizing disruption to core IT functions.
This Research Is Designed For:
This Research Will Help You:
 Mid-management IT and marketing staff seeking an
 Understand email marketing trends.
email marketing solution
 Their email marketing use case may include:
• Nurturing leads
• Acquiring new customers
 Evaluate email marketing vendors and products for
your enterprise needs.
 Develop your email marketing implementation
strategy.
• Building mind-share
• Engaging consumers
• Complementing existing marketing initiatives
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Executive Summary
Understand Email Marketing Trends and Considerations
Email marketing technologies have evolved from point solutions into comprehensive systems that allow organizations to
optimize any or all of the following functions:
◦
◦
◦
◦
Integrate data from social media marketing campaigns into email marketing campaigns.
Track consumer behavior throughout the customer lifecycle.
Nurture leads by offering them information customized to their preferences and behavioral patterns.
Engage consumers through tailored interactions with consumer segments.
• Understand your needs, potential costs, and your readiness to undertake an email marketing initiative before taking the
leap.
Evaluate Email Marketing Vendors
• Leverage the tools and templates included in this solution set to accelerate selection of an email marketing vendor.
Develop Your Email Marketing Implementation Strategy
• Distinguish the different strategic objectives of email marketing initiatives.
• Lay out a deployment architecture and capture additional implementation and operational costs and benefits.
• Realize short and long-term benefits with a phased implementation plan.
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Understand Email Marketing Trends and
Considerations
What’s in this Section:
• What is email marketing – and what is it not?
• The role of email marketing within overall marketing
initiatives.
• Key decision factors for email marketing.
• Assessing the appropriateness of email marketing.
Sections:
Understand Email Marketing
Trends and Considerations
Evaluate Email Marketing
Vendors
Develop Your Email Marketing
Initiative
Appendix
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Understand what email marketing does, and what it
doesn’t do
Email marketing: an economical tool to increase consumer engagement,
nurture leads, and convert prospective customers.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing allows organizations to directly communicate with clients and leads via email. Email marketing is the
cheapest form of marketing relative to number of audience reached. Advances in consumer tracking, segmentation, and
marketing automation have elevated success rates to a very high level. Only 4% of users report that no benefits are
attained.
What does email marketing do?
•
•
•
•
Targets marketing efforts onto a contact
database built on certain desirable criteria.
Augments brand mind-share nationally or
globally at low costs relative to alternatives.
Customizes marketing campaigns in
accordance with contact’s preferences and
behavior.
Deploys marketing campaigns quickly and
frequently.
•
•
•
•
Segments contact database into granular
level of interest to the organization.
Allows for continuous interaction with a
client or lead on a scheduled basis.
Complements overall marketing initiative by
offering a two-way channel of contact.
Informs clients and leads of new products and
services.
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IT Leader Joe: “But it’s marketing’s problem, not mine!”
Meet Joe, an experienced IT professional who was recently promoted to a middle
management position within his company’s IT department. In his first month on the
job, Marketing Dan approached Joe about an email marketing initiative, requesting
his feedback on which vendor the firm should go with.
“When I was in IT, it was difficult to see things from the marketing department’s
perspective and I never had to. Now as a manager, I realize the importance of
coordinating with other departments.”
IT Joe’s role:
• Belongs to a medium-sized company with roughly 11,000
North American consumers.
• Uses Salesforce CRM software to maintain their client
database.
• Operates other platforms almost entirely in a Microsoft
ecosystem.
• Interacts solely with staff from other departments.
• Controls all of the firm’s email channels.
• Tackles several ongoing projects requested by internal
customers.
An email marketing initiative has to be a
collaborative effort by IT people,
marketing people, people who manage
your CRM and whoever else that
maintains your data!
- Stephanie Miller, VP,
Digital Messaging Solutions, Aprimo
• Lacks sufficient staff to take on any new ongoing projects.
Keep an eye out throughout this storyboard for updates on how Joe is doing.
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Marketing Dan has a simple vision to send email to contacts
Clients and Prospects
The clients and prospects have signed
up for communication but don’t want to
be spammed.
Marketing
•
•
Marketing Dan wants to send messages
to clients and prospects. His vision is to
use his email editor to compose the
message and send it to everyone on his
mailing list.
He would like some additional features:
o Templates for standard emails.
o Some indication of campaign
effectiveness.
Marketing often treats email like a corporate drinking
fountain, where they go when they are thirsty for cash.
- John Caldwell, Consultant, Red Pill Email
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IT Joe has four immediate concerns with marketing’s vision
1. Spam laws and black lists
STOP
4. Impact on IT
The email marketing initiative
depends on other components of
the IT infrastructure. The client
list, for example, should come from
the CRM system and the actual
sending of email should have no
impact on internal email service.
3. Integration with other
strategies
Email is only one marketing
channel. Marketing departments
must coordinate with other
initiatives such as search
optimization and social networking
strategies.
There are a number of factors that limit
this vision:
1. Spam laws preventing the sending
of unsolicited email.
2. Inability to monitor and manage
completes and bounces.
3. Lack of integration with other
marketing strategies.
4. Impact on existing IT
infrastructure.
Different countries and regions
have adopted different legislation to
manage the spread of unsolicited
bulk email. The USA, Canada,
Europe, and Australia all have
different but similar legislation.
Failure to comply with this
legislation can result in fines or
litigation. A greater concern for
marketers, however, is that their
domain will be “black listed” by
popular spam filters.
See Appendix for a discussion of
the history of spam and different
spam laws.
2. Completes and bounces
Messages sometimes don’t arrive.
Full mailboxes, and other temporary
factors can cause soft bounces.
Erroneous domain names and other
permanent factors can cause hard
bounces.
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Marketing and IT agree: Get an email marketing bureau!
Marketing Dan can access the
email marketing bureau (EMB)
directly through his Web browser.
Benefits for IT
•
Internal IT Infrastructure
•
•
IT systems are insulated from the impact of
sending a large volume of email.
Message creation and the timing of sending can
be completely determined by marketing.
Protection from having the corporate domain
blacklisted.
CRM
Email Marketing Bureau
Benefits for Marketing
•
•
•
•
•
Ability to manage multiple
e-marketing campaigns.
List scrubbing.
Tracking based on geography or
other segmentation.
Standard email templates.
Creation of Web landing pages for
response tracking.
The EMB synchronizes with the
CRM system to maintain
contact master data. It can also
aid in campaign management
by tracking social networking
reactions and by integrating
with Web analytics systems.
Info-Tech Insight
VERP (Variable Envelope
Return Paths) is the key
enabling technology.
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EMBs resolve three challenges faced by all enterprises
Challenge #1: Acquiring Customers
•
•
•
•
•
•
Maintain a list of leads and keep current based on activity levels.
Track trends in prospects’ interests in order to better appeal to prospects.
Remind prospects of services and product offerings corresponding to foreseen demand spikes.
Tailor marketing to appeal to the interests of targeted leads.
Reach a huge number of leads relatively easily and quickly.
Build effective lists with the integration of email and social media marketing.
Challenge #2: Engaging Customers
•
•
•
•
•
•
Follow up with customers quickly and on an ongoing basis.
Provide interactive features in the email with the help of social media integration.
Promote content sharing by allowing customers to fill out surveys and view responses.
Provide links to profile creation, discussion, and registration pages.
Offer promotions and contests for client participations.
Keep customers up to date about advancements and new features of products and services.
Challenge #3: Complying with Legal Frameworks
•
•
•
•
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Ensure that permission levels of contact databases are up to date.
Enforce all spam compliance laws such as privacy policy links and unsubscribe links.
Take advantage of third party security certifications in order to ensure email delivery.
Regulate the frequency of email deployment to avoid flagging.
Stay on top of new spam compliance laws across different countries, and their requirements.
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IT Joe’s key challenge: How does he work with marketing?
Joe recognizes that email marketing is primarily a marketing activity.
So what is his role?
EMB Selection Process
Overall Process
•
•
•
•
•
•
Work with Marketing Dan to create an appropriate plan.
Address the concerns presented by marketing.
Choose a vendor which complements IT’s current infrastructure.
Help with implementation of the marketing software.
Identify areas in which IT might be required to step in during marketing initiatives.
Plan for how IT will address these areas without taking up too much time.
Key Considerations
• The email marketing software should integrate with the current Salesforce CRM so that IT
does not have to spend time manually updating their client list.
• The EMB should offer spam checks in accordance with the geographic location of clients to
prevent the hassle of keeping up to date with international spam laws which might affect the
health of their email channels.
• The email marketing software should handle the volume of email sent without downtime so
that the email channels are not clogged with pending messages.
• The email marketing software should allow marketers to easily create landing pages and
subscribe links so that IT will not be called in during marketing initiatives.
IT Joe ensures that he has the right plan in place.
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