Category: Content Marketing

Mastering Your Email Marketing Strategy: Nurturing Relationships in the Inbox

6/5/2020

Establishing effective communication and nurturing a relationship with customers requires tact, respect, and a deep understanding of the value of the recipient's digital real estate. Here are 7 key things to keep in mind:

The success of an email campaign significantly depends on how you manage your place in your recipient's inbox, which is a fiercely competitive space filled with numerous messages each day.
The process of managing a digital mailbox is compared to handling a physical one. While a physical mailbox gets cleared daily, digital mailboxes are attended to more frequently, with decisions being influenced by the sender's identity, the email's importance, and the recipient's mental state.
The digital mailbox, unlike the physical one, only allows for a single subject line to grab the recipient's attention. The inbox holder faces the decision-exhaustion similar to that of a physical mailbox owner, with unwanted emails ending up in the trash or being marked as spam.
Building a relationship with customers via email is a consensus-based process. The granting of consent to send emails does not automatically establish a relationship; instead, it signals consent to explore the possibility of a relationship.
Marketers often misuse consent by assuming it as an invitation to inundate the customer's inbox with emails. This mistake often leads to emails being ignored, deleted, or marked as spam, highlighting the fact that a relationship still needs to be built post-consent.
Building a relationship involves managing the frequency of messages and their content. The messages should be aimed at building a relationship, treating the recipient as a more evolved version of the sender, someone they are keen to learn about and understand better.
It's important to respect the recipient's inbox, modulating the frequency of messages to meet shared mutual importance. Treating the potential of a relationship as a test, rather than assuming that consent implies a direct trigger to sale, improves the odds of success.

Email marketing should be seen as an opportunity to create and nurture relationships with recipients. Consent is merely the starting point, not an excuse to flood inboxes. By respecting the recipient's space, and approaching them with the intent to understand and value them, businesses can make their emails stand out.

The importance of empty words in the recognition of customer value

8/3/2018

See if this sounds familiar:
Going forward, we need to drill down into the customer priorities and engage a deep dive into our big data storage. This action will attack the issues we have found in customer satisfaction, which have not been addressed by our previous representatives. Our stakeholders are concerned about the lack of action in this matter, and want everyone to have a clear idea of the end of play situation we want to create, as well as the leverage we can bring upon the customer to deliver the new numbers that our growth planning requires. Fortunately, our thought leadership research group has come up with a set of actionable ideas that allows all of us to get in the tent and get a group aha effect going, so we are all clear on the end result we are trying to obtain, as quickly as possible.

Once you catch your breath after reading the paragraph above, you may appreciate the importance of verbal clarity when it comes to creating a plan to improve customer value recognition inside a business.

This is why the Digital Customer Investment Plan is called precisely that. It has a purpose that is easy to understand. It does not take a lot of energy on the part of a team to 'get' the objectives the plan provides and the methodology it uses. It should be self-evident. This accessibility, once the plan is created and agreed upon, allows the team to spend its energy focused on the things that matter, and not in getting into endless meetings to discuss 'what it all means' and 'what we are trying to do.'

Organizations that are small or medium sized may find this transition simpler because their focus on the customer may be more accessible to them, with fewer layers to work with and fewer years of history 'of how things are done around here' to work through.

Recognizing customer value may seem obvious, but it can become fragmented because individual areas of the organization view customer value through their own internal lenses. Accounting may view customer value in one way, while sales views a customer in a different, sales-related way, and of course, marketing views the customer in its own particular way.

Over time, this fragmentation sets in and prevents a clear view of the customer as someone who does not attend all the meetings and does not understand the internal history behind this or that decision. This is one way that organizations lose touch with their customer base.

Once this behavior sets in and is organizationally valid, the interests of the customer become secondary to the interests of the individual departmental groups laying claim to the 'real' value of the customer.

The integrated Digital Customer Investment Plan is designed to avoid these issues before they become chronic.

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Mastering Your Email Marketing Strategy: Nurturing Relationships in the Inbox

The importance of empty words in the recognition of customer value

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