The email customer contact cycle

Essentially, successful email marketing develops through a multi-step process, let’s just call it the email customer contact cycle.

1. Procurement Phase. This is the hunting and gathering phase. This is the time when you identify your market, create the best offer for your business, and find and promote your best prospects by sending an email to your best potential target audience. It’s time to create sales-worthy copy and design that will persuade these prospects to “sign up” for whatever you’ve considered your offer. Of course, you can acquire new email addresses to add to your home list by means other than email (for example, direct mail postcards and TV and radio ads to get people to sign up).

2. Test Phase. This can be part of the acquisitions phase, of course, but it should be viewed and treated as an ongoing part of your overall email marketing plan. By regularly testing and retesting what works and what doesn’t in terms of bids, email lists, creatives, and other components, you’ll hone and deploy your best possible efforts promotion after promotion, campaign after campaign.

3. Retention Phase. Once you’ve rounded up your prospects, and even turned some of them into customers or customers, it’s time to develop a way to keep them. This is the most profitable side of the business because now that those prospects/customers are part of your home list, you are not burdened with the often heavy list acquisition costs like external email lists. This is also the time when you build a true “relationship” with your customers through one-on-one marketing, personalizing your messages, and showcasing products that fit their wants and needs. By doing so, you can solicit their endorsement of your products and services, thus getting back to goal one: acquiring a new set of customers through the use of viral marketing and other loyalty and referral programs.[hatfittheirwantsandneedsBydoingsoyoucanthenaskfortheirendorsementofyourproductsandservicestherebygettingbacktogoalone-acquiringanewsetofcustomersthroughtheuseofviralmarketingandotherloyaltyandreferral-typeprograms[hatfittheirwantsandneedsBydoingsoyoucanthenaskfortheirendorsementofyourproductsandservicestherebygettingbacktogoalone-acquiringanewsetofcustomersthroughtheuseofviralmarketingandotherloyaltyandreferral-typeprograms

An email campaign covers all three phases of the previous cycle. And there are methods for developing and fine-tuning the critical steps needed within each phase. To acquire new customers, for example, the lists you use need to be accurate when it comes to targeting, which means your list research needs to be thorough and approached, at least in part, like a science.

There are hundreds of prospect lists out there; however, some of them are completely ineffective or suitable only for the most select niche audiences. Finding the right lists is the key to email marketing success. It’s all a matter of doing your homework.

Also, you should keep in mind that in order to segment an audience correctly for optimal results, you need to be well-versed in testing strategies. In other words, you need to know the methodologies behind creating and running tests that will identify winning promotions and campaigns you can use in the coming months.

I should probably also point out here that email is not for those who are only willing to take “baby steps”; To truly reap all the potential rewards that email marketing offers, you must plan and test aggressively. For example, I would not recommend email for those who can only send a single promotion to a very small, untested list of, say, 2000 names or less.

Most likely you won’t get a good answer. And if that happens, what is your profit? What can you learn? In a word: Nothing. Likewise, that doesn’t mean you have to send emails to 100,000 email addresses to be successful.

It just means you have to be a bit aggressive (but smart); and at the same time, you have to be prepared to take a few hits. However, you need to make sure you have backups in place to help take advantage of those successes. Those backups come from knowledge, and that knowledge comes from testing.

Creativity can certainly go a long way in executing a promotional email. However, compelling copy isn’t just about presenting your features and benefits in a neat little package. It is the art of selling. and Pace and Tone It’s all about giving your audience of readers everything they need to make the final buying decision.