The most used triggered email message stream generally surrounds abandoned shopping carts or website signups where you give your email but do not complete a profile. If you are not using triggered messages around abandoned shopping carts and signups, you should begin to do so (see a good article on how to get going form MarketingSherpa), the emails are effective and can help you address a customer’s (or potential customer) real issue in abandoning their purchase. The problem in my mind is that the very nature of these being triggered messages pulls the real personalization and chance to connect with the consumer out of the equation. These messages generally consist of a generic message indicating that you are receiving the message because you did not complete an action on the site sending you the email. If that action was a purchase, the site might use some dynamic information about what was in your shopping cart and if above a certain dollar threshold trigger a message that offers free shipping if you complete the purchase. Sites often will offer you other ways to get in touch with them including their social media profiles and will wrap with some generic information about how you are a valued customer (maybe even telling you when you first became a customer). For sites that need to scale to large volumes of abandoned carts or signups there is perhaps no other way, however for the businesses where each purchase still matters tremendously and where you are just building your customer base I think you can do better. Continue Reading…

Friend and mentor Paul Greenberg is fond of saying that we may be moving from a time of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to Customer Managed Relationships (CMR). It’s a statement that every company needs to take to heart. The number of channels with which customers engage with your company and each other obey no geographic boundaries and know no time zones. Where companies once had control of the channels and times with which they would engage customers the pendulum has decidedly swung the other way. While your office and customer support may be open 9-5 on the east coast of North America, your customers are talking to you and about you when they feel like it and on the channel of their choosing. Where companies used to have to facilitate the coming together of customers through user conferences, again at a time and place chosen by the company, today that same user base is spread across social channels, forums and connecting with one another without company involvement. How then should you react to this dramatic shift in consumer empowerment?  Continue Reading…

A really great example from the NBA’s Phoenix Suns (via Eloqua’s All About Revenue blog) on how using unique and deep personalization in your email marketing can drive incredible results. The Suns like any other business are looking to drive revenue from email marketing and similar to many other businesses know that their best chance at success is with previous customers, in this case former season ticket holders.  In order to make a truly personal and unique connection to their former consumers the Suns marketing team took a look at all the information available to them about these previous customers in their CRM system and tried to mine it for the most personal connection they could make. With that goal in mind they landed on a piece of information available to them about every former season ticket holder that was also completely personal to the particular customer, the date of their first season ticket purchase.  Continue Reading…

I participated  in a roundtable discussion with some marketing executives recently and one of the items I suggested was that they start asking customers and prospects for their social networking usernames when gathering information online and in person. The concept is of course not earth shattering but I was surprised at how few companies who want to interact with customers and prospects on social networks do not use the opportunities that they have to ask the simple question of what social networks are being used and how find the customer or prospect on that network.  Continue Reading…