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Relevance is the key to successful e-mail marketing, and most marketers employ at least some level of basic personalization in this day and age. But many still fail to reach true relevance. To help marketers deliver more targeted e-mail marketing campaigns, Redwood City, Calif.-based marketing and transactional e-mail solutions provider StrongMail Systems developed the AAIR (Access, Analysis, Insight, Response) process, which it outlined in its white paper, Four Steps to Relevancy in Email Marketing: The AAIR Methodology.
1. Access: to multiple customer databases and systems. Customer data is typically siloed in separate departments and dispersed throughout e-commerce, CRM, campaign management, Web analytics, and other systems and business applications, rendering it nearly impossible for marketers to leverage, the white paper says.
Historically, e-mail marketers have accessed data by working with an internal database administrator—building target-query lists from data sources—or building a marketing data store. Both these options have downfalls, however, namely the inefficiencies of relying on IT to build and manage the databases.
New technologies exist that allow direct integration into multiple data sources; aggregation of data from each system into a common namespace; normalization of this data set so marketers can slice and dice the data for analysis and targeting; and a facility to pass result information back to both a marketing data store and the actual systems of record. Review your current e-mail marketing solution to determine if it will allow you to easily integrate and pull customer data from all of your critical systems. Aggregating your customer data in one location allows you to gain unique insight into successful promotions, messages and events across multiple channels.
2. Analysis: advanced data analysis to identify key trends, profitable segments and effective channel integration. Go beyond the traditional, one-dimensional campaign performance metrics, the white paper suggests. Open and clickthrough rates need to be viewed alongside more critical metrics like conversion and across additional variables like customer segment or demographic, allowing marketers to communicate with customers in a truly one-to-one fashion.
3. Insight: into opportunities that present themselves based on data analysis. After the analysis is complete, digest the information and determine what insight can be gleaned. Build test and control groups to see if your insights are accurate and can be applied to drive response. For instance, try reducing the frequency for low responders to decrease the risk of unsubscribes, or test different offers for one segment versus another.
4. Response: the ability to respond to uncovered opportunities with programs that leverage trends, segments and synergies. Take what you’ve learned in your analysis and insights to respond to the data. Should you optimize the current program? Create a new segment of customers and introduce additional streams of e-mail? Develop benchmarks (increase in revenue, page views, etc.), and test your new or tweaked campaigns.
1. Access: to multiple customer databases and systems. Customer data is typically siloed in separate departments and dispersed throughout e-commerce, CRM, campaign management, Web analytics, and other systems and business applications, rendering it nearly impossible for marketers to leverage, the white paper says.
Historically, e-mail marketers have accessed data by working with an internal database administrator—building target-query lists from data sources—or building a marketing data store. Both these options have downfalls, however, namely the inefficiencies of relying on IT to build and manage the databases.
New technologies exist that allow direct integration into multiple data sources; aggregation of data from each system into a common namespace; normalization of this data set so marketers can slice and dice the data for analysis and targeting; and a facility to pass result information back to both a marketing data store and the actual systems of record. Review your current e-mail marketing solution to determine if it will allow you to easily integrate and pull customer data from all of your critical systems. Aggregating your customer data in one location allows you to gain unique insight into successful promotions, messages and events across multiple channels.
2. Analysis: advanced data analysis to identify key trends, profitable segments and effective channel integration. Go beyond the traditional, one-dimensional campaign performance metrics, the white paper suggests. Open and clickthrough rates need to be viewed alongside more critical metrics like conversion and across additional variables like customer segment or demographic, allowing marketers to communicate with customers in a truly one-to-one fashion.
3. Insight: into opportunities that present themselves based on data analysis. After the analysis is complete, digest the information and determine what insight can be gleaned. Build test and control groups to see if your insights are accurate and can be applied to drive response. For instance, try reducing the frequency for low responders to decrease the risk of unsubscribes, or test different offers for one segment versus another.
4. Response: the ability to respond to uncovered opportunities with programs that leverage trends, segments and synergies. Take what you’ve learned in your analysis and insights to respond to the data. Should you optimize the current program? Create a new segment of customers and introduce additional streams of e-mail? Develop benchmarks (increase in revenue, page views, etc.), and test your new or tweaked campaigns.
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