With the recession putting marketing budgets under ever more pressure, brands will inevitably be forced to be more creative with their e-mail campaigns and distribution. Here are six tips for gathering new customers without dropping your existing service levels.

1.    Look after your loyal customers

Changes in consumer behaviour will likely mean you need to revisit your current customer segmentation strategy. Let’s say customers in your top segment typically spend £500 a year; now assume that the economy forces these customers to cut back and spend only £400 a year.  Those £400 spenders are still loyal customers – tightening their belts, but still worthy of VIP status. Adjusting your parameters will be critical in order to avoid alienating your core customer base.

2.    Automate revenue-generating programmes

Implement automated trigger-based email campaigns, these are campaigns that send out messages based on actions taken by a recipient. Triggered e-mail messages offer a two-fold advantage. First, because they are automated they enable cost-effective programme management. Second, they ensure contact with customers at the most timely points in the relationship and buying cycle, thus delivering consistently high ROI results. In fact, it is not unusual for a triggered message to deliver upwards of five times higher revenue when compared to a standard broadcast e-mail.

3. Think of new ways to expand your email lists

Those loyal customers I mentioned earlier are also your brand advocates, and perhaps the best option for acquiring new customers. With new names getting harder to acquire, we recommend a strategy of ‘acquitention’. Although not a word that rolls off the tongue, the rationale behind it is solid. By devising a strategy aimed at acquiring the email addresses of long term, loyal customers who purchase through other channels, for example point-of-sale, in-store and loyalty card customers, not only are you likely to boost online sales, you will find that offline purchases by these customers are likely to increase also. There is plenty of research to support the view that the more channels a customer uses to purchase your product, the higher the lifetime value of that customer.  By focusing on acquitention, you could significantly increase your email lists as well as build loyalty and online sales.

4.    Fine tune your e-mail frequency

There will be plenty of temptation (not to mention management pressure) to ramp up the frequency of your email. Increasing frequency is fine, as long as you are intelligent about it. Do so by adding relevant programmes that target a particularly active segment of customers, or an opt-in programme that sets the expectation with customers that these messages will arrive more frequently. Simply blitzing the inbox may increase revenue in the short-term, but it could devastate your customer list with unsubscribes – including the loyal customers you have invested so much time and money in acquiring.

5.    Test your programmes for good measure

Times are tough, and you may be tempted to discard with your testing programmes in order to save budget. The truth is that it is more important than ever to understand which campaigns are performing the best, and why. Save money instead by focusing your budget on improving the highest performing programmes. Testing against a control will help you identify which programmes are yielding the greatest return on investment, and how you can enhance them.

6.    Be prepared to defend your budget

E-mail has all the essential qualities a CFO looks for in a tough economy: it’s measurable, predictable, and profitable. In fact, it’s not unreasonable to think that your CFO will want to put more budget into e-mail, even as cuts are being made in other areas. But don’t be complacent. Be prepared to defend your budget.

No budget item is off limits, including your e-mail marketing budget. Be prepared to show your executive management how each e-mail sent converts to sales and provide them with an accurate measurement of your programme’s return on investment. The beauty of email is that all of this data is at your fingertips.

By Simone Barratt
MD e-Dialog