Consumer preferences are evolving. But is your marketing strategy evolving with them? As the value everyone places on their time increases, the easy road of bombarding customers with high-volume, multi-channel communications that are irrelevant, generic, or poorly timed no longer works.
smart marketing: build more rewarding relationships
Fortunately, it’s never been simpler to deliver carefully personalized, deeply engaging content to your customers and subscribers. This increases the metrics around your marketing efforts while raising the perception of your company. At WhatCounts, we call this Smart Marketing. By leveraging advanced data collection and automated message delivery, companies can develop and deploy unique content that fits recipients’ needs, values their time, and increases their loyalty.
don’t treat your customers like strangers
Today’s consumers are wise to basic email marketing practices. Simply using their name in the subject line is no longer enough to stand out. If a subscriber still feels like another entry in a database after opening a message (if they even do that), you won’t keep their attention for long. Personalization is an amazing practice that builds engagement, earns consumer loyalty, and increases brand awareness with each message sent.
send amazing content
Every message sent to your email lists should be timely, relevant, and unique. That aspect of uniqueness should be the result of a symbiotic relationship with your subscribers. Every way they engage with your message is data that should be used to tailor the content you send them. The more data you have, the more amazing messages you can craft. You can now engage each individual on a personal level.
tap into valuable consumer data
This leads to the third aspect of Smart Marketing. Personalization increases customer loyalty. And as a result, customers share more information for you, which allows for the creation of a more relevant brand experience for them. Personalization builds more rewarding relationships with your customers while fueling new insights into your most active markets.
best practices to optimize the customer experience
Smart Marketing turns every email you send into a more rewarding conversation. Richer customer data reveals valuable new market insights. Enhanced subscription options let customers control the experience. Advanced segmentation drives the development of personalized, relevant content to each individual on your list.
dive into consumer data
By optimizing your existing customer data, enriching it with additional detail, and then tracking each individual’s responses to your marketing campaigns, Smart Marketing helps you observe, understand, and engage with your target market on a new level. You’ll understand who they are, what they want, and what motivates them to take action.
always offer choices
If you want to know what your customers really want, ask them through a preference site campaign. Preference sites are great way to provide options for your customers, allowing them to decide exactly what type of content they want to see from you. Preference centers build trust and relevance into your marketing campaigns by giving your subscribers greater control over the communication flow. The more control you give recipients, the more likely they are to engage positively with your brand.
create segments
Once consumer data is available, it’s time to organize and segment it. We mentioned one of the principles of Smart Marketing was to tap into this data, and we do this because segments are a great way to deliver hyper-personalized content to your email lists.
You start learning about your subscribers the minute you start sending to them: What they’re opening and clicking, what they’re browsing for and purchasing, and various other differentiators. Use this information to create unique messaging, and use the aforementioned preference centers to acquire more valuable data about the consumer — age, gender, education level, and location, just to name a few.
Use this data to segment your subscribers and build your email lists. The content sent to each segment will be unique and reflect that segment’s specific needs and preferences.
get the entire guide
After the principles of smart marketing and best practices to optimize the customer experience, there is automation, a/b testing and multi-channel communication. If you want to read these sections and learn more about optimized engagement, download our free ebook “The Guide to Optimized Engagement.” Don’t hesitate to reach out with any further questions. Our email experts are ready to help.
