Connect with your customers while gaining valuable insights, writes Lee Thompson

As the era of cookie-based targeting draws to a close, there is a commercial imperative for businesses to try and control more of their own marketing destiny. A key ingredient in that is the growth and development of first party data assets. These assets bring brands closer to their audiences and provide a greater degree of certainty.

Logged-in users are happy to share their behaviours. They allow businesses to engage with them and this interaction provides a blueprint to help find similar audiences. The relationship is at its best when it’s reciprocal. The more data users share, the more insights brands derive, and the better the customer service and user experience should become. 

Email very often lies at the heart of the relationship between users and business. They act as a source of first party data and facilitate greater understanding of customer preferences. Outlined below are perspectives on how to run effective email marketing programmes.

Invest Unleash the power of email by investing in sophisticated marketing software. Platforms such as Klaviyo and Constant Contact allow you to own more of your marketing. You can centralise your data and put it to work, segment your audiences, and test and run a combination of scheduled and automated email activity.

Clean Out Your Email List Get a fresh start with your email marketing activity by cleaning out your email lists. Clean your lists about every six months to ensure that your audiences remain engaged. We advise clients to employ a reactivation strategy where people have not opened an email in three months or bought in the last six months. Engagement or not with a final generous incentive should tell its own story.

In Association with

Create A Marketing Plan You need to build your email list. We recommend offering a discount to all site visitors on condition they provide their email address. There will be scheduled activity to promote sale events, product launches and key milestones across the year. There could also be triggered email activity based on purchase events and cart abandonment. The goal is to segment audiences and act on signals. 

Generate Impact Use responsive design to cater for all devices. Write compelling copy, using a singular call-to-action. Convey benefit and urgency above the fold and use video where possible. Be brand aligned in terms of imagery and tone, and flow in customer testimonials where relevant. Use email footers to reinforce brand credibility and authority.

A/B Testing The best way to figure out what is working and what’s not is to perform tests. You can run a variety of tests on audiences, design and copy. Being able to track what is working best will lead to improvements. 

Segment Your Audiences The co-mingling of website data and email engagement will help you segment your email list into discrete audiences. This will help to deliver more relevant and converting emails.

Save Time, Create Flows Flows are emails that are sent automatically when certain actions are triggered, such as when someone enters their email on your website in response to a 20% discount offer.

Metrics, Metrics Use metrics to track the success of your email campaigns over time. You should be looking at delivery, open, click and conversion rates. At the same time, you should also be paying attention to unsubscribe and spam complaint rates. 

Resource Email will prove itself to be your most profitable sales channel over time - the best e-tailers rely on email for up to 15% of their online sales. Because there is a constant flow of data, email sees the highest conversion, re-purchase and average order value scores of all the online marketing channels. To capitalise on this, you need expertise in setting up and managing a high performance email programme.

+ Lee Thompson is Strategy Director at digital marketing agency Sing,