Here’s some great news: Your customers want you to market to them. When it comes to consumer preferences for including marketing messages within service e-mails, their answers may surpise you.
Our research revealed that consumers have very well defined preferences when it comes to how companies can use e-mail to meet their service and marketing needs. Respondents to our 2005 View from the Inbox survey indicated that they were particularly amenable to the use of e-mail for service communications such as transaction confirmations (77%), shipping receipts (61%), and customer service (60%).
Now consider that fully two-thirds of respondants also indicated that they are open in varying degrees to receiving relevant marketing messages within those service e-mails. And approximately half of the respondents indicated that e-mail was a preferable channel for coupons, bills, newsletters, and promotions. Results like these simply cannot be ignored.
These responses highlight the use of e-mail for very targeted, personalized, and concise communications. Service e-mails in particular, such as transaction confirmations and account summaries, are by their very nature highly personalized and based on overt consumer behaviors. Getting the picture?
For most multichannel merchants, service-based messages are an untapped marketing opportunity. The key is to provide, first and foremost, the service that your customers value so highly. Otherwise the messages will simply be ignored. Only when you are providing the expected service will you be able to target receptive consumers with relevant content or offers within those messages.
What can you do to correctly and effectively incorporate marketing within service e-mails? First, you must assure that the consumer is receptive to this practice. You must also use stated preferences or historical data to ensure that the promotional message is relevant to the consumer’s interests.
It should come as no surprise that your data serve as the foundation for any program that integrates customized marketing content within service e-mails. Starting with the data–recipient list data and digital assets—is key. Any data describing a customer must be integrated with the marketing content. Once you’ve integrated these data, you then need to build in the business logic based on marketing objectives to ensure that the appropriate service and marketing-based content is 100% aligned with the targeted recipient.
It may also be necessary to bridge the gap between internal groups. Often service messages are operational and therefore handled by a different department than the marketing department. Marketers will need to collaborate with their internal partners. Looking for opportunities to more fully leverage the channel may mean simply looking next door.
Katie Cole, Ph.D., is vice president of research and analytics for Merkle|Quris, the e-mail marketing agency of Merkle. You can contact her at [email protected].