With budgets tighter than ever before, marketers are being asked to do more with less. At the same time, however, consumers have never demanded more from the brands they chose to do business with.  It is not an easy time to be a marketer.  With more companies sending out more emails, you’ve got to do more to position your program above the competitive fray.

The good news is there are new innovations and proven tactics for better engaging customers and driving revenue. Here are three:

Lifecycle Marketing
Unsophisticated email campaigns treat all people the same, regardless of their interest level or  relationship to a product or service (e.g., interested, aware, engaged or apathetic). To strongly engage customers and gener­ate improved return on investment, you need personalised messaging that communicates more effectively than just blasting everyone with the same message.

Despite the advantages of lifecycle marketing, many marketers are con­fused about where to begin and are concerned about the additional work required to implement this strategy. If you’re not sure how to get started, try splitting your list into three simple groups, each with unique goals that align with the customers’ mindsets for each lifecycle stage.

• New Customers—email recipients who have expressed some desire for communication

• Unique goals: moving them to opt in to receive regular messages from you, visit your Web site, make an online purchase or visit a retail location
• Ideal messaging for achieving these goals: educational campaigns, welcome messages, promotions for first purchase

• Engaged Customers—consumers who are actively involved with the brand and expect to receive communications and, potentially, promotions from you

• Unique goals: maintaining or increasing purchase levels, strength­ening loyalty, encouraging recommendations to friends, and the delivery of efficient customer service
• Ideal messaging for achieving these goals: renewal notices, trans­actional emails with up sell or cross-sell offers, special promotions for top customers

• Lapsed Customers—people who have stopped opening and click­ing your emails or who no longer make purchases

• Unique goals: gaining an understanding of their concerns, attempt­ing to re-engage them with the brand, and preventing them from switching allegiance to another company
• Ideal messaging for achieving these goals: surveys that identify reason for lack of engagement, incentives to revisit the Web site, promotions to encourage purchases

As with many elements of sophisticated email marketing programs, the key to lifecycle marketing is getting started. The more you deliver relevant, tar­geted messages to prospects and customers, the better your results will be.

Customer Reviews
Consumers today are placing increased value on user-generated content, often trusting their peers’ opinions over advertising and other company-produced materials when making purchase decisions. For email marketers, this provides a golden opportunity to increase engagement by including customer product reviews in emails, making your messaging both relevant and persuasive.

To build up your database of user-generated reviews, set up an automated trigger that sends a message requesting a product review one or two weeks after a purchase. You can then populate personalised emails with these reviews according to each recipient’s interests or purchase history, resulting in messages that are more targeted and engaging to recipients.

Courting customers to offer reviews can also help increase brand loyalty. Consider rewarding top contributors by giving them a VIP reviewer status or delivering sneak peeks at new products. Not only will you encourage these customers to generate even more content, you’ll also be creating an army of brand advocates to help spread your message far and wide.

Social Sharing
Social network sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have changed the way people interact with friends. And they’ve also shifted the relation­ship between companies and their customers. Savvy engagement marketers use this new medium to connect more strongly with customers.

Much like successful email marketing requires more effort than blasting away at your customer list, getting your recipients to share your emails on social sites requires more effort than just dropping icons into your message template. For starters, you’ll need to educate your readers about how and why they should share your content. Feature your social-sharing option in your welcome messages. Devote prime space in your regular mailings to highlight the location and use of your sharing icons or links.

As with other aspects of email marketing, testing is key. That’s because while some of the best practices of email marketing still work when encour­aging recipients to post messages on social sites, there are differences and nuances in what generates the highest results. Since the social medium is still so new, the various best practices are still emerging and have yet to be agreed upon. So experiment with the placement of social network links in your messages (top, middle or bottom), what social networks you link to and how many social network links you include in your messages.

When connecting with customers using any of these email tactics, you’ll want to make sure to coordinate messaging across multiple channels, conveying a consistent and personalised experience. By using a mar­keting solution that integrates channels such as email, landing pages and social media, it’s easy to spread your message wide, but keep it focused.

By employing the email marketing techniques outlined here, you’ll engage customers in a way that sets you apart from the “noise” that’s currently overwhelming consumers, increasing brand loyalty and profits in the process.

Riaz Kanani
Director of marketing-international
Silverpop