Is It Time To Revisit Your Email Strategy?

Leading distribution marketing teams have found a way to connect with their customers and prospects on a personal level. Is your team up to the challenge? Are you still sending mass marketing emails based on the latest vendor flyers or are you making highly targeted offers to your customers based on their preferences, behaviors and sales histories?

Has Email Marketing Really Changed?

On the one hand, the heart of email marketing is the same as it was 15 years ago. But email marketing in distribution has changed quite dramatically thanks to recent advances in technology. How do we reach customers with valuable information in the most cost-effective way? Access to sales data allows your team to very quickly profile highly targeted lists so that you can create emails with the exact right content, product selection, contact personalization and timing.

Why Are Personalized Campaigns Important?

It all comes down to authenticity. Customers expect that you know them, understand their business and can add specific value to their lives. If you can’t do those basic things, they will take their business elsewhere. It would be a shame to actually provide all of that value and then turn around and look clueless in your next email campaign. Your prospects are still learning about you and your business. The wrong offer could send them packing before you even get a chance to engage with them.

A personalized campaign demonstrates how much you really understand about you customers. Perhaps more importantly, a carefully crafted and personalized email demonstrates that you want to be a valuable partner in their business while mass emails hint at a more transactional relationship.

There could still be a time and place for mass email campaigns. You might be communicating important company-wide news. You might have a great vendor offer that applies to a larger list than normal. You might have a bunch of leads who you’ve never worked with before so you have no sales history to give you any insights. But as your relationships go deeper, your email strategy should deepen as well.

How Does SMP Make My Campaigns Better?

SMP is unique because it brings sales and ERP data together into a single CRM and business intelligence platform. SMP users can easily create and send focused and personal messages to profiled lists. Because list profiling is a matter of a few mouse clicks, it actually takes less time to profile a list and set up an email campaign than it does the old fashioned, mass-marketing way with spreadsheets and third-party programs.

SMP allows you to drive strategy through analytics. You don’t have to wait for IT help with your data analysis, because SMP is so easy to use. Anyone can drag-and-drop new data visualizations, perform an analysis and then create a new list based on those insights. You can look at any number of data points to help predict behavior.

For example, you might compare previous purchasing behavior to better understand which products to offer in an up-sell campaign. Or you could profile a list of customers who also work with a particular competitor to try to win more business.

Most CRM packages treat your customers as just numbers. SMP gives you the power to explore data and create easy to understand visualizations that really tell each customer’s story. And with the tight integration to your ERP data and a powerful email marketing solution, you can quickly act on personalized insights for better success.