Profile Your Lists to Make Email More Relevant

One of the biggest surprises new SMP users have is how quickly they can see a return on investment from the right kind of email marketing. Maybe their email marketing in the past was undifferentiated, just sending blasts out to the entire customer base. They might have received a few clicks – if they could even track clicks – but they weren’t seeing real interactions. Maybe doing email marketing was just too hard before SMP and they were surprised how quickly they could create dynamic and laser-targeted marketing lists from right inside the system. SMP makes it very easy for any marketing team to reach the right customers with the right information without having to upload lists or do manual work inside of spreadsheets. Fast, easy and targeted emails create high ROI.

Relevant Emails Require Smart, Targeted Lists

When you first start using SMP for email marketing, one of the first changes you should make in your strategy is to stop looking at your list as one big monolithic list of customers. Think about ways you would want to profile email lists and segment your customers. Go crazy and think big because with SMP running a data visualization and creating a new list takes minutes not weeks. The more highly targeted your lists are, the more specific your messaging is to those targeted lists, the more relevant your messaging will be.

With SMP, you have a single system to manage all of your contact and email lists. You can quickly build static or dynamic lists. A static list is a list that doesn’t change based on behaviors and attributes. A dynamic list can change depending on buying behavior, customer type or any other attribute. And of course, if you attend a trade show or have a new list from another source, you can import ad hoc lists any time. SMP allows you to keep them separate or combine them with any other existing list.

Profiling your lists is about reaching the right contact with the right message at the right time. Personalized messaging boosts your response and makes your customers feel engaged. Even if they don’t respond, they know that you understand their particular needs.

Sales is the Last Mile of Any Campaign

Highly-targeted campaigns are even more effective when you follow up with sales calls and meetings. SMP makes it easy to create follow-up call campaign activities to the same lists with just a couple of clicks so that you know all of your teams are working together. What if your email list is too big for your sales reps to follow up on? You can easily add new data elements to the same data visualization you used to create your email list to pare it down to a more reasonable call list.

For example, maybe you pulled a list of all customers who bought products A and B but not C. But that list had 1,200 names and you only have enough bandwidth to make 200 calls. You could add another data dimension – perhaps the date of their most recent purchase – and sort your list so that your reps call the top 200 most recent customers about buying product C.

Because SMP combine BI with CRM and ERP data, it makes it easy to follow up on and manage these integrated campaigns across all of your teams.

Where Should You Start?

Because SMP is so powerful and allows you to quickly analyze many different cross-sections of customer data, you might wonder where to start in your profiling. Here are just a few simple suggestions to get you going:

• Look at different buyer profiles. Some customers deserve better treatment. If a customer is more profitable, place bigger orders and purchases with frequency, they should be treated better than less important customers. Recent buyers actually appreciate offers based on their recent purchases because they know you’re trying to work with them individually. Sending them an offer, even though they recently purchased, might bring them quickly back into your counter. You might pull a list of lapsed customers and send them special discounts to win their business back. With tight integrations to your ERP system, SMP makes it easy for you to profile email lists based on purchasing patterns.
• Don’t’ forget simple demographic information. Many distributors have trouble pulling even the most simple customer lists based on size, location, industry and more. We take advanced profiling for granted at SMP because we’ve made it simple to drill into all of your data. But even simple list targeting will improve your messaging. Don’t send quantity break offers to your smallest customers unless you want to alienate them. Don’t send offers for training in branches that are too far for a customer to reach unless you want their local branch to receive complaints. Don’t send sprinkler offers to contractors in Chicago in January.
• Compare purchasing trends. SMP makes it easy to create a list of customers who should be buying complementary products or taking advantage of training but aren’t. Sending them a personalized message about those products won’t even seem like a marketing message but will be viewed as great customer service.

Focus on the Quality of Your Email Content

Even with the power of SMP’s data visualization and list building capabilities, no matter how carefully you profile email lists a bad message will fail and a good message will succeed. The easiest tip to stay relevant in your messaging is to stop thinking about your company and start thinking about their company. Don’t write your emails based on what you want to sell that week. Customers don’t run their businesses based on what purchasing deals you made or what you have in stock. Take the time to analyze your customers and think about how you can improve their business. That’s what they want to hear about and that’s what will keep them opening your emails in the future.

If that sounds like hard work, it doesn’t have to be. Here are a few ways to make your emails more valuable.

• Exclusivity: Customer like feeling special. Now that you have carefully profiled lists, you can make specific offers that make them feel like part of an exclusive club. Provide training content based on purchase history. Give subscribers special discounts that they cannot get anywhere else. Issue exclusive invitations that only certain customers receive.
• Specificity: SMP makes it easy to quickly analyze your data to find connections that your customers wouldn’t otherwise make on their own. Make a list of people who make a lot of orders with a few lines each. Then, show them how they can consolidate their purchasing for lower cost and higher convenience. Make a list of people who shop only one brand and give them an incentive to broaden their purchasing habits. With SMP, you can create these kinds of lists on the fly in a matter of minutes, so you have no excuse for not providing specific offers to the right contacts.
• Differentiation: Do you customers understand what makes you different, or do your emails look very similar to your competitors’ emails? Make sure you put your differentiation front and center with reminders about service levels, training, deliveries, value adds, kitting and more. Stand out even more by making your emails different. Instead of sending out a flyer, send out a video. Instead of sending a, “checking in,” email send them a fun quiz.