Email lifecycle marketing

Executive summary

An email inbox is a challenging place, both to get to and to remain in. Despite the advances in deliverability techniques and segmentation strategy, email still poses some unique challenges.

Email is a bit of a special medium, most people have got an email address that is unique to them, which makes it more like a mobile phone number than a postal address. This means it is a very personal media and the expectation of the recipient is moving closer to the one-to-one communications that have been talked about by direct marketers for years.

An email address is individual (most of the time) and it can be linked closely to the customer lifecycle using response data alongside transactional RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary value) data. This lifecycle can be tracked, measured, anticipated, and managed. This requires knowledge of the customer that helps to determine where on the customer lifecycle they are and helps you decide what type of communication they are likely to need.

This knowledge of the customer is going to require customer data linked to the email address. This might be a tough one, but the bottom line is that you need this information to know what to send to the customer and when to send it. Generating sustainable revenue from an email list is going to require information about the customer. A prospect will need communicating to in a different way from a loyal multi-buyer, as would someone who is deemed to have lapsed or defected.

This approach moves away from the traditional “mass” email marketing where little segmentation takes place, to a more targeted approach where a recipient is sent emails they are most likely to find relevant.

It’s important to understand why we go through all this trouble when email is such a cheap medium; surely someone will click on an email when they are ready, so why not send it to everyone all the time?

I’ll summarise the answer to this one, but more comprehensive detail on email deliverability can be found in the DMA white paper on email deliverability.

In short, you will generally suffer poor deliverability if you don’t send relevant emails that users respond to. Unfortunately, if you continue to send emails that don’t get a response, the ISP tends to put your mail in the recipient’s junk mail folder or block you. This means that when your customers are ready and in the market for your products and/or services, they might no longer get the emails you are sending them. Using the stages of the email lifecycle can help you to choose the most relevant types of communication for the customer.

In order to provide a simple guide to the different stages of an email lifecycle, this document will be broken down into four key stages of the lifecycle, citing examples of how these stages have been successfully managed in email campaigns.

Although this document has been written with a purchase process in mind, the ideas and processes are equally appropriate for most non-retail sites and campaigns, where buying could be substituted for browsing, downloading, commenting, or any other activity where the final engagement objective is not a sale. The stages are:

1. List growth
2. Conversion
3. Retention
4. Win-back

This document will explain the stages above and detail the important elements within these stages that will assist in developing relevant email programs.

Read it here