Marketers know the importance of sending relevant, tailored communications. But how well are we doing? Not so well according to a  poll by Chief Marketing Officer Council. This poll reveals that of 91 percent of consumers who opt out or unsubscribe to emails, 46 percent are driven to brand defection because the messages are simply not relevant. Ouch.

How connected are marketers to their customers? Not doing well here either, with nearly three quarters of consumers reporting they have received promotions for products they have previously purchased from the company.

If marketers know how important it is to be timely, relevant and personal, why is this such a challenge? One might argue marketers have a wider array of tools and technologies at their disposal, so shouldn’t they be doing a better job? While its certainly true there are more technologies to choose from, the reality is having a tool in your tool belt and knowing how to put it to best use are two entirely different things.

So, how then to achieve the holy grail of personalized and relevant email marketing? By adopting precision marketing approaches that utilize more tailored and targeted messaging throughout the customer life cycle. Continuous data collection, as well as integration and on-going analysis are needed to produce customer insights. These insights enable marketers to achieve mass-customization of messaging to customers and generate improved response, engagement and retention.

Marketing databases allow sales and marketing to reach customers and nurture relationships more effectively (and efficiently). If they are designed properly and used correctly they are the “secret sauce”. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Here are some of the most common mistakes made by direct marketers as they build a data-driven marketing engine:

1. No method or procedures established for monitoring the vitality of the customer base over time. Statistics such as retention, reactivation, conversion and percent new-to-file will allow a direct marketer to more easily determine the success of various marketing strategies.
2. Lack of standards or process in place regarding data hygiene including householding the file prior the delivery of promotions, etc. The result being mailing inefficiencies and potential customer service problems. Avoid this and scrub that data!
3. All response models are not created equal. Many managers don’t realize that roughly 75% of analysts’ time should be spent becoming intimate with the customer data through data manipulation and review to ensure it’s predictive power is exploited to its fullest potential.
4. Lack of basic knowledge regarding database architecture, hardware and software. Without some basic database knowledge, a marketer is not well suited to establish marketing specifications for good database development which are reasonable and will maximize effectiveness.
5. Little knowledge of the rules that must be followed when establishing promotional or list tests to ensure results are readable, reliable and projectable and/or a lack of understanding of how to read test results once final.

Bonus mistake:

6. Purging customer records after 24 months of inactivity (or less). Most marketers don’t understand the implications of doing this. At a minimum, a direct marketer should roll up key data for inactives including all promotional data and make available for future analysis purposes for at least 4 years.

Bottom line, sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you more than you think.

A December article by eMarketer cites two recent studies to show the continuing dominance of email (as opposed to Twitter, Facebook, etc.) as the most popular method used by individuals to share information via the web.

The following study findings are of particular interest:

1) email (as opposed to Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is still the most popular method used by individuals to share content with friends.

2) content shared via email leads to more page views than any other method

3) most significantly, content shared via email is far more likely to lead to a purchase, subscription, etc. – 36.8%, as opposed to just 3.2% for Facebook and 0.4% for Twitter.

There are positives for social media as a means for sharing content – links shared through Twitter, for example, have the highest click-through rate of any sharing method.

That said, it is clear that direct marketers should be aware that the the overwhelming majority of the actual business generated by social sharing of content comes not from the new wave of social media vehicles, but rather from our old friend, email.

Source: “Users still sharing by email”