E-mail marketing secrets & lies: transactional marketing

btobonline.com - A 2007 study from StrongMail and MarketingSherpa found that 60% of marketers surveyed didn’t include promotional offers in transactional e-mails such as customer service messages, registration confirmations and order confirmations. However, 90% of those surveyed said they were making plans for 2008 to improve those transactional e-mails. Tricia Robinson-Pridemore, StrongMail’s VP-market and product strategy, expands on the results of the survey and points out one little-known “secret” and one widely believed “lie” about transactional marketing.

Secret: Transactional e-mails affect your overall deliverability rates.

ISPs categorize all of a company’s e-mails the same way if they originate from the same IP address—regardless of whether the marketing department is sending them or they’re coming from an automated, triggered mailbox, Robinson-Pridemore said. If one e-mail list has a lot of bad addresses, it affects everyone sending e-mail from that IP address. Marketers don’t realize this and aren’t keeping track of their company’s overall reputation, she said.

“About 65% of marketers have no visibility into key delivery metrics for transactional e-mails,” she said.

Another issue is that most transactional messages are written by either an IT person or an automated template. Robinson-Pridemore’s advice: Marketers need to control the reputation of all e-mails coming off their e-mail server. This means taking responsibility for the creation of transactional messages, and asking for deliverability metrics for any messages that are sending over a shared server.

Lie: You can’t use transactional messages for marketing purposes.

Marketers assume that transactional e-mails with promotional messages aren’t CAN-SPAM compliant. But if you read the FTC’s Facts for Business (http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm), you’ll quickly see that transactional or relationship messages are exempt from CAN-SPAM to some extent, Robinson-Pridemore said. “The main purpose of a transactional message must be about the transaction,” she said.

Because most transactional messages are generated by a template, Robinson-Pridemore suggested having your legal team approve that template, and when sending out cross- and up-sell offers, stick to some simple best practices. Offers should relate directly to a transaction; if you’re selling a software program, don’t cross-sell a hand truck, for example. This may be legal in the U.S. but may alienate customers. (This type of non-specific cross-sell is illegal in the European Union.)

“Your transactional e-mails can definitely give customers the idea that they are getting in on an inside deal, which can be very beneficial,” she said.

How Long Is A Customer Lifecycle?

http://blogs.mediapost.com/email_insider/?p=567

mediapost.com - IF YOU ARE LIKE MOST people, you have stages of life and all things around you; people and environments change dramatically over time. We have an early life stage where we learn the primary elements of surviving in this mixed world, the basics, as we could call it. This is where we form our basic judgments, values and shape who we are and the paths we’ll lead. This is where we learn to develop our community of generations, or simply break out and build our own communities. We have many milestones that we go through: high school graduation, college for some, young adult life in the working force, family development and planting roots into a community. We then drift into the middle stages of our life, where many foster these communities and evolve the next stage of life till we get to the celebrated later stages of our life and bask in our wealth and watch our families grow up.

If you are a legacy brand that has evolved in the 20th century, you have likely reinvented yourself several times over. I wrote an article on the “The Generation Changes” that spoke to the differences in the generations and the influence of technology in their lives. What makes this such a fascinating topic, along with lifecycle management, is that each product or service on the market caters to each of these generations, yet many support a linear view of a customer lifecycle.