You Need a Strategy: Podcast with Dr. Dave Chaffey #GRTalks

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On the 30^th of April, we’ve published the Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Excellence 2018 report – an annual global benchmarking research that helps you improve your email, marketing automation, and content marketing ROI. Listen to our podcast and hear what Michał Leszczyński and Dr. Dave Chaffey have to say about the report findings.

Let me start with a few basic facts, in case you haven’t heard about the report yet.

What’s the reason behind the report?

As Dr. Dave Chaffey puts it – the goal of the research and the report is to find and promote new ways to make email marketing work harder for you.

Who is it for?

We wanted to make it useful for everyone working on email marketing – across different sizes of businesses.

You will find it useful, if:

you’re looking for ways of using the MA for email marketing
you want to learn how to automate to save time, get better ROI and deliver more relevant communications

Key findings of the report:

20% of the respondents didn’t use automation at all!
just a few respondents track customer activity like, e.g., browsing the website or cart abandonment.

It means that in most cases brands don’t follow up. But we should remember that often those contextual emails, which fit in with the activity customers are doing, work fantastically well.

On the one hand, it’s a bit disappointing. But, at the same time, it’s a great opportunity for all of us in the online marketing world.

You need a strategy!

The number one reason for poor email marketing and marketing automation results is a failure of management – lack of strategic approach.

That’s why according to Dr. Dave Chaffey: “You need a strategy with your email marketing and your automation. Driving prospects down the funnel won’t happen by accident. (…) You need a planned project to map out all the different potential customer touch points and when you can potentially send emails and then to build them in.”

And, surprisingly, it’s not only the small businesses who lack the strategic approach – larger companies do as well.

So, if you want to run successful email marketing and marketing automation operations, and to make sure you don’t miss out on opportunities, you should develop an overall strategy in which channel integration should be key.

Dave gives the following advice: “You should be looking at the lifecycle of the prospect, as they are interacting with your business and figure out how you can provide reminders to encourage them to buy with you.”

Experts at SmartInsights believe in this approach of lifecycle marketing, which looks not only at email but also at other communications techniques. For example, recommendations in the email and delivering adverts through retargeting on social media and the website. So personalization could be a part of your overall contact strategy or engagement strategy.

If you think that developing a strategy is too big a project, remember that with a strategy you’re not trying to do everything at once – you can gradually increase your sophistication.

It’s about seeing your customers and your business in a proper perspective. You need to map out the full customer journey and then look at where you expect to get the quickest returns.

Something to start with

“Alright, so where do I start?” – if you happen to be asking yourself this question, here’s a quick tip.

One of the touchpoints to start with is the welcome. The first thing you can do is create a welcome series instead of a welcome email.

The welcome sequence is the first impression. That first email you send is in some ways the most important one. And if you turn it into a sequence, you can engage your audience from the very beginning of the subscription.

If you want to learn more about the welcome series, check out these articles on our blog:

How to Onboard New Customers with Welcome Emails

How to Build an E-commerce New Subscriber Sequence

Listen to the podcast

Listen to the podcast with Michał and Dave to learn more about the report findings and to get more tips on how to improve your email marketing and marketing automation operations.