The Email Wars

Why would you want to build a contact management preference center for your website? You already have lead capture in place. You are getting 2-5 data points besides email address for every prospect. For your newsletter opt-in forms, you are getting the necessary subscriber email address. This is all good right? You have what you need to start communicating with people, according to your marketing plan. When someone above you says drop another email on the list and drive some sales, you are all ready to lock and load. Your messages simply drop the payload on everyone on your list in hopes that a good percentage of them are interested in something you have to say or sell. “Spray and Pray.” Perfect plan, right?… you have done your job.

Or have you?

If you are the one in charge of email marketing efforts for your company and this is how you approach email marketing, then maybe it is time you start thinking about how you are going to start getting tactical for the holiday season and beyond.

Why a preference center?

Besides simply their email address that you already have in your database, what information would be more important for you to know about someone in order to have a relevant discussion?

In B to B
Current need, current provider, business challenge, stage in evaluation to make a change, location, and job title are just a few that instantly come to mind. These help the marketing team enable the sales team with relevant communications, by aligning messaging and strategy. With this alignment, organizations can reach out with a series of emails in a prospect to lead to customer lifecycle. This helps to prioritize and move the ball forward. Look at this as a team approach. When it comes to business growth and you need to huddle up and act like a team.

In B to C
Gender, location, size (retail), product interest and frequency of desired email communication are some of the main data, but what is relevant to capture is entirely dependent on your specific industry.
There are many ways to “ask” for this information, if you can put it together in a way that is valuable to someone completing it. You can use smart campaign ideas to get relevant click data in order to build a profile. Think about a clothing retailer and the use of simple things like men/women or S/M/L/XL as actionable data that you can append to a profile. When it comes to the consumer, don’t always expect that click data gives you the full picture. A subscriber could be in market to purchase a gift or product for someone else, thus skewing your data. So find ways to ask or build a profile from data over time. I have two retailers that continue, after six years, to send me product offers for women even after I’ve changed my gender in their preference center, which is slightly frustrating. Your typical customer would simply unsubscribe over time if they got these offers.

What is the goal that you wish to achieve from an email preference center?
There is always a “what’s in it for you.” What are those things that, if you had them, would make your email programs better? If you had X, Y or Z facts, could you be more strategic and deliver better offers, emails and campaigns that truly lift your sales/goals? You need to start with defining these goals according to data and start from there.

Is this helpful to you, or to your subscribers?
Are you out to help people? What I mean is, are you taking the time to look at your email marketing efforts from the other side of the inbox to see what changes would actually make a positive impact on the relationship from the subscriber perspective. Looking at your campaigns from the other side can give you a way to work backwards and realize why someone actually subscribed to your emails, thus giving your efforts a boost of insight. Why have they subscribed in the first place? Is it information? Learning? To save money? To be closer to you as a brand?

Is there a middle ground?
Of course there is. There is no way that you can only think of it one way. Email is relationship marketing. If you want a good relationship you need to be giving, listening, and working on it each and every day. It is not something that you can go about as just having something to sell. Taking this approach might work some of the time, but after a while that success will dry up. You will either start to hemorrhage subscribers, losing interest (thus clicks and conversions), and be forced to radically change your approach. Or you could simply be constantly fighting for more new subscribers to offset the loss.

Email preference centers are usually an easy thing to implement but many people we talk to see it as a challenge from a technological point with getting data in sync. Well even if you can only store these records in your email platform or CRM that is a good start. Look to where you can best use it and feed the data in that direction. You can always look at integration with other systems later, but you need to start somewhere.

One of the easiest places to start is at the opt-in. Sure you only grab an email address now, but what are you sending them to on the thank you page? Is there an opportunity for you to use progressive profiling at that point to ask 2-3 more questions? If so, do it and tie a win to them for completion. Convey the benefit to them so they will gladly give you the information to use. Or you can do so with a welcome email triggered by sign up. It should be instant and not delayed a few days (or weeks as I have witnessed at times). They are engaged with you and just gave you some information. Why not ask for it then? Sure, a certain percentage of them will not complete it, but many will if you present it with reasons to share it with you. Simply asking for it is not the best approach as we are all wary of why we need to surrender or share more data. Tell them that by doing so they will get more relevant emails, will get earlier access to sales, studies, or other offers that others do not. But if you tell them this you will need to deliver on it.

In closing, it is now time for every email marketer to have a preference center to begin the move to valuable email engagement. Or you can simply sit back and do what you have been doing all along, helping contribute to all of those that like to write articles about the death of email. It is in your hands.