Digital Marketing Power

Now that email marketing has been around for years, every retailer has an email marketing program. But, each program is at a different level of sophistication.

Do you ever wonder where your program ranks compared to others? Need helping mapping out where to go from where you are?

The crawl, walk, run metaphor and PR can resonate with many marketers. Many times after finishing a race, you will hear a runner say, “I’m never doing that again!” But after just a few days, the runner is already planning her/his next race.

Getting to the finish is hard, and at times may not seem worth it; but in the end, you can recognize your achievements and realize you can push yourself to be better, both as a runner and as an email marketer.

The concept of inbound marketing is to provide great content to attract visitors to your site, convert them into leads, create a relationship with them, close them as customers, and then delight those customers. I have seen this methodology provide significant and powerful results across all different industries. Committing to an inbound marketing methodology, however, can require considerable manpower and time. It can also be a slow process in the beginning, which can be frustrating.

It usually takes 3-6 months to start seeing the benefits and results. So when companies are eager to get leads for their sales team during this beginning time period, purchasing email lists starts to look pretty attractive to them. Great idea, right? Think again.

This is all too common of a strategy for companies and unfortunately what tends to happen is that marketing departments waste thousands of dollars on useless leads that are cold and old.

In today's world, knowing how an individual email campaign performed on a one-time basis is not enough. To learn whether your company is deriving true value from email marketing, you need both broader and deeper perspectives offered by program- and list-level analyses.

Though email campaign process metrics such as delivery, open, and click-through rates have their place, if you don't look beyond them... the true impact of your email marketing—and opportunities for continuous improvement—will go undetected.

It's high time for email marketers to assess email marketing performance in relation to goals, objectives, and contribution expectations that matter.

So, what matters?

Marketing automation may still rely on email for most of the communication work, but times are quickly changing. Sophisticated marketing automation focuses more heavily on user behavior, providing visitors with the right content at the right time in the buying cycle—on any channel. To achieve this, you have to move beyond mass email campaigns and, instead, shift focus to personalized, content-focused lead nurturing.