The Sea of Change in Data-Driven Email Practices

Research Sponsored by
Tactics for
Data-Driven
Lifecycle
Marketing
May, 2013
THE SEA OF CHANGE
IN DATA-DRIVEN
EMAIL PRACTICES
Written by Christopher Marriott
The Relevancy Group, LLC

Page | 1 Research Sponsored by
Copyright © 2014 The Relevancy Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
The Sea of Change in Data-Driven Email Practices
Tactics for Data-Driven Lifecycle Marketing
Written by Christopher Marriott, The Relevancy Group, LLC
Research Sponsored by Yesmail Interactive
Introduction
Email is the most dynamic and powerful marketing channel in the universe. It’s accepted in
marketing circles that email keeps customers engaged and informed and can be a great tool for
generating sales and acquiring new customers. This mindset about the channel has
represented the status quo for years. A review of email marketing articles from five years ago
will show you how little things have changed. Email marketing has matured to the point where
further evolution of the channel is not possible.
Or is it possible?
How do we continue to evolve email marketing? It starts with the most important question in
email marketing today: "What do you do when you get them to do what you want them to
do?” Why is this question so important? The obvious answer is that you want them to “pay
you money.” But that is never going be the outcome of every email interaction you have with
customers and prospects. In today’s growing multichannel world, an email might not even be
the next interaction you have with that person. The real reason this question is so important is
that it forces you to focus on how email can be the connective tissue between all of the
channels. At this point, you can begin see the tremendous benefits that can be achieved
through lifecycle marketing. For the purposes of this paper it should be understood that
lifecycle marketing refers to automated and triggered multichannel communications that are
data-driven and responsive to changing consumer states over time. They can be both single-
touch and multi-touch in nature.
Once a marketer adopts a lifecycle marketing approach to digital marketing, he quickly realizes
that it means that consumer engagement with his brand must not be the only goal; it must also
be planned for. What do you do next after you have their attention? The ultimate goal might
be to drive a purchase, but you need to plan for the steps along the way that don’t end in “buy
right now.” If you don’t plan these steps, you’re likely to hit a marketing dead end, where your
customer stops engaging. Sending another email can’t be the only option you have.
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The Permanent Campaign
The Clinton presidency was often referred to as “The Permanent Campaign.” What they meant
was that he never stopped running for office, even after being elected because he knew there
would be another election down the road. It’s the same thing with marketing. If a customer
transacts with you, there’s a good chance they will do so again in the future. The time between
transactions can vary greatly, but in all cases it is critical to recognize that successful email
marketing goes beyond selling great products at a great price. Hammering your customers with
“buy now” messaging quickly turns to noise. This is a marketing dead end. Savvy email
marketers will use lifecycle campaigns to engage customers between purchases—the
permanent campaign!
Today’s leading email marketers are doing things like creating the content that gives context for
their products (how-tos, case studies). They are creating entire conversations surrounding their
content such as reviews, blogs, videos to watch and share, customer forums, and Twitter.
However many marketers struggle with this approach because it goes beyond just email
marketing.
Oftentimes a company’s organization gets in the way of doing this successfully resulting in
marketing silos. Silos are good for farmers but they are terrible for marketers. They get in the
way of planning the multichannel actions you need to take with your customers and prospects.
Silos keep you from leveraging the connection between display, social, search and email (it's
not the single exposure alone that gets consumers to act, but rather the context of all the
marketing that preceded it). All of these channels are places you may encounter your
customers and prospects and can be leveraged as tools as you “plan” what you are going to do
when you get someone to do what you want them to do.
The chart on the next page from our recent research is a good indication of the existence of
marketing silos. Less than half of marketing departments share common goals, less than a third
have central ownership across marketing channels and only a quarter do any coordination
between marketing channels. Most organizations find it impossible to develop multichannel
lifecycle campaigns under these conditions. Indeed, marketing silos are like a hangover: they
are really hard to get rid of and everything else hurts!

Figure 1 – Marketing Department Organizational Structure
Question: Please select the statement or statements that best represent how your marketing organization operates? (select all)
Source: The Relevancy Group, LLC Executive Survey, n=419 11/13, US Only, all market segments
The pain caused by the silos becomes readily apparent when we asked the same marketing
executives to list their top ten challenges when developing email marketing campaigns. As the
chart below indicates, 4 of the top 10 challenges email marketers face are directly related to
problems caused by siloed marketing departments. Even breaking down some of your silos—
email and mobile for example—will drive better results and allow you to create better lifecycle
campaigns.
Figure 2 – Top 10 Challenges When Developing Email Campaigns
Question: What are your greatest challenges when developing email marketing campaigns? (select all)
Source: The Relevancy Group, LLC Executive Survey, n=374 11/13, US Only, Mid-Market & Enterprise Respondents

The ability to automate and trigger communications in response to events along the consumer
purchase path is the other key to a permanent campaign strategy. These triggers can be things
they do—or don’t do. They can be triggered by the passage of time, a visit to your web site and
any number of other ways. They are powered by the most precious commodity you have…
Data!
The various sources of data you have and collect on your customers form the foundation of
your entire lifecycle program. The next chart shows all the types of data that can be used to
drive your multichannel lifecycle marketing efforts.
Figure 3 – Connecting Customer Data to the Customer Lifecycle
Source: The Relevancy Group, LLC
The key to running permanent campaigns is to notice the “smoke signals” consumers send up
when they are once again ready to buy. These come in the form of—yes—data. Whether its
higher engagement with your email or time spent browsing on your website, the data guides
you and allows you to react with “buy now” messaging again.
The Power of Data-Driven Lifecycle Marketing
It seems like everywhere you look these days people are talking about lifecycle marketing. It
has been anointed as “the next big thing” and marketers are dreaming big! But for all the buzz
and hype, there’s still not much activity on the part of marketers. When we asked marketers in

a recent Relevancy Group survey what percentage of the messages they send are automated,
as in triggered messages based upon customer behavior, the numbers came back very low as
the next chart illustrates. In fact, only slightly more than 20 percent of them utilized data-driven
automated and triggered messages in more than 30 percent of their total messages sent.
Figure 4 – Percentage of Automated/Triggered Messages Utilized by Email Marketers
Question: What percentage of the messages that you send are automated, as in triggered messages based upon customer behavior?
(select one)
Source: The Relevancy Group, LLC/Executive Marketer Survey n=374 11/13, US Only, Mid-Market & Enterprise Respondents
When we followed up that question by asking marketers what were the most important
considerations when selecting an email marketing service provider (ESP) application, triggered
automated campaigns came in at No. 18 behind such features as social marketing features and
responsive design. The Relevancy Group suspects one of the reasons for this is that marketers
get a little overwhelmed by the sheer scale of lifecycle marketing through the use of triggered
and automated campaigns. It all sounds great in theory but then you get back to your office and
think to yourself, “where do I even begin?” The good news is that to do data-driven lifecycle
marketing a little better starting today you don’t have to boil the ocean. There are simple
automated and triggered multichannel lifecycle campaigns that you can deploy to get the ball
rolling.
As this next chart indicates, there are a number of simple data-driven lifecycle and triggered
campaign opportunities for email marketers to leverage in their efforts to improve their email
marketing. The low rate of adoption means there is real competitive advantage to using these
tactics. You should expect to see an immediate lift in engagement.

Figure 5 – Types of Automated/Triggered Messages Utilized by Email Marketers - 2014
Question: From the following list please select which types of automated trigger campaigns that you currently utilize. (select all)
Source: The Relevancy Group, LLC/Executive Marketer Survey n=374, 11/13, US Only, Mid-Market & Enterprise Respondents
Let’s return to where we started—the most important question in email marketing today:
"What do you do when you get them to do what you want them to do?” For example, what do
you do when you finally get a prospect to subscribe? Automated onboarding campaign! Let the
new subscriber know what they should expect from you. Studies repeatedly show that people
are most engaged when they first subscribe and you can use an automated onboarding
campaign to get someone in the habit of opening your emails. As another example, what do
you do when you drive someone from an email to your site but they fail to complete a
transaction? You send them a follow-up email reminding them of what was left in the shopping
cart and offer a further inducement to complete the transaction.
What do you do when someone who has transacted with you in the past stops engaging with
your email? You send automated emails to let them know you valued their business in the past
and would like to incent them to do business with you again. In a world where up to 70 percent
of the people in your database who have transacted in the past 12 months may never again do
so, this is a simple and effective way to get that percentage down. These are just a few
examples to help you get started with your own program.

The Nerds of Email Marketing are Now Cool
In the future of email marketing, acquiring and capitalizing on multichannel data is the key to
success. Using this data to trigger lifecycle and other campaigns is game changing! The three
things you need to start doing right now are:
1. Plan your customer pathways in advance—and remember they are not in a single
channel.
2. Break down silos between your various channels (even if it is only one silo at a time).
3. Use data-driven automated/triggered lifecycle programs to enable your efforts and to
customize experiences.

About Yesmail Interactive | www.yesmail.com | (877) 937-6245 | sales@yesmail.com
Yesmail Interactive delivers technology-led, insights-driven, and services-supported email marketing
solutions that seamlessly integrate mobile, web and social channels. Their clients are sophisticated
marketers who value the creation of meaningful connections. These clients understand that building
relationships with customers who are media-saturated and increasingly distracted requires intelligent,
original thinking. Yesmail Interactive attracts brands that want email marketing solutions that represent
the leading edge of technology. Yesmail Interactive provides the insights that enable marketers to
identify and understand customers in order to create lasting connections through relevant
communications, driven by email and synchronized across all digital channels, while respecting the
customer's unique preferences and privacy. Yesmail is the email marketing solutions provider within Yes
Lifecycle Marketing, a solutions provider which holistically brings together multichannel marketing
platforms and data, with creative and strategy services honed on the optimization of delivering relevant
marketing messages.
About The Relevancy Group, LLC | www.relevancygroup.com | (877) 972-6886 | info@therelevancygroup.com
The Relevancy Group provides market research, survey design and consulting. We assist marketers
(buyers) connect with vendors (sellers) and manage the vendor selection process, each year we
represent tens of billions of email messages that are out for bid for new solution providers. We provide
educational and advisory resources to advance our clients and the markets understanding of relevance
in order to deepen their customer relationships. The Relevancy Group is dedicated to educating the
market on the imperative tactics needed to foster trust with consumers and improve an organization’s
relevance within the broader online economy. Working with the leading brands, vendors and
associations that comprise our economy, The Relevancy Group acts as an educator and trusted advisor
in the aim of optimizing omnichannel connected marketing strategy and tactics. The Relevancy Group
publishes research, educational resources and consults with businesses on vendor selection,
mergers/acquisitions and other strategic imperatives.
About The Author
Chris Marriott – VP of Services and Principal Consultant, The Relevancy Group, LLC | On Twitter @CSMarriott
A regular columnist to iMedia, Chris is an experienced digital marketer with a focus on creating data-
driven experiences for customers of leading brands. Chris served as a tenured executive at Acxiom
Digital Impact, running their worldwide digital and email services. More recently Chris served as VP of
agency services for messaging technology vendor Strongmail. He is an expert leader in wrangling and
implementing efforts to integrate email with other digital channels. Chris currently serves on the Board
of Directors for eDataSource, a marketing services company that collects, analyzes, organizes and
archives millions of marketing messages, providing intelligence and analytics to the email marketing
community.

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