Adapting Your Cross Channel Marketing

Recently a respected colleague and long time friend reached out to me with a question: “How do I market to current and prospective customers more effectively, given the current environment?”. 

This is a great question.  With all of the changes in the economy due to the global event this year, not only has consumer behavior changed but so has business behavior. His question exemplifies a proactive pivot approach that I support.  When business and economic norms take dramatic shifts, business owners must shift too.  As I’ll discuss in a coming post, when faced with dramatic shifts in the state of your business, taking a thoughtful yet aggressive data based approach to the solution is the best way to ensure the survival of your business.  

To be fair, there are many ways to answer his question.  One of my favorite techniques, which is overlooked by many businesses, is to leverage email campaigns in conjunction with a paid retargeting campaign in social media. 

A study by Facebook and Salesforce (https://www.facebook.com/business/news/email-and-facebook-ads) showed that by executing an email campaign in conjunction with a social media campaign improved the sales conversions by 22%, and extended the exposure of the campaign (the “reach”) by 77%.  

While this study was done in 2014, the core tenets are just as viable today.  In the case study above, you can naturally substitute “Facebook” with any other social network (LinkedIn, for example).  

It is important to note that (typically) case studies like these highlight the best possible outcome the author was able to generate in a controlled environment, and as such your results may vary.  But with that said, it isn’t illogical to think that your campaigns will benefit from 1) marketing to customers who are already familiar with your brand and 2) multichannel marketing.  

This marketing model can be used with both B2C and B2B marketing.  With the proliferation of devices, there are more ways than ever to market to consumers.  It is no longer the case when one channel effectively grabs attention and drives action; consumers want and need input from numerous sources.   And when you unpack it, businesses are really just companies made up of consumers; so the marketing techniques you use for consumers can and often do translate to successful strategies for marketing to businesses. 

In response to my friend’s query, I outlined the following checklist for enabling a campaign via email and social.  Please send me your feedback; it’s welcomed!

SETUP

Before we start, we’ll need to setup a few things:

  • An bulk email service account.  There are numerous providers from which to choose – MailChimp is currently one of my favorites.  (est. 1 hour)
    • You’ll create a template email with logo.  This is what your email campaign will look like. I recommend a very clean look – perhaps your logo on a white background.  You do NOT want it to look like a marketing piece. 
  • Landing Page (est 4 hours per page)
    • This is the webpage where you’ll be driving your email recipients, when they click on a link in the email.  I always recommend a simple semi-generic landing page where their contact info is collected (or prefilled), and their requested item is promoted. 
      • Even better if this can drive to an immediate online purchase option.
    • You may want to consider including a direct dial number as well. Always give the option to speak to a human. 
  • Analytics Tracking (est. 30 min)
    • You’ll want to make sure that you have analytics software installed on your webpages, especially on your landing page.  This is a very simple process which can be done quickly by any webmaster, who will install the code on your website and in particular the landing page(s).
  • Identify 4-10 product / service offerings (est 2 hours)
    • You’re going to want to start with a handful of offers that will be attractive to a wide group of customers.  You’ll be promoting these in your emails, your paid social marketing, and on your landing page(s).   Choose items that have high margin (profit), low shipping costs, and aren’t perishable.
  • Identify initial target customers (est 2 hours)
    • These are the customers you’ll be reaching with the campaign.  This audience should be broad enough to reach a larger group. 
      • by industry
      • by geo
      • by title
  • Tracking
    • We’ll want to understand up front how we’ll be tracking the results, and then building those tracking mechanisms into the campaigns. 

CAPTURING EMAILS

This is very simple.  Your team will do an advanced search in your existingCRM system.  If you aren’t collecting email addresses from your clients, START TODAY!

CAMPAIGNS

The process for the email campaigns is quite simple: 

  1. The emails are loaded into MailChimp. 
  2. Your team uses the email template above to create a simple, personal, friendly campaign. 
  3. Emails are sent to clients. 
  4. You optimize the content / creative, frequency, and target audience for best results.  

PAID SOCIAL MARKETING 

  • The same emails are loaded into your preferred social media channel. 
  • A custom audience campaign is targeted towards those same contacts, only this time via the social channel. 

TRACKING THE RESULTS

Tracking code will be included in all activities so that the results can be measured, and then the product offering and target audience is tracked.   This allows for an ever improving solution; you can identify which industries, regions, job titles, etc respond best. 

Armed with minimal resources, you can leverage the power of email + paid social to reach their customers with the optimal message to drive sales.