But no matter the company size, moving from one platform to another is an intricate dance. You have to get all the steps right to succeed from the start.

Moving to a new platform can seem daunting because you don’t learn how to do it in college. You learn through experience. Not everyone has had that experience; if they did, it probably was bad. Every migration is different because every company has different needs and setups. 

COVID-19 spurred companies’ dissatisfaction with martech

Migrations are on my mind because more companies are now moving through the request-for-proposal process (RFPs) or migrating between platforms. 

Dig deeper: Download MarTech’s Annual Replacement Survey for the applications that are most frequently replaced

Many discovered their martech partners weren’t fast or innovative enough to support their demands for speed and flexibility in a changing COVID economy.

Pre-pandemic, companies switched martech platforms mainly because they were unhappy with the cost, features or support. Now their patience has expired with platforms that aren’t sophisticated enough. 

Getting realistic about migration

There exists the idea that migrations are simple and fast. I’ve had to counsel companies that think they can make a massive platform change in just four months. Sure, it can be done, but at four times the cost.

As I mentioned at the start, a migration has many steps, and you have to do them correctly if you want to succeed. You can plan on spending three to 18 months in a migration based on your program’s sophistication. Take that timeline into account in your planning. 

These are the four most common complaints from companies that want to investigate new technology. Which one applies to you?

• “My system is wonky.”
• “We need a lot of hacks, workarounds, and manual processes to make things work.”
• “I need Mary in IT to move data around for me.”
• “I need external processes to get the reporting I need.”

These happen because somebody hurried through the migration.

4 focus areas for successful migrations

Although every migration is different, at a minimum, you should focus on these four areas when you migrate your systems from one martech platform to another:

1. Discovery

This is the most important step and often the most overlooked. That’s because nobody ever thinks to look at internal systems first. I will spend a fair amount of time on this step because your success hinges on it.

Sure, you’re excited because you just signed a contract for a new shiny tool. You’re dreaming about everything you want to do with your new email service provider (ESP). And you can’t wait to start sending emails. But to use your new tool effectively, with all the features you drooled over in your demo, you must know what to do first as you migrate to your new platform.

Your first critical step is to inventory all your martech systems, using your team, consultants with your ESP or a third-party agency. This means deep diving into where your data lives, how it gets there, and your processes, APIs, data fields, access, and governance.

Ask many questions. Talk to everyone who touches your email process, from your data and creative teams to the people who push “Send” and your CMO. 

Don’t skip this step or rush through it. An effective discovery process ensures you can get the most from your new tool because it will reveal unexpected strengths, weaknesses, gaps and other things.

A proper discovery takes a global perspective of the entire operation. It’s not just individual teams in their silos and responsibilities. 

Also, document everything in a manual. This will identify your important integrations, what’s useful and what isn’t, what has to move to the new platform and what doesn’t. 

It takes time, and it must be comprehensive, but it’s critical for the success of your next steps.

Dig deeper: Martech stack documentation is vital, here are some tips to do it right

2. Moving to the new platform 

Your new ESP can use the manual you created in discovery to define business cases and identify processes to move. The discovery process also reveals the order in which to move things over. 

Migrating to a new platform isn’t about chucking all your triggers, templates and lists into your new platform and then hitting “Go.” It’s a systematic approach not driven by an IP warm-up plan. 

I laugh (to myself) if the first question I hear from a client after signing a new martech contract is if the ESP mentions an IP warm-up plan. That’s step 325 in the migration. We’re at step four. Let your integrations and planning come to fruition first before you plan your first campaign.

Maybe you think your new ESP will handle all this for you. Surprise! It likely can’t get into your current ESP to do any of this work for you. Your internal teams or external companies do the work, not just to meet migration timelines but also to avoid disrupting business during the move. 

Every business unit affected by the migration has its own objectives and KPIs. Migrating to a new platform means you’ve added to their work. You’re ripping data out of one place and putting it somewhere else. That takes planning, agreements and negotiations.

This becomes a systematic and precise orchestration of moving systems, processes and creative content from one platform to the other. Each element must be moved in the right order. I cannot emphasize this enough. Migration is not about speed; it’s about accuracy.

A good discovery process pays off here, too. If you do it well, you will have those things in place. Migration is a team effort, like an orchestra, and you’re the conductor.

3. User acceptance testing

This is another often-overlooked step. When you move from Place A to Place B, you must test to make sure everything is working correctly, with your old ESP as a backup if it doesn’t. That means you will need to have some runway with your soon-to-be old ESP. That gives you time to move everything over. 

Develop a plan for user acceptance testing that shows what’s being tested and approved. Test all 1,000 of your triggers. Test all iterations of your templates and all of your inbound APIs.

A disciplined testing regimen keeps you from breaking things on your new platform. User acceptance testing is a big step that gets you closer to pushing that “Go” button. But you’re still not ready to push it. 

4. Send an email campaign — but only at the right time

You might send an email early in the process to test the system or have a proof of concept. But don’t hurry this step. Do it when it’s safe and makes sense, not because a timetable says you should.

When sending an email campaign, don’t try every new feature on your platform all at once. Patience is a virtue in migration. Wait until you get to parity, or a bit beyond parity, when you do things you did on your old platform but do them faster, better or cheaper.

A new platform brings changes everywhere in your email operation. Phase in your new implementation, and rely on your new ESP partner to help. Pushing “Send” is the last step in this process, not the beginning.

Wrapping up

In the last 23 years of being involved in RFPs and migrations, I’ve seen just about everything. Three key concepts get overlooked:

• It takes a massive, coordinated internal effort.
• Plan your cutover from the old platform to the new one, and that means possibly renewing with the old ESP for a short time. 
• Give yourself enough time between the RFP and the end-contract date.

In our work with enterprise client migrations, we recommend a minimum two-year process between running an RFP and shutting down the old platform. ESPs are not great at extending contracts if the migration process takes longer than expected. It gets expensive, and it can be cumbersome.

Planning and partnerships can help you understand the innovation arc you want to be on and recognize the potential for your new program.

The pandemic showed us we must pivot quickly to stay ahead of changing business conditions. Maybe you saw right away that your old technology couldn’t meet the challenge, so you can be forgiven for wanting to step on the gas to switch platforms.

Don’t try to make the migration process from RFP to pushing “Go” move just as fast. 

The post 4 steps to take before hitting go on your new martech platform appeared first on MarTech.

Consider this: 17% of companies are planning RFPs this year, according to the 2023 State of the ESP RFP. You might not think that sounds like a large number, but it is if you scale that number to industries. So, that doesn’t sound like a pullback to me.

Among the clients for whom we manage RFPs, we see more requests for technology platforms that help marketers execute and innovate faster. They ask, “What can I do to insulate myself from the coming economic apocalypse if it happens by being innovative and agile?”

Below are smart decisions to improve your business, whether the economy goes sour or not.

1. Rethink that RFP

Before you replace or add technology, ask yourself whether you maxed out your current functionality. Whenever anybody asks me to start an RFP, my first question is, “Are you using everything the platform gives you right now?”

Dig deeper: Economic uncertainty means marketers will re-evaluate ad buys more frequently in 2023

A rule of thumb holds that marketers use only about 20% to 30% of what a tech platform offers. Maybe they didn’t have time to learn how to use the really cool stuff. Or the vendor didn’t offer training. Or they couldn’t get the platform to integrate with external data sources. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how innovative the platform is. It has so many other deficits that you still need to switch.

Today’s vendor marketplace makes the RFP process much more challenging if you don’t have someone to do the work. Look at what you’re paying for now but not using before beginning the time-consuming and potentially disruptive process of finding something new.

2. Develop a plan to shift your marketing priorities

Remember when, at the height of COVID, email saved ecommerce? That’s not an exaggeration. Many companies rediscovered how well email drives sales and revenue and builds customer relationships, especially during a crisis.

Your CEO might remember that. If the CEO asks how the company could change its marketing approach, what would you say?

If your email program became your company’s hero this past few years, it’s even more likely that your CEO will seek your input now. But even if it just kept on keepin’ on, you should still have a plan for the next few months that lays out your options and how you could use them for marketing against a downturn.

What to put in your plan

It shouldn’t begin and end with “Send more email.” If your customers don’t have the money to buy more often or to fill larger carts, sending more offers won’t move the revenue needle.

Look at your targeting. Consider your segmentation program. Review your price structure on promotions. What should it look like to stimulate more sales?

Dig deeper: 5 tips to get more value from your tech stack

Identify segments that can be more lucrative to target, such as regular buyers, people who buy at full price instead of waiting for sales and shoppers who send you clear purchase or upgrade intent signals. 

Look for propensity to purchase. Consider developing a next-logical-purchase plan that moves beyond cross-selling or upselling.

If your CEO asks for your advice, that’s as much of a blue-sky question as you’ll ever get. So be ready to jump. Don’t stop to think about the process. Be able to respond quickly with a plan. 

It could go like this: “We need to structure campaigns around our best customers’ propensity to buy in these lines. Here’s what those email campaigns would look like.”

Develop your plan now, and have it ready to go when the CEO or another high-ranking executive comes calling. But even if that call never comes, if the recession doesn’t happen, or if your customers keep buying, why not execute your plan anyway instead of doing business as usual? This is an excellent opportunity to think strategically without getting bogged down or distracted by tactics.

If you’re unsure where to start, begin with an email audit. This can help you find gaps and other weaknesses in your messaging strategy. (Get background information and details in this earlier MarTech column: 10 questions to ask when auditing your email program.)

3. Educate yourself and reach out to your community

Think about all the advice — in columns like this on MarTech, during webinars, in white papers and guides — that poured out as the business world shifted gears during the pandemic. Expect the same if the economy stutters.

Besides these thought leadership sources, you can call on your email communities for advice and ideas. These communities thrive because the members feed off each other for support and advice. 

Watch the news every day. Raise your sights and educate yourself about what’s happening in the broader economy beyond your vertical. Maybe you weren’t directly affected by the mass layoffs that have rolled through the tech industry, but the repercussions could affect your company or industry.

Spend at least an hour a week reading up on everything that’s happening in email, social media and mobile marketing, in privacy legislation and customer expectations. Add to this cauldron of content news about changes in consumer behavior, the unemployment rate and the economic impact they could have.

Be informed so that when your CEO asks for your advice, you can report what’s happening in your immediate market. CEOs can call on higher-level business forecasts, but you will be the expert on your market conditions.

Wrapping up

Use these suggestions to jumpstart your own thinking. If you want to tap into the added functionalities a new vendor can provide so you can increase your business, then go for it. Suppose implementing propensity is the right strategy to improve your marketing results; get it done. 

The one thing that marks a potential recession is what we saw during COVID: fast-reaction pivots that scale to a new market condition. A recession doesn’t have to be scary. But now is not the time to rely on the adage that email is recession-proof. 

Keep your eye on the future. Think back to November 2019. How would you have prepared if you had known that the world would shut down three months later? You have that time now. What’s your plan?

The post 3 recession-defeating marketing strategies appeared first on MarTech.

1. Authenticity

Authenticity and its connection to the consumer — to our customers — has always been critical to messaging success, especially during and after the most intense days of COVID-19. Authenticity is a complex emotion because we’re talking about authenticity to a brand and authenticity to a person. At its core, authenticity helps us connect with people on an emotional level. 

Machine learning, AI and ChatGPT can emulate authenticity, but they can’t replicate it as humans can. That’s the key point — at a human level. 

Empathy is connected to authenticity. Both are essential for marketing success, another lesson we learned during the COVID disruptions. As a marketer, you have to have genuine empathy and authenticity. Sure, you have to know how to sell. But you can learn that.

Dig deeper: Does ChatGPT pose an existential threat to marketers?

I can’t teach someone to be empathetic and authentic. I can teach them how to break down the barriers to let empathy and authenticity come into their mindsets. The best marketers have these qualities and know how to act on them.

You know you have empathy and authenticity when you’re creating an email campaign, writing a blog post or a tweet, and you get a feeling in your stomach that something’s not right. That feeling comes from your innate understanding that your actions might exceed your brand or the customer relationship. 

We can ask ChatGPT to write a first draft — something we can read through and adjust. But reading is different from writing. I have difficulty understanding how we can capture that innate emotion of empathy or authenticity. 

2. Connection and extrapolation

I will never let ChatGPT or one of its sister or brother models write my articles or presentations. One of the reasons is that my brain “works goofy.” That’s a direct quote from my wife. She’s not wrong.

One of my writing powers is connecting something I did in financial services with something I will do in retail. Or, I can call on something I did over the last 25 years of my career and relate it to a challenge a marketer faces today. 

One example: I can call on groundbreaking research that changed how we structure abandoned-cart reminders — that sending a first reminder email within an hour after abandonment was more effective than waiting 24 hours — to help a marketer design a more effective program.   

Extrapolating from my personal experience informs how my brain works and how I communicate it in a venue like this article or a presentation to 200 people. That abstract connection doesn’t come from any database other than the one in my head.

It’s hard for me to understand how people’s reaction to language models like ChatGPT misses the point in authenticity and extrapolation. We’re all brilliant people making abstract connections like this to help the industry and lift all boats. 

We can make it easy for one audience to understand a concept and then dive into the complexities for a more knowledgeable or experienced audience.

At a recent conference, where ChatGPT was either on the agenda of many presentations or brought up by audience members, it was clear several speakers didn’t read the room right. They seemed to aim their presentations at executives, not the operations people in the room. They over-complicated things. 

Gauging your audience’s reactions and changing up if you detect a lack of engagement — that’s something a content database can’t do. In my case, that extrapolation of history combined with my opinions, plus chance and dumb luck, drives much of my content. 

3. Inspiration

Among people in my industry, I’m known as the email preacher. Reading something I write, or attending my stage presentations, is like going to church and hearing a sermon. That comes naturally to me after a long history of this kind of speaking. 

But the underlying current of my work is inspiration. How can I inspire people to do better? How can I call on empathy to understand their position and then thoughtfully push them in the right direction? 

If you look back at my writing for MarTech, you’ll find I use my end-of-the-year article to inspire marketers for the next year and review the events of the passing year. 

Inspiration can be captured and defined, but you must have lived the experience to give it the impact that informs and engages your audience. In other words, to communicate the authenticity that makes your words worth reading or hearing. 

A language model or other technology can’t capture or replicate that lived experience. That inspiration is a personal desire many of us in the email industry share to teach, show or motivate people to do great things and rise above their own skill sets and abilities to improve and do more.

AI will never write my articles for me

Many reasons I say ChatGPT and models like it won’t write my articles for me are based on emotion. That’s why I fight against people who say content is dead. That’s a foolish notion — that one technology still in its infancy will kill off an entire realm.

It’s foolish to say that copywriting is dead now that we can call a bot to do it for us. How fast we go from living to dead in this world. Direct mail isn’t dead. Email isn’t dead. Let’s focus instead on what lives, changes and evolves. What expands our understanding?

ChatGPT has been around for less than a year, but some want to use it to condemn an entire profession? The baby was just born and now we’ve decided it will be President? Nonsense!

How about we look at it from this perspective: “What could it be?” Not “What will it be?” Let’s ask, “How can it enhance what we do?” Could ChatGPT and other natural language processing (NLP) models write copy to appeal to a specific persona or model data? Sure. 

People are floating many ideas and use cases but not functional applications. Let’s be patient and have fun with the possibilities, not the doomsday predictions. Heck, we don’t even have full pricing yet.

NLP models like ChatGPT are still the latest shiny new toy in the digital playground. Let’s see whether they evolve into tools instead of gleefully predicting what they could kill. 

The post Three things ChatGPT needs which only you can provide appeared first on MarTech.

I myself was fielding calls for strategy help, working on business deals and managing the chaos all the way to the eve of Christmas Eve, something that rarely happens in my 20-plus-year career. 

Look back and celebrate, then move on

The first business for 2023 will be to step back, clear your head and take stock of all the great things you accomplished in 2022 despite the odds (i.e., coming out of COVID, going into a rebound and COVID round 2, moving into supply-chain shortages and other hiccups, facing down a potential recession) and how they affected the work you did to succeed.

And now it’s 2023. I hope you got your budget request approved and you’re ready to move ahead with a clean slate and new KPIs to hit. You’re probably wondering, “What can I do now to grow my program?

3 directional changes to grow your email program

Naturally, every marketer’s goals will be unique. We have different audiences, challenges, resources and goals. But I’m focusing on three major directional changes with my clients this year. Which of these could help you succeed this year?

1. Stop sending so many emails

Yeah, I know. That sounds strange coming from somebody who believes wholeheartedly in email and its power to build your business. But even I have my limits!

Email during this last holiday shopping season was insane. In my 20+ years in the email industry, I cannot remember a time, even during the lockdown days of COVID-19, when my inbox was so full. 

I’m not the only one who noticed. Your customers also perceived that their inboxes were getting blasted to the North Pole. And they complained about it, as the Washington Post reported (“Retailers fire off more emails than ever trying to get you to shop“).

I didn’t run any numbers to measure volume, isolate cadences or track frequency curves. But every time I turned around, I saw emails pouring into my inbox. 

My advice for everyone on frequency: If you throttled up during the holiday, now it’s time to throttle back.

This should be a regularly scheduled move. But it’s important to make sure your executives understand that higher email frequency, volume and cadence aren’t the new email norm. 

If you commit to this heavier schedule, you’ll drive yourself crazy and push your audience away, to other brands or social media.

If you did increase cadence, what did it do for you? You might have hit your numbers, but consider the long-term costs: 

• More unsubscribes.
• More spam complaints.
• Deliverability problems.
• Lower revenue per email. 

Take what you learned from your holiday cadence as an opportunity to discover whether it’s a workable strategy or only as a “break glass in case of emergency” move.

My advice? Slow down. Return to your regular volume, frequency and cadence. Think of your customers and their reactions to being inundated with emails over 60 days.

2. Stop spamming

In that Washington Post article I mentioned earlier, I was encouraged that it cited one of my email gripes — visiting websites and then getting emails without granting permission first. 

I could have given the Post a salty quote about my experiences with SafeOpt and predatory email experiences (“Business stress is no excuse to spam“) for visitors to its clients’ websites. 

Successful email marketers believe in the sanctity of permission. That permission-based practice is what you want to be involved in. Buying a list means you don’t hire a company to sell you one, whether it’s a data broker or a tech provider like SafeOpt. 

Spamming people doesn’t work in the long term. Sure, I’ve heard stories from people who say they use purchased lists or companies like SafeOpt and it makes them money. But that’s a singular view of the impact. 

Email is the only marketing channel where you can do it wrong but still make money. But does that make it right? 

The problem with the “it made us money” argument is that there’s nowhere to go after that. Are you measuring how many customers you lost because you spammed them or the hits your sender reputation took? 

You might hit a short-term goal but lose the long-term battle. When you become known as an unreliable sender, you risk losing access to your customers’ inboxes.

Aside from the permission violation, emailing visitors after they leave your site is a wasted effort for three reasons:

• A visit is not the same as intent. You don’t know why they landed on your site. Maybe they typed your URL as a mistake or discovered immediately that your brand wasn’t what they wanted. Chasing them with emails won’t bring them back.
• You aren’t measuring interest. Did they visit multiple pages or check out your “About” or FAQ pages? As with intent, just landing on a page doesn’t signal interest.
• They didn’t give you their email address. If they had interest or intent, they would want to connect with your brand. No email address, no permission.

Good email practice holds that email performs best when it’s permission-based. Most ESPs and ISPs operate on that principle, as do many email laws and regulations.

But even in the U.S., where opt-out email is still legal, that doesn’t mean you should send an email without permission just because somebody landed on your website.

3. Do one new thing

Many email marketers will start the year with a list of 15 things they want to do over the next two months. I try to temper those exuberant visions by focusing on achievable goals with this question: 

“What one thing could you do this year that could make a great difference in your email program’s success?”

When I started a job as head of strategy for Acxiom, I wanted to come up with a long list of goals to impress my new boss. I showed it to my mentor, the great David Baker and he said, “Can you guarantee that you can do all of these things and not just do them but hit them out of the park?”

Hmmmm…

“That’s why you don’t put down that many goals,” he said. “Go in with just one. When that one is done, come up with the next one. Then do another. If you propose five projects, your boss will assume you will do five projects. If you don’t, it just means you didn’t get it done.”

That was some of the best advice I’ve ever received and I pass it on to you. 

Come up with one goal, project or change that will drive your program forward. Take it to your boss and say, “Here’s what I’m going to do this year.”

To find that one project, look at your martech and then review MarTech’s six most popular articles from 2022 for expert advice.

• 17 AI-powered writing tools and how to make best use of them
• The future of headless web content management
• GA4: What marketers need to know for a successful transition
• 8 major email marketing mistakes and how to avoid them
• What marketers need to know to prepare for 2023
• Create a B2B GTM strategy that buyers, execs and revenue teams love 

You’ll find plenty of ideas and tips to help you nail down your one big idea to drive growth and bring success. But be realistic. You don’t know what events could affect your operations. 

Drive your email program forward in 2023

The new year has barely begun, but I had a little trouble getting motivated to take on what’s shaping up to be a beast of a year. You, too?

I enjoyed my time off over the holidays. Got in some golf with my dad and his buddies, ate great food and took time to step back and appreciate the phenomenal people I work with and our amazing industry. 

What gets me going at last? Reaching out to my team, friends and you. Much of my motivation comes from fellow marketers — what you need, what you worry about and what I can do to help you succeed. 

If you’re on the struggle bus with me, borrow some motivation from your coworkers and teammates, so we can gather together 12 months from now and toast each other for making it through another year. 

It’s time to strap on your marketer helmet and hit the starter. Here’s to another great year together. Let’s get the job done!

The post 3 email marketing shifts to make in 2023 appeared first on MarTech.

There is no “try” there is only “do,” as Yoda says. Launch things. Make money. Hit your year-end goals. 

As an email strategist, I got bored after the 15th of November, when my team locked down its holiday campaigns to the end of the year. My job was done. I did things to fill my time, but in the last six weeks of the year, nobody called on me for strategic thinking. Everybody was in execution mode.

Today, my agency’s retail clients are all heads down, launching campaigns. Our teams are helping them get things done. Everybody is in a mad push for the end of the year.

Teams in other verticals fall into one of two groups: 

• The ones for whom December is just the end of the year. You want to finish strong, and that’s great. 
• The ones, especially B2B marketers, who are crushing it to close deals by December 31. 

Whatever vertical you find yourself in, take a few minutes to walk with me and look back over what we’ve done in the last 12 months.

4 marketing lessons learned in 2022

I suspect many of you are grabbing time to read this while you’re on your way to something else — your daily stand-up, a team meeting, commuting to or from work (don’t read and drive) or just kicking back and looking for something to do because you don’t feel like doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

Wherever you are in your daily life, thanks for joining me to review the year, look for things we can pat ourselves on the back for and remind ourselves that we made it through another challenging year.  

1. The advice I shared in 2022 can guide you through 2023

When I look back at all the columns I wrote this year for MarTech, one thing stands out: Most of them are designed to help you level up your email program. I frequently advise marketers to stop what they’re doing, clear their minds, look at their efforts and think of how to improve them.

That has been my goal with my MarTech columns since I began writing them — to help marketers do better.

I share real-world advice pulled from my own experiences because I have been where you are now:

• The person pushing the “Send” button.
• The one getting screamed at to “send another email.” 
• The marketer who had to figure out how to fight for every scrap of budget to make the email program achieve its potential.

If you’re thinking about what to do in 2023 but not sure where to start, visit my article directory on MarTech and search for ideas. How to do email audits, review your tech stack and move to a new ESP. How to brag a little about your team and your results and help your company understand the power of email and why it deserves investment.

You’ll find a year’s worth — and more! — of strategic and tactical approaches that can make a real difference in your email program. Find one or two improvements that you could make happen, along with a reserve list of five or six, and then follow my guidance for how to make them happen.

No, you don’t have to do it right now. Post a note on your cubicle wall or tape it to your computer monitor, and come back to it after the holidays. 

2. Brands are beginning to invest extra in email again

I’m noticing an encouraging trend — an increase in spend. We’ve seen significant investment in email by our clients in 2022. When I ask business owners why, they say they learned their lessons during the pandemic. They needed to invest in better platforms to take advantage of everything email could do for them.

We also saw people put their investments on hold to see what would happen in the economy and the labor force. But overwhelmingly, spending increases outpaced cutbacks or holds.

We also talked with front-line marketers. They told us they won their increases because they had effectively communicated the power, the upside and the opportunity of email in their organizations. 

They made a case for email. They educated their executives and pointed out where email could excel. They also highlighted instances outside of marketing where email could solve company problems that cropped up because of COVID-19.  

That’s the advice I shared a year ago in my forecast for 2022. Boast about your program a little. Talk about your email program with your executive team and point out what you’re doing and how you’re contributing to the company with email.

This has been one of my consistent themes this year because I can see the increase in business, and I want other marketers to share that mentality if they can put together solid business and communication plans.

In other words, if you want the funding, you have to think like a business owner. Because you own a business unit within your company. Treat your marketing program like a business, an asset, and communicate that asset to your executives.

This approach results in increased spending at companies that value email. That comes from people who own it.

Dig deeper: 5 email marketing lessons learned in the pandemic

3. RFPs and ESP migrations are off the charts

This is another long-term result of changes forced under the pandemic. Many companies found their platforms weren’t good enough. They weren’t fast enough. They couldn’t handle the fast pivots and new demands from extreme digital transformation.

That left many marketers wondering, “Am I the problem? Or is it my platform?”

In my 20 years of working with RFPs, migrating to new platforms and onboarding new clients, I saw people running RFPs because they didn’t understand what their present platforms could do. They hadn’t tried everything or taken ownership of the process to learn all the ins and outs.

Today, we are getting inquiries from people who have done that work and know that their platforms can’t take them where they want to go. They don’t have time to cope with sluggish systems, downtimes, workarounds or extra processes. These companies are driven to change and need platforms that can keep up with them.

You don’t have to be beholden to the platform — whether email, marketing automation, CRM or what have you — that you have been using. 

Digital transformation in its broadest sense can mean moving to a new platform that enables cross-channel and omnichannel marketing, that gets you to the Valhalla of real-time dynamic content, that draws a closer relationship between customer intent and product demand.

This rush to RFPs will continue in 2023. The frustration I hear from clients is tangible. This is a challenge to the existing ESP industry to do better. You can’t just say you “do email.” People want more than a pipe. They want functionality that goes beyond email and pushes email to do more.

Is an RFP in your future? Maybe. But before you start putting one together, be sure you’re using everything your current platforms offer. Audit your platform use to be sure you can accomplish everything you need to do now. 

Dig deeper: 5 tips for successfully switching email service providers

4. Finding balance is a need, not just a want

COVID drove home the idea that people want balance between their work and home lives. As I wrote last year (“Marketers: Where will you be a year from now?“), finding that elusive work-life balance would become a priority in 2022. Burnout was real, and we could feel its effects as 2021 ticked over into 2022.

I wish Elon Musk had followed my advice.

After he acquired Twitter a couple of months back, he sent out a now-infamous memo telling people they had to work harder — nights and weekends — or quit. 

My reaction: Somebody wasn’t reading the room.

Whether Musk appreciates it or not, we have moved beyond demands like that. We have moved beyond the corporate dictate that work is the be-all and end-all. 

Yes, some employees signed up for that 24/7 workday. That’s fine. That’s in their DNA. But many others looked at the choice between more work and more life and chose to have a life.

I hope this trend continues into 2023. Manage your work so you can take time for yourself. If you’re in ruins, so is your work.

In my 2021 column, I also advised marketers to keep their resumes updated and to take any interviews that come along. You could be happy as hell in the job you’re in, but keep an eye out for the next great opportunities.

Finally, continue to boast about your email program. Help others discover all the good work you do and get the respect you deserve. As some of my clients showed, it can pay off. 

Going into the new year prepared

As we go into 2023, let’s remember this — as hard as it was to work through the upheavals that COVID wrought in 2020 and 2021, we got to the other side. No, COVID is not over. We’re facing another winter with the triple threat of COVID, the flu and RSV, the respiratory virus that’s so dangerous for young children and the elderly.

And let’s not forget about the twin challenges of inflation and recession and whatever crisis is waiting for us. Can we meet it? Yes. Can we conquer it? Yes!

Over the 20+ years I have been in this business, email marketers have always impressed me with their spirit, their grit and their ideation. 

We are a talented industry, and we need to take pride in what we do.

Over the next few days, disregard Elon Musk’s advice and take time for yourself. Watch SpongeBob SquarePants. Put your phone down. Turn off your notifications. 

Put some distance between yourself and your work to start 2023 with a fresh perspective. Give yourself the gift of balance because you deserve to take breaks. 

Know that I think everybody reading my words is an amazing person. 

Have a wonderful holiday, and I’ll see you on the other side. 

The post 4 marketing takeaways from 2022 to help you conquer 2023 appeared first on MarTech.

This also is the season when anyone with a blog, a column or a webinar will start predicting what will happen in marketing in 2023. I’m not immune to that, but I’m also honest enough to admit nobody really has a clue right now. 

There’s so much we don’t know about what will happen in the next 12 months. One thing is for sure: We definitely can look forward to many twists and turns in the online space and the real world — again. 

So, instead of predicting, I’m going to look at what marketers should remember as they plan for 2023. I hope my insights will give you some direction, help you set some goals and put you in the right frame of mind in the next five minutes before somebody comes down the hall to request another Black Friday email campaign.

A global recession is coming

No matter what American politicians say, a recession isn’t just a U.S. concern. It’s happening everywhere. It poses another challenge for email. But email can rise to meet it, just as it emerged as a winner in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

I’m a big believer in staying informed whether it means reading marketing, economic and political news or keeping an eye on the five screens in my office, each of which streams different information. So I’ve been on top of news stories reporting that some companies are already pulling back some ad spend. Others are investing in processes now to get ahead should we hit recessionary headwinds. 

Because email proved its value in the pandemic, I don’t expect email budgets will get eviscerated to fund other channels. But we’ll test the concept that email is still recession-proof. 

That doesn’t mean email will emerge unscathed. But we email marketers should get ready for a different kind of challenge. Companies could go back to their pandemic tactics, in which they invested in email to keep customers informed and build authentic relationships. Or they could revert to their business practices in the 2008 recession and just discount everything in a mission to save revenue targets.

We’re dealing with a lot of uncertainty right now. We could be in a recession that in some parts of the world doesn’t even look like a recession because of high job growth, even with a higher-than-normal inflation rate.

So now we have to look at how email can live up to its recession-proof reputation. Our twin challenges will be the evolving state of the global economy and how we can adapt email to survive. 

The email channel itself will survive. What remains to be seen is whether we can retain the primacy email has gained.

Dig deeper: 5 email marketing lessons learned in the pandemic

Segmentation will help increase revenue from inflation-weary customers

Consumers pulled back on spending during the pandemic. Now, inflation is driving similar cutbacks. Reduced consumer spending puts even greater pressure on email marketers to perform.

Retailers are responding to their bargain-hunting customers by launching holiday campaigns even earlier this year. I saw many campaigns in early October that I would normally expect to see closer to November. 

Consumer spending predictions are all over the board this year, too. The most optimistic say holiday spending will rise 4% to 6% over 2021, while others expect consumers will either hold the line or spend less. 

I expect retailers will pull the usual levers to capture more holiday spending — heavier discounting, higher email frequency or some other tactics. But instead of pulling on those levers indiscriminately, marketers should rethink and revise their list segmentation to keep revenue flowing reliably. 

Segmentation represents an untapped market across the board for motivating and incentivizing consumers to spend their money with you instead of your competitors.

Segmentation comes into play with the customer data platforms (CDPs) and advanced analytical tools. Email marketers can use these tools to fight both recession-driven budget cutbacks and reduced consumer spending.

Use what you learn about your customers — what works and what doesn’t — to support requests for resources to support segmentation and win higher priority in the marketing tech stack. 

Although marketers worldwide might encounter a global recession in 2023, lower consumer spending could finally force us to become smarter marketers, not just “more” marketers.

The pressure will be on CDPs to prove value

Customer data platforms, or CDPs, have been around for a while, but they’re just now moving into the reach of middle-level brands and full implementation at the enterprise level. But we still don’t know whether they’re the savior for data-driving marketing or the latest shiny object.

In 2023, I expect we’ll see the proof point for CDPs and whether we as email marketers can use them to transform our email campaigns into messages that elevate the customer conversation. 

Vendors have sold CDPs as the gateway to customer intent, purchase propensity and data orchestration. Next year, we will see whether CDPs bridge the gaps between data lakes and CRMs, resulting in more intelligent marketing and boosting messaging automation, targeting and personalization.

But this move also could end up shifting priorities away from email. Historically, email has been stuck at the far end of the investment dinner table, waiting to see what’s left on the platter when it finally reaches us. 

We might learn that CDPs do give us easier access to data for segmentation and personalization. Or we could find out that the money companies spend on installing them is wasted without the data, technical structure or know-how to manage them.

Dig deeper: How to manage email addresses in a customer data platform

Martech stacks will get a lot more scrutiny

This year, my agency was insanely busy working with both long-term and new clients on their tech stacks. Not just their email platforms, but all of their adjacent and connected systems.

Many of these clients were unhappy with their technology and asked us to find new vendors or move to new ones. 

We all know how the pandemic accelerated digital transformation. Your tech stack might be a casualty if it hasn’t kept up with the changes. I heard clients say, “We aren’t agile enough.” 

Or, “This platform doesn’t help make us smarter.” 

Even, “This platform isn’t complex enough for all of our needs now.”

Some companies outgrew their systems, too. The pandemic forced them to react faster and communicate better with customers, employees and stakeholders and forced many to push their systems beyond their limits. 

Today, many of our clients want technology that’s better, faster, more complex and more capable to meet their needs because they have evolved and need support that can meet them where they are now.

I expect more companies will examine whether they have the right technology and look to see what else is out here and what they can get to meet their new demands.

As part of this re-examination, we also will see companies using more of the technology they’re already paying for.

Maybe you saw Gartner’s study that found companies use only an average of 42% of their tech stack capabilities, a figure that’s actually down from a slightly less dismal 58% in 2020. 

When I worked at Responsys, we found platform usage was actually closer to 10%. Back then (I’m older — “then” was 2007), marketers didn’t know how to use all the advanced features, many of which are standard equipment today.

If you’re dissatisfied with your tech stack, figure out whether it truly doesn’t meet your needs anymore or you just haven’t used all of its capabilities.

Before you start looking for new tech providers, go to your vendors and ask them to show you their latest demos. They’ll be happy to do it. Challenge your providers to show you what you should be using but aren’t yet. You’ll understand your tech capabilities and limits much better.

Dig deeper: The secret to building a useful martech stack

Looking to the future

As usual, I could be full of crap. Not about asking your vendors to audit your tech use — that’s always good advice — but for everything else, it’s what I’m seeing in my work, in the news and in talking with other marketers. 

Plus, I’ve been through a recession, COVID, the birth and evolution of the internet, the Amazon wave, consolidation in the email space and so much more. That also informs my views about what will happen. 

My focus is always on marketers and what they need to think about when planning for the coming year. 

So let’s get back to it and knock out the rest of our 2022 plans. Don’t forget to celebrate with your team, whether by taking them out for drinks and dinner or supporting your remote staffers. 

Tune in next month for my annual December motivation and year-end reviews!

The post What marketers need to know to prepare for 2023 appeared first on MarTech.

Why the spit-take? 

Because retail and email marketers on the front lines know that the holiday season is going to happen a lot sooner this year than it has in the past. We’re coming up on the third anniversary of COVID-19, which in 2020 gave us permission to start early. Nobody’s willing to give that up, especially in a down economy where every minute from now to the end of the year matters.

I also could have told that talking head that holiday campaigns aren’t the only things stressing us marketers right now. Guess what else we have to contend with now?

Friends, it’s budget time. 

Yes, I said the “B” word. When I was in retail, I hated this time of year because I was already stressed from my holiday campaigns and then had to come up with a reasonable spending plan for the next year. Right now, I am working with every client helping them determine the right investment levels. Stress is at an all-time high.

As stressful as it may be, start thinking now about what next year might look like and you might end up with the budget you want. 

5 budget success tactics for 2023

I always advise clients to audit email programs so they know what’s happening in their campaigns and to schedule lunch-and-learns with their teams and execs. This groundwork lets you pitch new ideas more successfully. 

Here’s what I’m telling my clients to make room for in their budget requests.

1. Get a new email template

Every email design can go stale and become ineffective, whether it’s bare-bones minimalistic or a cacophony of colors and animations. 

Templates break down and cause you hours of pain and suffering as you try to come up with workarounds until your designer or developer can tackle the problem. Consider switching to a modular template, assuming your ESP supports that format. 

A modular template is like working with LEGO bricks, only you’re building an email instead of a model of the Starship Enterprise/Millennium Falcon. To build an email, you drag formatted blocks and drop them into position, then add images, copy and CTAs into defined spaces. 

A modular template lets you build emails faster and standardize your design process. Most ESPs give you the ability to custom-load modules into their template builders.

Now, if you’re thinking, “But each email I send is a work of art all by itself!” Then skip to the next section because modular design is not for you. And good luck with all that coding and testing and tweaking.

[Insert your favorite facepalm GIF here.]

Modular design is for people who like the consistency of sending messages that subscribers will recognize immediately but with content that changes according to the campaign and customer data. That’s what’s important — not creating beautiful emails. 

If you like simplicity, shorter production timelines and not losing your mind every time you have to send a campaign or triggered email, a modular template will help you out. But what if you send emails through Mailchimp or another ESP that uses modular design? You might find your template needs to be updated with new modules and more flexibility. 

2. Seek a third-party review of your entire email operation

I encourage marketers to look over their email programs at least once a year (read 10 questions to ask when auditing your email program). Also, get an outside review of everything your email program includes, like the production process, results, content and more. 

Look for answers to questions like:

• How effective is our process?
• How quickly can we execute?
• What contingencies could an agency give us that we can’t achieve on our own?

An email audit and performance review will help you identify gaps and highlight where changes could help you deliver better results. You’re not obligated to accept all the changes. C’mon, we’re not the IRS! (Or the Inland Revenue, for our British colleagues.) 

You can review your audit results to discover what will give you the greatest gain for the time and money you have to invest. You can make quick and easy changes, or plot a course for long-term improvements.

But be sure your reviewers focus on one key point as they go over your email program. Any changes they recommend must be tied to increasing your ROI, whether by increasing revenue or decreasing expenses. That’s how you can justify asking for company money to fund the exercise.

Dig deeper: Getting back to basics: Marketing ROI

3. Work up a strategy to add staff

Everybody in email marketing — in any marketing channel, really — wants more team members. The trick is to ask for it the right way. In my client-side marketing days, I rarely did it right. I just looked at my team and said, “I need more people to get the job done.”

That’s the wrong way. The right way is to specify what those added team members would do and how their work will help your team contribute more to the company bottom line. Make your executives understand why it’s in their best interests to give you more staff — how it will help them achieve their business goals.

That will take some education (again, a lunch-and-learn that shows your execs how your department works) and some good old-fashioned sales work. Plus, you’re competing against every other team that wants to add staff. 

You’re a marketer. So, market yourself to persuade your execs to buy in.

4. Propose one innovative new program

Do you need to create an onboarding program or upgrade the one you have now? Refresh your abandoned-cart series? Seek out a new marketing automation vendor?

For 2023, propose one thing that will help you drive growth toward your business goals. Predict what the ROI will be. This will make your budget request more substantial. You always want to show the return outweighs the cost and could even be profitable in the first year. That makes it almost a no-brainer. 

But don’t just request the funding. Include a plan for keeping your boss informed about whether your innovation is on track, whether it’s bringing in the revenue or savings that you predicted or even delivering more than you expected.

This is important to track because when you move ahead to 2024, you can remind your boss about your success. That gives you more credibility to propose another new program that could add to your gains from 2023.

If you followed my advice from my previous post, How to make the time to solve marketing problems, you should already have a list of ideas to choose from. If not, go back and do the five-minute exercise that will help you identify the one big rock that you need to move for next year.

5. Get creative with your leftover 2022 budget

Does your year-end projection show money left in your budget? Congratulations! Now, go spend it. If you don’t, you might not get it back next year.

But don’t spend it on stupid stuff. Stay focused on ROI as always. Here are a couple of ideas:

• Use it to develop or expand testing. 
• Pay it to a vendor and ask to have it applied to next year’s spend.
• If you use an agency, ask your rep for ideas that you can play with now but sustain next year without blowing your 2024 budget. 

Your to-do list can give you spending ideas here.

Dig deeper: The budget bottleneck: How to get more from your marketing budget

Get the email marketing budget you deserve

Budgets are crap because everybody always says no. We all hate getting that no. But one of the reasons the company says no is because we asked the wrong way.

Sometimes, when I was told no, my boss blamed “competing priorities.” If that’s what you’re hearing, it might be that those priorities are coming from people who did the education and groundwork I mentioned earlier or appealed more to executives’ self-interest.

I’m not saying it’s always your fault if you don’t get the budget amount you requested. But the tips I’ve shared here will help you get funded at a level that also allows you to contribute significantly to your company’s bottom line.

The post 5 tactics to get the 2023 email marketing funding you deserve appeared first on MarTech.

Here’s what I want you to do:

Grab a piece of paper and a pen or pencil. Minimize distractions. Put all of your notification settings on “Do not disturb” for a few minutes. Silence your phones. 

Now, write down everything you need to do for your email marketing program from now until the end of the year. Set a timer for five minutes if you need to. Don’t come back here until it goes off or you complete your list. Turn off your screen and… Go!

(Hey, no peeking until the five-minute alarm goes off. Get back to work.)

Okay, great. You should have quite the long list — and if you were still writing when your alarm went off, go back and finish it and then catch up with us when you’re done. 

I just did this exercise. If you’re like me, your list is probably scaring the crap out of you right now. No way are we going to get all this stuff done before Dec. 31, right? Well, don’t panic. Now, go back and circle everything that looks realistic. 

What’s left should be a pretty realistic list of goals to achieve in the next three-plus months. Now, here’s the next thing to think about: How will you get everything done?

You have two answers to choose from: “I’ll find time” and “I’ll make time.”

Finding time versus making time

If you answered, “I’ll find time,” I’m sorry to tell you that you’ll probably never get to the end of your list. If you said, “I’ll make the time,” you need a plan to accomplish that. I’d like to help the “find time” wishful thinkers transform into “make time” doers. 

In my days at a big-box international retailer, we barely got a break from the Christmas music before we had to start planning again. But this is not practical for most companies, like some of my clients and probably like your company. We all have so many different things going on, and most of my clients are focusing on what’s in front of them right now.

Trust me when I say that you’ll never find the time in your day to do the extra work that growth and innovation require if you try to fit it in and around everything else on your project management list, annual plan and daily to-do list. Been there, tried that.

You have to make the time

If you don’t, you won’t have time to do anything but look at what you did last year, update it for 2022, launch it and hope for the best. However, hope is not a strategy, as email legend Loren McDonald says.

Besides, this year we are facing a fresh new challenge that we didn’t have last year, with its pandemic upsets and supply-chain issues. With everything else on your plate, now you also have to factor in inflation-shocked consumers and a potential economic recession, no matter where in the world you are marketing. (More on that later.)

3 tactics to achieve your goals

Here’s how you can whittle down that to-do list and maybe tackle a few things you didn’t think of (like strategizing for a recession).

1. Discipline your time

This tactic always works for me: I block off time on my calendar every week, so I have the space to do what needs to be done, whether that’s working on a client project, catching up on industry news or thinking through strategy for my company or clients. That means nobody can call me or schedule a meeting then. When I finish that particular project, I just delete the block.

You’ll have to fend off requests for your time from others. Maybe you need to come in an hour earlier or stay an hour later. Maybe even block out the entire day due to a doctor appointment (wink, wink) to hide out and work.

(By the way, isn’t it funny that when you have a doctor appointment, no one bugs you, but when you need personal time for work you get pulled in several directions?) 

The important thing here is to have the discipline to prioritize what’s important to you — most likely, doing what you have to do to make your revenue goal. You have to stand up for yourself because you can’t count on anyone else to do it for you — unless you ask for help, which I will address shortly. 

Saying “I didn’t make goal because everybody else wanted my time” will not appease your boss. 

Dig deeper: 20 ways to make your marketing team more productive

2. Ask for help

When I was still laboring in corporate America, I was in your position. I had a hard time protecting my time. Learning to fence it off and defend it didn’t happen overnight. But one thing helped — I went to my boss, and sometimes to my boss’s boss, and asked for help.

We all want to be superheroes who can be counted on to get the job done. But Captain America and Wonder Woman are comic-book characters. Out here in the real world, the responsible thing is to ask for help so you can achieve a goal. Your superiors should help you because, as the saying goes, they succeed when you succeed. 

That probably will take more than a simple request. Your boss has to understand what’s at stake. Host a lunch-and-learn to get people outside your team on board. I recently hosted a client’s lunch-and-learn session about journey mapping and its importance. Our next conversation about that topic will be easier because our presentation greased the skids.

These two tactics can give you enough space in your day to add another item to your list for Q4 and then come up with a well-thought-out solution. 

Next up: Here’s where all that planning time will pay off — when you have to deal with something unexpected. 

3. Plan for the worst-case scenario — inflation and recession

As I mentioned earlier, these two problems affect markets worldwide. Too many retailers try to solve both problems with one solution: discounts for everybody.

Email is considered a recession-proof channel because of its low cost and wide reach. When times get tough, companies look to email to bail them out, as we saw during the pandemic. But your recession plan needs to be more nuanced than just mass discounting.

A study I worked on years ago for Acxiom examined and categorized different kinds of fashion buyers and what motivated them to purchase. Our findings apply throughout the retail world, and they illustrate why mass discounting can backfire spectacularly.

Some buyers will pay full price no matter what. They don’t worry about inflation or recession like other shoppers. Gratuitous discounts for these shoppers won’t increase your sales — they just eat away at your profit margin. Your strategy is to move these people to purchase without random discounts or other incentives.

So you can understand how complex your customers are as buyers, here’s a list we used to classify segments of our consumers: 

• Full-price buyer
• Impulse buyer
• Occasional discount
• One-time purchaser
• Category specific
• High-value loyalist
• Low-value discounter
• Brand motivated
• Full-price seldom purchaser
• High-value consideration
• Perception based 

Does your inflation/recession strategy center on maximizing your margin based on these segments? If not, right now is the best time to get aligned.

Instead of reaching for the 20% off button, do more segmentation. Look at your customer data now to find buyers like those premium fashion buyers who have never used discounts, coupons or other incentives, and who regularly buy at full price. Who are your high-value loyalists and occasional discounters? 

Aim to go into your holiday marketing with a plan that rides on segmentation and not come into the holiday with a blanket discount.

Dig deeper: No matter the time of year, there’s a holiday you should be planning a campaign for

Wrapping up

Making time to improve your marketing is hard. I’ve been doing this for more than two decades, and it’s still hard for me. 

Right now I need to review a white paper draft that has been sitting in my inbox for weeks. It’s difficult to make the time because of every other project that demands my time, but it’s also important for my agency. So, as soon as I finish this post, I will move on to that one. 

This highlights why you must prioritize what’s important — especially if you are facing economic uncertainty in Q4. The meetings will never stop. People won’t respect your out-of-office status on your intranet. They’ll keep screaming down the hall for you. 

But I know this much is true: Making time is mandatory whether you want to achieve great things or just knock the next must-do project off your list. 

Now, go back to your calendar and schedule a few “doctor” appointments.

The post How to make the time to solve marketing problems appeared first on MarTech.

I suggested you take some time off to plan your marketing strategy for the coming year. Forsake the hustle and distractions of the office and take your team to some offsite location where everybody can stretch their legs, let their minds run free and get the inspiration flowing. 

I also included a five-point plan for auditing your email marketing program before starting the strategic planning process. This gave you a foundation and direction for your planning process. It also revealed how your team members felt about the work they’re doing.

A lot has changed since I wrote that column. How well does it hold up? 

Time to rethink the email audit?

COVID-19 and its aftershocks certainly threw a big wrench into marketing operations, but it wasn’t the only factor reshaping the email landscape. Corporate restructuring, the “Great Resignation,” a new focus on “owned” data (zero-party and first-party data), economic and political upheavals and the continued evolution of marketing technology — all of these have left their marks on many email programs. 

Here’s what I found: My initial advice still stands. (Yeah!) But now, I can see there’s more work to do to understand how your email program is performing and create the strategies that will help your program achieve its goals.

Now: A 10-point email audit for strategic planning

Yes, I gave you more work. But that means you’ll end up with an even more helpful document.

Even if you don’t do a full-blown strategic planning session every year (email marketing team of one, I’m talking to you), this audit will guide you through the background research you need to identify your email strengths and weaknesses and plot your course for the 12 months. 

This research, and the insights you pull from it, become the basis for your strategic plan. Without this work, your planning retreat won’t go beyond aimless blue-sky banter. That’s not how you make your budget numbers or generate the kind of results that give you bragging rights about how well email helps your company achieve its goals. 

Feel free to adjust my audit points, so they work with your company’s unique email situation or add areas that you think I missed. (If you do, tell me what you added!). 

Numbers one through five below are the new points for your email audit. I also included the five from the previous version — for more details on those, check out my original blog post.

1. How do you measure success?

If you’re an ecommerce brand, your number one question should be, “How much money did this email campaign bring in?” The corollary to this question is, “Did it make as much money as I was expecting?”

All the metrics you use should help you answer that question: total revenue attributed to email, revenue per email, revenue per subscriber, and so on.

What doesn’t measure revenue? The open rate. It has never been a reliable success metric, but it has become even less so since 2021, thanks to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature. 

If your audit shows you rely on opens to report success to your bosses, you need to change it.

Dig deeper: Study finds iOS 15 is inflating email open rates

2. What are you doing to keep your email lists clean and up to date?

List hygiene is more important than ever now for two reasons:

• We have to deal with more factors that pollute the database, like spoofed or disposable email addresses and out-of-date addresses, thanks to turnover from COVID-19 layoffs.

• As cookies phase out, the email address has become much more important as an audience identifier across channels. You have to be sure this primary data point is up to date. (See my point 6 below on acquiring primary email addresses, too.)

3. What’s the overall tone of your email content?

I’m looking at two drivers for this point:

• Many brands recalibrated their communications while the world was in lockdown to be more helpful and understanding. Sure, you still need to move product, but the “buy now” mentality is shifting toward “buy from us, and here’s why, and here’s how we can help.”

• Brand equity is more important than ever now that we’re in a world where people will freak out over a single public misstep. I was already talking about this in 2019, but COVID, social media and the world, in general, are making it even more essential to think about how your email campaigns build up or eat away at your brand.  

4. How are your email automations working? 

How long has it been since you reviewed all of the email programs you use besides your basic promotional campaigns? 

I’m talking about a welcome program, transactional emails like abandonment, purchase, loyalty, repurchasing and reactivation.

In case you missed it, my latest MarTech column explained why your automations aren’t “set ’em and forget ’em” and what can happen when one goes rogue. Reviewing and recalibrating your automations should get built into the construction process.

Also, consider what new technology could help you solve some long-standing problems. You might be more data-dependent now than you were a few years ago. Could a central data platform (CDP) help you send better emails?

5. Where could you achieve better returns by bringing in outside help? 

If we learned anything about email over the last 2.5 years, it’s that email works. But making it work right takes time and resources.

If you don’t have the budget to hire full-time help, look for places where you could bring in contractors or an outside agency to take on some of the work you struggle with.

The recent layoffs at major tech companies have created a big pool of talented people who can bring an outsider’s viewpoint and specialized skills. 

Here’s a thought: Hire one of them to audit your email program. You’ll get insights from someone who isn’t beholden to company politics or how things have always been done.

6. Are you asking customers and users for their primary email addresses?

Multiple studies show that the average consumer has up to three email addresses, one of which is their primary email address. What are you doing to sell your program to get the right one?

The primary email address is the one your customers check most often. Emails to primary addresses are more likely to be opened and acted on. 

It’s also the one they guard most carefully. If you want people to give you their primary email addresses, you must give them realistic expectations of your program’s value.

7. How do your transactional emails make money for your email program?

This requires a specific focus on your transactional emails and is separate from your overall periodic review. Here you assess how much revenue those emails bring in — and what your customers do with them (open or click on them, go back to their carts, or ignore them.) 

To judge any potential opportunity, I have worked with retail companies that generate 30% to 50% or more of their email revenue from transactional and triggered emails. This is a good bar to measure your own performance.

The age-old guidance is that you can use 20% of your transactional email for promotional purposes. That’s enough space to get a connected product for upselling or cross-selling.

You might need to revise your email template to update the branding, clarify the benefits, or smooth out the path back to the cart.

8. What’s your campaign workflow?

Ask each team member to write down the process you go through, from campaign research to email launch. 

• Does everybody understand each step? 
• Which steps get overlooked? 
• Is there any step that has become the rule and not the exception that you should add?

You might discover that team members don’t understand what everybody’s role is in pulling a campaign together. 

Another benefit: This evaluation can reveal where the process breaks down and introduces errors or lost time.

9. How do you promote your email successes throughout the company?

Everybody outside the email team thinks email is either easy or a peripheral contributor to the company’s success. 

One of your jobs as an email team leader is letting everybody know just how badass email is.

After you figure out whether your emails are succeeding (see point 1), you need to broadcast that success to everybody who has a hand in deciding the email team’s fate – from budget to hiring to fast-tracking IT requests. 

What could help you get the word out to your boss, to other marketing teams, and ultimately to the boss of your boss’s boss? 

10. What do you want to accomplish in the next six to 12 months?

This is separate from meeting your team’s revenue goal, and it comes last on the list for a reason. 

A thorough audit should expose opportunities as well as weaknesses. Have each team member list one or two things that could move the needle. 

Think like the marketer you are, too. Explain the goal, the strategy for achieving it, and the tactics you’ll need to implement your strategy — especially if you want to add technology.

One last step… 

Write everything down and put everything into a master document for every team member to consult. Go old school and print it out if you want. 

Doing so will keep everyone on the same page, so to speak, and keep your team pulling together.

A pitch for bringing back the strategic planning session

If COVID-19 didn’t kill the offsite planning retreat, it definitely put the experience on pause. But now might be a good time to bring it back. 

Ideally, this planning retreat would happen at a beachside resort with an 18-hole championship golf course and fine dining nearby. But even if your budget will stretch only far enough to cover box lunches in the boardroom, the concept is the same: Get the gang together, lock the doors, turn off your phones, and think long and hard about what you need to accomplish in the coming year and what you have to do to get there. 

Having everybody on Zoom doesn’t cut it because you still have outside distractions, and video-call fatigue is real.

You need this time away from the email grind. Refocus on what’s coming beyond getting your next campaign to get out of the door. 

A strategic plan will help you identify your goals and objectives and outline the strategies you need to use, along with the tactics that will carry out those strategies. 

You’ll probably want to modify some things if COVID is still a challenge. Some team members will never feel comfortable in in-person gatherings anymore. But it’s worth the effort to try to restart in-person strategic planning even if your company is 100% remote.

The post 10 questions to ask when auditing your email program appeared first on MarTech.

The booking process went well, but if you have ever booked a site without seeing it in person, you might feel a little anxious after clicking “Book now.” 

Will this place that just ate a big chunk of my credit limit turn out as advertised? Will it live up to the photos in the listing, or is it really a shack on a main road with some stranger’s shoes on the deck?

One day after I booked, I got an email. “We saved your search so you don’t miss out on your dream vacation,” it said.

Yes, folks, I freaked out. 

Attack of the browse-abandon emails

I booked the place, so why was I getting this browse-abandon email? My card didn’t go through? The owner refused my booking? My reservation got lost? Somebody else booked it a second before I did? 

Over the next four months, I looked at the property 22 times, and I received 22 follow-up emails. I know exactly how many because I saved them all. 

I won’t mention the site because we all have things in our email programs that we know we need to fix. But there’s an opportunity to learn from it and make sure we’re not making the same mistake.

If you follow me on MarTech, you know how much I love browse-abandon emails (not). But this gave me a whole bunch of teachable moments, which I have narrowed down to three because I just returned from that beautiful house and am in post-vacation-chill mode:

1. Set up or adjust your exclusions 

Browse-abandon emails make sense in travel and hospitality, because repeatedly viewing locations, hotels and attractions can be strong intent signals. The dollar value is higher, and the travel shopper’s mindset is more considered. 

But…

Your marketing automations must build in exclusions for people who don’t need to receive a follow-up message, even if they meet some of the triggering criteria, like a site visit. Yes, they are still showing intent, but has that intent grown or has it waned? Do you need to change the message?

Dig deeper: 8 major email marketing mistakes and how to avoid them

You don’t have to include everyone who meets your criteria in your browse-abandon sequence. Think deeper. When should you not send a standard browse-abandon email to someone who visited a site but left without clicking the “Book now” button? When should you change the message? (See the next item.)

Exclusions are just as important as inclusions in marketing automation. If you have no exclusions, you’re doing it wrong. In fact, I can’t think of a single automation that wouldn’t have at least one exclusion.

2. Vary the messages

Remember those 22 browse-abandon emails? They were all pretty much the same. Same headline, same copy, even the same recommended properties. It reflects badly on the brand. 

If you have an automation that executes every time an event happens, you can’t send the same message every time. Set limits. How many emails with the same message is too many? 

You need a good reason to operate an open-ended automation. This particular automation did not have a “converted” exclusion. You also should set a limit – say 10 follow-up emails, and that might even be too much. If I view a property 10 times but your data shows I still haven’t booked, it’s time to change the message.

Escalate me to customer service. Ask if I need help. Give me a number to call. Give me a chance to say I’m not interested any longer or I booked the property. 

It’s all about meeting your customers where they are, based on intent and what you know about them.

3. Resolve your data disconnects 

You’re probably thinking, “Ryan, their order system isn’t connected to their email marketing system.” I understand that disconnect in data. But when your program is so disconnected that it’s not effective, you should limit the impact.

If your browse-abandon email isn’t hooked up to your order history, then you should limit your email series to three or four and test to find out at what point extra emails become annoying. 

This limits the damage to your brand experience and forces you to solve the problem.

Even a manual intervention could have helped. You can implement a range of temporary fixes while you formally integrate the data.

We don’t always have all the data we need to be successful. But you have three choices here:

• Create a good enough automation even though you lack data.
• Wait until you have all the data you need so you can perfect the automation.
• Launch an email that doesn’t hurt the brand experience but still helps you accomplish a goal (the agile solution).

We all have data problems. But our job is to make do with what we have and not tick off people who just spent a gobsmack of money on our products or services.

Wrapping up

Marketing automation is incredibly powerful. I know companies that make 50% of their email revenue on automated and transactional emails on 4% to 5% of their overall volume.

But with that power comes the responsibility to build programs that enhance customer intent, grow that intent and convert that intent — and, when the customer converts, to recognize that conversion.

This intent gap signals us to review our marketing automations and find out what’s in the data, what’s missing, what’s excluded and what’s included. If your marketing automation just sends an email every time an event happens, that’s not automation, that’s just repetition.

The smart play is to make sure your automations have the right data, you have considered your inclusions and exclusions, varied your messages and limited the impact. 

Sometimes you can send too many emails. Just because you have an event on your website, that doesn’t mean you have to send the email associated with it.

Or, as my friend David Baker says, sometimes email doesn’t work. In my situation, the email the company sent me — and sent me, and sent me — didn’t work. But it serves one useful purpose.

It gave me the opportunity to see where we need to improve our programs and look critically at how we execute marketing automations. 

(Drop microphone, walk off stage. Walk back on, pick up mic.)

If you think I’m writing about your company, print out my column, send it to your team and say, “Ryan just wrote about us! Here’s why we need to fix our automations.” Not that I’m so important, but seeing your problem described publicly on MarTech.org might motivate your team to act. Then write to me and let me know how it went.

The post 3 ways to avoid email automation breakdowns appeared first on MarTech.