How to make complex email marketing simple

Email marketing is a complicated business, taking a great deal of time and energy. Or is it? It depends on the tools and techniques you use to support your efforts. The best of the bunch deliver everything you need to drive email marketing success without having to invest in new staff or buy expensive software.

You need tools that give your business the in-depth customer analysis required to ensure measurable returns on your marketing investment. What do the best, most powerful, and simplest applications provide? I’m going to look at tools that support three of today’s most popular email marketing routes: desktop, mobile, and social media engagement.

Making desktop email campaigns easier

Let’s take Emarsys as a good example of an application which drives better email marketing, saving businesses a great deal of time and hassle. Here’s what their email marketing application delivers:

• Gives you in-depth customer intelligence so you gain a better understanding of your customers and prospects, basing enquiries on any aspect of the data
• Creates integral customer life cycle clusters that can be customised for more or less instant in-depth insight
• Analyses demographics, opens, clicks, behavioural, and financial information to drive creative segmentation and targeting
• Plans and automates complex multi-channel campaigns and lifecycle programmes in no time
• Creates personalised campaign content automatically and re-purposes it easily so you don’t need to know anything about html code
• Creates real time transactional responses to save marketers time, remove the risk of mistakes, and deliver customer service excellence
• Sends different versions of the same content to different people according to their interests and sales cycle status
• Creates one-click integrated communications across email, social media, mobile, and the web for multiple customer touch points

Making mobile email campaigns easier

Here’s how a top-performing system like Emarsys’ can make email marketing to mobile devices easier:

• Senses automatically which device or platform people will use to open your message and displays the right content  every time
• Replicates a slimmed down version rather than the entire message
• Lets you include or leave out any sections you like for mobile consumption
• Allows better-proportioned images to maximise the power of your messages’ visual impact
• Lets you convert live links into big, clear buttons for a better user experience and higher response rates

Making social media email engagement easier

And here’s how the right tools can help you maximise the power of social interaction for email marketing:

• Gives you the choice of either sharing the entire email message on the social network of your choice, or picking and choosing elements of it. It also lets people choose which parts of your email message they want to share
• Post-sending, you can track messages’ footprints and monitor success via in-depth social reporting
• Allows you to identify and track brand champions and influencers
• Lets you talk to users in a new way

As you can imagine, doing all this on a DIY basis would be nigh on impossible, taking a vast amount of time, and putting you at serious risk of making a brand-damaging mistake or missing a critical trick. But with the right support from the right tools, email marketing brilliance is plain sailing.

Author Bio: Michael Palmer, an Oxford based business graduate and writer. His writing covers many subjects, including business, marketing, HR, fitness, and football.

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