Our Email Marketing & CRM Seminar on Wednesday saw delegates from a diverse range of brands come together for an afternoon of presentations by expert speakers with a wealth of experience working with email and CRM. Here we sum up the key takeaways from each presentation and some of the main questions that were discussed on the panel. You can also follow the links to watch the full presentations.
Personalisation: Why Does it Fall Short?
Laura Paterson, Customer First Marketing for Selligent Marketing Cloud, looked at how marketing has evolved from the mass-market era to the era of relevance and focused on four key areas where marketers are struggling to create personalisation.
Laura explained how to drive personalisation with AI; for example, using different email opening lines for different customers. She also stressed the importance of using customer data to target customers smartly (the right content at the right time). She ended by sharing three key tips: use the data you have, don’t do things that would make you feel uncomfortable as a customer, and make your marketing customer-focused rather than business-focused.
Reach for the Stars! … OK Down a Bit
Julie Neilson, Head of Planning at Edit, identified three key challenges of creating marketing strategies: being over-optimistic, underestimating the challenges, and not consulting implementation teams early enough. For Julie, ambition is positive, but it needs to be reality-checked. This means you bring pragmatism and realism into your strategy and don’t try to reach unrealistic goals.
She explored what CRM can realistically achieve, how to use data effectively, and summarised the roles that different members of your strategy team play. Julie also pointed out that you should be working with your client and not only for them because working collaboratively produces the best results.
Delivering Transformation in CRM
Stuart Russell, Client Services Director at Planning-inc, talked through four key characteristics a high-performing CRM team should have: agility, clarity, balance, and efficiency. He illustrated how much time you can save by having access to the right customer data and shared some examples of the success of their client, New Look.
Stuart discussed how to strike a balance between what marketers want to achieve and what the business cares about and how this benefits your CRM programme. He offered some examples of successful email campaigns they have run, including almost eradicating unsubscribes and increasing revenue through geo-targeting.
The Five Most Important Marketing KPIs and How to Track Them
Christelle Fraysse FCIM, Chief Marketing Officer at Workbooks, shared that fewer than half of business leaders believe that marketing expenditure significantly contributes to revenue or profitability. Christelle offered some tips on how to demonstrate that you’re producing something as a marketer and not just costing your company.
She broke this down into trackable KPIs, including measuring marketing contribution to revenue, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and whether you’re investing wisely.
Christelle also explained how to calculate your net promoter score by dividing your customers into promoters, detractors, and passives. She stressed the importance of marketing automation and CRM being integrated and different pieces of information not being siloed.
Hacking the Stack: How to Bring Strategy Back to Email
Alex Henry, Client Solutions Director, International at Bluecore, showed that email marketing, far from dying out, is actually growing. He focused on the rising cost of acquiring consumers and the fact that it takes longer to do. This means that businesses are increasingly resorting to discounts to attract people, but this is creating a discount culture where consumers never want to pay full price for anything and so wait for discounts before engaging with brands.
Alex demonstrated how essential unified retail data is and stressed that the emphasis should be on customer engagement rather than the volume of emails.