Email marketing: The importance of your data and ‘getting it right’

Many larger businesses are already dipping their toes into transforming the ways in which they communicate with their audience, whether that be their direct audience such as clients, or their wider audience, like prospects. A sophisticated way they achieve this is through email marketing. A ‘giant’ who does this well is Amazon. They harness the power of features like automation to create a two way, relevant conversation with their customers, all while strengthening their brand and improving ROI.

Big businesses like Amazon dominate when it comes to their email marketing, time after time. But how are they able to do this so seamlessly? Data.

The data you collect as a business can be the driving force behind many of your marketing activities. And whether your contact database is 100 or 100,000, the same rules apply. Once you implement your rich data and meaningful actions with that data, when it comes to your email marketing activities you will have the starting point to continually grow your datalist and associated actions.

Each time you meet a new prospect, add them to your list. Has a prospect evolved into a client? Change which list they are in accordingly. You can upload your current datalist to MailFirst and all the new information, such as ‘firstname’ datafield, will override previously held information.

Email marketing platforms, like our very own MailFirst, allow you to create beautifully crafted campaigns that make lasting impressions on your audience. As well as being visually pleasing, Mailfirst is also very intelligent. Pulling together your data either from your clean datalist or predetermined segments, the platform can be used to build long lasting automation programs which deliver ‘touch points’ to your audience, as and when they show interest. Your data can also be applied to dynamic content.

For features like these to work, it is especially important that your data is correct. These features work due to ‘rules’ that are implemented and if your data doesn’t match a rule, your email marketing intentions will fail.

For example, you may decide to apply a more human touch to your campaigns and have your campaign ‘sign off’ come from four individual people within your business. Your data should be as follows:

You can create a set of rules in MailFirst to personalise your campaigns. Your data fields are the driving force of these rules. The most common example of this is in the use of an adviser name and picture. By flagging in the MailFirst database that client Joe is advised by David, Dynamic Content will ensure Joe will receive the same email as the rest of your clients but with David’s picture at the top, whereas other clients will receive their own respective adviser’s details. You can read more about dynamic content here.

This is one of the most important reasons your data must be correct. Dynamic content is case sensitive and if there is not an exact match between the rule and the information from your data, it, unfortunately, will not work. A great feature but it needs great data to work with.

What we consider the most important factor with data is that it is very important that you only email those who want to be emailed. By constantly sending to recipients who are not interested in what you have to offer, you can damage your sending domain. A good way to ensure your audience only receive mailers that peak their interest is by implementing a preference centre. A preference centre would be linked in every one of your mailers. Similar to the ‘view in browser link’, it allows your audience to decide which mailers they receive.

You can visit the help section at anytime if you need any guidance on data or implementing the features mentioned above, automation and dynamic content.