Email customer engagement marketing is evolving. Many have heralded its demise over the recent years. This is true, perhaps, with regards to the email blasts that attempt to blanket wide swaths of people with outdated “spray and pray” techniques. But for those that seek to target certain segments with highly relevant and personalized customer engagement messages, email marketing is alive and well. In fact, it is actually thriving.
During an Ad Tech session in San Francisco titled, “The Death of Email Blasts,” Jerry Jao, CEO of Retention Science, joined Amy Michaels, T-Mobile Director of Direct Marketing Acquisition, to discuss how the rising mobile provider uses email to understand and support its rapidly growing consumer base.
When compared to other major U.S. cellular carriers, T-Mobile may not lead the pack. But when considering the swiftness of its expansion, T-Mobile’s stature starts to look a lot more impressive. As the largest growing carrier in the nation, T-Mobile has recently gone from 33 million customers to 55 million customers in only eight quarters, and it has done so by effectively leveraging a host competitive pricing, enticing offers, and targeted marketing efforts.
“When I think about email prospecting, there are some customers that I don’t want, or need to talk to,” Michaels said. “What I want to know is everything about current customers. We want to very carefully understand what the tipping point was that drew in new customers, and I want to know everything about them. Specifically, I want to know the role email played in their journey, and their decision to come to T-Mobile. And then we look to automate, replicate, and scale that.”
The breath of customization that email allows lets marketers personalize messages to maintain a degree of relevance that can get customers to actually want to open an email, rather than see it as mass marketed junk. Overtime, this also allows marketers to see trends emerge, which can be leveraged through data analysis to further enhance the effectiveness of future campaigns.
A large part of T-Mobile’s marketing success comes from the rigorous way it targets and segments customers through emails.
“Quantitatively, we look at the demographic trends of people who come to T-Mobile, and how the long-term customer may or may not differ from the new customers,” said Michaels. “After we see how the data lines up with certain segments, then we go out and do qualitative research with these groups to understand what drives them, how they came to T-Mobile, and what they did. From that we architect a marketing strategy that describes that journey, and then we run predictive analytics on it.”
T-Mobile takes great care to perfect its approach to avoid giving anyone a bad customer experience. It is in the best interests of the brand to avoid an email marketing strategy that becomes bland, generic, or, worst of all, irrelevant. And this process is also fluid and ongoing. The nature of customer behavior is capricious and always evolving, and so brands seeking to implement a similar strategy must continually work at it.
“Do a monthly customer review,” Michaels recommends. “Understand who your customers are, what’s motivating them, the demographic trends that relate to who’s coming into the store and who’s buying. Because if you can bring all that together to have the right customer conversation, there are all kinds of things that can come from that to help you across your marketing efforts.”
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.