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Overview
Sitebrand Retail Marketing Suite
Easy to implement:
Available in two packages:  
A Guide to Permission-Based Email
Sitebrand's president examines email marketing tactics, focusing on the strategies that build the customer relationship. According to the fifth annual Quris "The View from the Inbox" study of consumer email preferences, a significant gap still exists between what consumers say they want and the kinds of permission-based email companies are sending them. The gap indicates the basic failure of many email marketers to fully comprehend the interactive nature of the medium, and it raises a simple question: Why guess what your customers want when you can just as readily ask? Too many companies have adopted an exclusive push mentality for a medium that works both ways. The tendency to push—to guess instead of ask—may be a lingering legacy of pre-digital days when advertisers controlled their own brands, start to finish. But nowadays, brand perception is in the customer's hands, and the quality of that perception is often directly related to the quality of the latest impression, regardless of the venue or channel. Often the quality of that impression can be found not only in its demographic and psychographic relevancy, but also in its functional relevancy, in its ability to address the specific needs of the customer at a specific point in the relationship curve. The Quris study finds that two out of the three email applications most popular among consumers are found not in the awareness, consideration, or transaction phases of the relationship curve, but in the post-awareness, post-consideration, post-transaction backend, more specifically, in transaction confirmation and customer support functions—information that directly relates to specific purchases. According to the Quris report, consumers ranked shipping confirmation messages atop the desired permission email application food chain at 56 percent, while electronic statement and account information ranked a close second at 50 percent. The shift in customer support from more traditional channels to email corresponds to two other trends noted in the Quris study: 1) heavy email users actually read more permission emails on a daily basis (nearly 11 in 2005 versus five or fewer in 2004), and 2) the proliferation of web-based email services offers greater account access from multiple locations, and in turn generates increased reliance on the medium as a customer support vehicle. Lessons to learn In today's highly sensitized and cluttered brand environment, a single bad customer support experience can poison a 20-year relationship in a heartbeat. Moreover, the viral word-of-mouth nature of today's accelerated communications channels threatens to poison multiple relationships with each less than satisfactory engagement, as customers are quick to relay the extent of their frustrations and disappointments to family and friends, first via email, then by telephone and face-to-face encounters. Brands are simply much more sensitive and vulnerable than they were 10 years ago, and each individual withdrawal from the brand bank threatens a potentially pandemic response. In such a promiscuous and tenuous brand universe, companies might be wise to expand coupon distribution beyond the traditional front-end acquisition application on the relationship curve. They might instead also begin to view coupons as effective tools to repair, deepen, and broaden relationships at the backend. The ability to repair and deepen a relationship are of course traditional support functions, but the ability to broaden a relationship is a more traditional function of marketing and acquisition, a function now being conducted on the backend of the relationship curve by virtue of the fact that more and more consumers are devoting more and more time with post-transaction support applications in the email channel. The resulting closed-loop logic is inescapable and invokes an inevitable transition as more and more companies look to the backend customer support functions of permission email to drive front-end acquisition and relationship marketing. The new relationship loop The old relationship curve, which once tracked a customer's relationship with your brand — from awareness, to consideration, to transaction, to fulfillment, to customer support and loyalty — has evolved in recent years into a closed loop with no real beginning or end. The new relationship loop, which replaces the old relationship curve, demands greater brand responsiveness across the full range of functions—from awareness to transactions to customer support. Consumers will move in and out of brand engagements at various points in the loop for various reasons, and it is simply incumbent on the brand to keep pace. The lesson is pretty simple: Seize the opportunity to market wherever and whenever your prospective customers are most likely to spend their time with your brand. So take a bite out of someone's backend. Justin Shimoon is president, chairman of the board of Sitebrand. Before founding SiteBrand Corporation in February 2000, Shimoon worked at Nortel Networks and was responsible for their Optical Network Planning and Design Testability groups. While at Nortel, he closed over $300 million in deals with some of the world's largest Internet Service Providers, including PSINet, ClearData and PG&E. Shimoon holds a degree in electrical engineering with a concentration in Telecommunications from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. His persistence, drive and ambition won him the prestigious Carleton University Wes Nicol Entrepreneurial Award. He was nominated in "The top 40 under 40," which is presented annually for exceptional business ideas and implementation strategies. About SitebrandSitebrand specializes in helping online retailers realize greater profitability through personalization. Its marketing automation software includes powerful, integrated tools for delivering real-time, rules-driven, personalized web campaigns, as well as personalized email campaigns. By providing the data necessary to identify market segments to target, and the tools to drive successful campaigns, marketers can generate more customers, more profit per customer, and more customer loyalty. Unlike other solutions, Sitebrand, with its single integrated application, uniquely provides a personalization rules engine and fully-tracked email campaigns. It also provides rapid time-to results, and is offered as a web-based, subscription service. Sitebrand (www.sitebrand.com), founded in 2000, is privately held, with offices in Gatineau, Québec, Canada. Media ContactCarolyn Gardner |
