Email Marketing: Playing Customer

Posted by Scott Cohen On April 7, 2011 in story time I 0 Comments

There comes a point in every marketer’s life where they just don’t know what to do next with their marketing programs. Are you at that point? Try this:

Become a real customer of your product or service.

I don’t mean simply go to your sign-up form on your website and just make sure everything is working properly (yes, that is important). I mean actually BUY something.

Go through all of the steps and look at all of the touch points.

• Do you get the information you need to make an informed purchase decision?
  • If so, where did you get it from? Email? The phone? The website? All three?
  • If not, where would you have preferred to receive that information? What could have been better about the experience?
• Is the information presented in a confusing way? Could the emails have been better at disseminating the information?
• Were there any points where you would have rather received an email? Or perhaps instead of an email, you would have rather received a phone call?
• Were there any points in the experience where the email you received was at odds with information you received from other touch points? (Ex: The website said one thing, and the email said another.)

Take off your marketer’s hat and become a customer. Becoming a customer allows you to live through the experience of the folks you’re marketing to.  As I wrote previously, all of your marketing channels create an experience that should be smooth, simple, and easy to navigate.

Your email program is a great way to optimize that experience, but you can’t optimize it without knowing where it fits in the ultimate experience. So, get your teams together—your customer service team, your website team, your social team,  and any other channel team—and build a true experience where email can be the grease to the engine that keeps everything running smoothly.

Just a friendly reminder from your neighborhood email marketing agency!

Cheers, Scott