By Matt Levy

Most marketing executives want to build quality customer relationships and see a personalized, relevant and integrated email marketing solution as one way to meet that objective. Often frustrated with internal constraints marketers will reach for outside solutions to meet strategic marketing needs. Going outside and around the existing IT infrastructure seems like a quick approach. However, marketers soon realize the importance of having their own IT department involved in order to make e-mail marketing effective.

When considering the implementation of an email marketing solution several important factors must be considered.

First, leverage existing customer information stored within internal IT systems. The goal is to provide a personalized and relevant experience and therefore, mining and utilizing existing customer information is a tremendous resource to the savvy marketer. Understanding the steps required to integrate customer data into the email marketing solution can make or break a successful campaign. One recent client required 39 different customer data fields to ensure the customer relationship was managed effectively once an email marketing solution was deployed.

Next, recognize that email marketing is a responsibility as much as an opportunity. Email marketing is a primary touch point for many organizations and must also be utilized to update and keep customer information reliable. Most departments within the marketer’s organization don’t have the resources or the ability to enable updates to customer information with the same magnitude or significance that marketing does when utilizing email marketing as a tool. The words from a popular movie a few years ago come to mind, “With great power, comes great responsibility”, I believe this was Spiderman’s uncle, but this seems relevant here too.

Have a plan. Email marketing is only one component of your integrated marketing and communications plan. Implementing email marketing should be tightly integrated with this plan. Understanding the implications of the various moving parts of email marketing will affect your plan. For example, implementing an internal or outsourced email marketing solution will affect budgets, timelines and internal resource requirements. Similarly, have you decided to use the email solution for internal communications as well? If so, how does this solution tie to the internal communications plan? If you are like many of our clients, internal and external communications are handled by different people within marketing. The need for a well understood plan across marketing and affected departments becomes the foundation to build consensus and direction while providing the necessary leadership to keep the ship moving in the right direction.

Answering these foundational questions before you begin your email marketing campaigns will help ensure you get the best return on your marketing dollar:

1. How do we get all of our customer information loaded into our email marketing database?
2. How can we keep customer information ‘clean’ once it is loaded into the database?
3. How do we achieve meaningful reporting on customer activity?
4. Should we install internal software or outsource it to an e-marketing service provider?
5. What is the best solution to allow business users to update the email marketing content within our unique business and IT environment?
6. What is our email marketing strategy and does it prioritize our critical initiatives?
7. Can we pilot email marketing? – Yes, ask us how.