• by Neil Rosen , September 10, 2013

A recent article in a trade publication likened the inbox to a battlefield, and that image isn’t very far off the mark. Email marketing is becoming more and more attractive to marketers as other means of reaching prospects and customers are either disappearing or are shown to be ineffective and/or overpriced. Email marketing, on the other hand, is growing by leaps and bounds, energized by the new emphasis on mobile devices and delivering the best ROI available.

What this means, of course, is that there’s even more potential for customers to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume in their inboxes… and to use the delete key for anything that isn’t immediately engaging. And who can blame them? Especially when we’re probably doing exactly the same thing in our personal lives vis-à-vis the email lists to which we subscribe!

The reality is that good deliverability doesn’t just hinge on following all the industry best practices: it also hinges on giving thought to delivering great CRM. It doesn’t really matter if an email reaches a mailbox when it’s not going to get read anyway. Keeping your customers engaged and interested in reading and responding to your emails is what makes for the best deliverability anywhere.

And that engagement starts from your very first contact with the customer. No one wants to receive emails that they didn’t sign on for, but getting that first signup can be tricky, and many marketers shy away from the constant testing that’s required to sanitize email lists. And yet data, and learning from data, may be one of the most critical jobs of any B2C marketer today—and will go a long way toward ensuring positive CRM. Because good lists make for happy customers.

The reality is that performing list hygiene after the fact can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. A far better idea is to pay more attention to how those lists are being obtained in the first place. 

Good CRM through excellent list and customer acquisition is a process that begins by automatically evaluating each individual lead source, rather than lead quality and performance in the aggregate. Aggressive acquisition practices will harm your inbox delivery rates and may even get you listed on email reputation sites; so proceeding with traditional acquisition processes not only makes your company assume a good deal of risk, but also tells potential customers that they are of little value to your company. Not the best idea from a CRM point of view!

So if you perform this evaluation, you will automatically identify the sources of any risky leads and eliminate those sources, as well as identifying your best-performing lead sources and subsequently increasing budget to those sources. How? By turning off lead sources that provide a disproportionate number of high-risk leads before they injure your ISP reputation, and automatically throttling to receive more leads from your best-performing, clean, low-risk lead sources.

Many acquisition processes implement auto-responders for new-customer signups, but isn’t it time that we went beyond auto-responders? Why shouldn’t marketers up a system that immediately nurtures leads? That system would deliver a cascade of behavior-based promotional emails, so that the same cascade would not be delivered to every single lead that comes into the system. Instead, the cascades will respond in near-real time to prospect actions. What cascade is received depends on what the person did, requested, commented on, or filled out. And that continues once the prospect has become a customer and begins to watch for your emails: once they become customers, people get cascades that react to the actions they take.

That’s the kind of email that stands out in the inbox. That’s the kind of email that wins on the email-marketing battlefield. Don’t you want to score a victory? You can do it as long as the customer experience is at the core of every engagement, from acquisition through customer lifetime. Because good lists make for happy customers!