• by Neil Rosen , June 11, 2013

So let’s say that you are a terrific email marketer. You have a responsive email list, you send out welcoming messages to new customers (maybe even a little transition marketing to make them feel really welcomed), and you get solid results on your targeted campaigns. Your e-marketing strategy is working—as far as it goes. But it could go farther.

What are you missing?

Successful email strategies combine two initiatives: recency and frequency. You probably already think about frequency quite a lot; you want to send emails as frequently as makes sense for your business, but not so frequently as to annoy your customers (which you determine by monitoring response rates—opens, clicks, sign-ups, purchases, unsubscribes and complaint rates). 

Recency is another way of looking at communicating with your customers. It refers to communicating with customers as quickly as possible in response to an action taken by that customer. The impetus doesn’t come from you; it comes from the customer, and it’s responding to that customer’s action that can make all the difference in driving revenue and loyalty.

It’s essential that I underline that last bit, because that’s where great CRM comes into the equation. You care about your customers mostly—let’s face it—so that they remain your customers. I recently noticed a company proclaiming that it has “legendary customer service,” which I think may be a little over the top—nothing in the world of marketing, frankly, is world-shaking enough to generate legends in the great scheme of things—but the truth is that one area of intense competition among marketers is in fact great customer service: it can mean the difference between keeping and losing some valuable income. So great email marketing requires great CRM, and that’s why it’s essential that the timing of your email campaigns corresponds with what your customers have indicated that they want. 

In other words, time your email campaigns and cascades to be in synch with how your customers want to hear from you. Do they want follow-up emails? Do they need to be reminded so that ordering XYZ from you (which they’ve already indicated in some way that the plan to do) stays top of mind?

So recency marketing, as I just pointed out, is most powerful (and most successful) when it’s connected to a freewill action by the customer. What are some of these actions?

• When a new customer comes on board: your welcome email and offer sequence need to immediately follow the signup to drive optimum revenue. 
• When customers visit your website: reengagement technology enables you to send additional emails to customers who leave the site without making a purchase (even before filling a shopping cart!). These emails drive up to 10 times the revenue of your standard email campaigns. In addition, they generate open rates in excess of 50%.
• When customers contact your sales or service departments: this is a great time to send a thank-you email and reaffirm immediately how much you appreciate their business—always remembering to include an offer. Again, time here is of the essence.

Additional recency opportunities exist, less powerful, but also providing a significant revenue boost over standard email: 

• When customers open emails and then take no further action, a quick follow-up offer expanding upon the offer in the original email drives strong sales.

• When customers receive offline media, for example catalogs or other direct mail pieces, coordinate your email to arrive just after these offline initiatives to keep your brand in the customer’s mind.

A well-defined and well-executed recency strategy is a must-have part of any email strategy—as important as your testing strategy, segmentation strategy, landing page strategy, and creative strategy. It costs almost nothing to implement … and provides you with the best CRM ever: it gives your customers the sense that you listened to what they said and responded to it.

Which is what everybody really wants, at the end of the day.