Making Money On-line: The Quest for the Data-Driven Email: How Your Team Can Come Together on a Digital Marketing ...

Creating an effective and engaging email that will garner the results you want, such as higher open and click-through rates, might require the whole marketing team to come together.

You might need your marketing director to help shape the vision for your campaign and drive the team forward. The content manager might work on where the email fits in your content strategy or even write the copy for the email. Your designer will provide the visuals, and a campaign manager well versed in marketing automaton and email marketing might send the email (or emails) out. A social media specialist or director will then use the appropriate platforms to promote the content or offer in the email, and the content manager might also feature the same offer or message in your blog. Of course, someone on your team who works with data management will have to track the results.

Of course, your entire team would have had to come together in the first place to plan the email and use the appropriate data to make sure that it’s personalized for its target audience to hopefully get the best response possible. Such data-driven emails garner the best results, as they speak more directly to your audience and are tailored to their preferences and interests.

Certainly, today’s digital marketing requires multiple moving parts all coming together with the same vision and goals in mind to shape an email with the right data. It is a game that you play to win ample rewards and also an adventure you go on with your team. Using data to craft an impactful email is truly a quest, and those that succeed are heroes.

In fact, you can use the analogy of a roleplaying game’s campaign to illustrate how all a marketing team’s different members and skillsets come together to solve problems and create an email. RPGs rely on cards that stand in for special abilities and tools, and each marketer on your team will also their own set of talents and tools that they use to play a vital role in winning the day.

You are all digital marketing knights of brave renown, and here are some of the trials you might face on your quest:

Scenario #1: The Rhyming Imp from Corporate Marketing

An imp comes down from Corporate Marketing and claims that they are there to look everything over. They want to see if your emails are working, and if not to instruct you on how to take things slower. As your budget will be cut, your leads will be given to another marketing team who has had better luck.

Rather than despair, your campaign manager mage will conjure visions of numbers from how previous email campaigns with your data and email copy and design did swell. This will show that you are on course to do good with this email as well.

This banishes the imp back to Corporate Marketing, and repeated status reports on your campaign’s success keep him there, and numbers do not lie, so he won’t come back soon, he won’t dare, he'll hide.

(Having data to back up and justify the decisions you make during campaigns can please your CMOs and other marketing executives and give you more confidence and freedom when planning and executing your campaign.)

Scenario #2: The Content Audit Dragon

To see what content will work well with his magic spells to entice prospects into becoming customers, your content wizard must do an audit of his old spell books to see what worked before and what needs tweaking, revising, a dash of midnight, a four-leaf clover, and other magical ingredients.

This knowledge can help in crafting future emails, as the wizard will have an idea of enchantments his team’s audience likes to fall under. However, it has been an age since the last content audit. The spell books have piled up high and fill an entire cave. The magic has leaked out of them to form a dragon, one your wizard is reluctant to face, as it will take much tedious work to formulate the magic charms needed to tame it and organize the spells (the content) along with the data of how well it all performed.

However, the SEO paladin and the designer bowman both lend a hand, and together with an agency of noble knights and the wizard, they defeat the dragon and organize all the spells into a framework that is readable, understandable, and actionable to use in emails and other spells and content.

(Content audits can be long and tedious work, especially if you leave them go for too long. However, they can provide great insights into your content and help you with you with your strategy and campaigns. A content manager does not have to perform an audit alone. You are part of a team, and your teammates also need to know how well past content has performed, as it might help inform their SEO, design, campaign, and other strategies. Making an audit into a team effort promotes teamwork, invests everyone in its results, and lets everyone have a look at the content in order for them to provide their own feedback. You might also call on an agency you work with to help with the audit, as the information it provides will help them in their projects and the direction everything is going in, too.)

Scenario #3 The Gnome from Sales

A gnome from sales appears in your office. He sits in on all your meetings and looks over everyone’s shoulders at what they’re doing. He appears to have no other purpose but to try to tell everyone how to perform their duties better, with an emphasis on giving the people spread across all the kingdoms a hard sell. About what, pray tell? Well, they need your team to provide them with the lucky charms to send the bothersome trolls packing. He and the other gnomes are always talking with the people, and they think your emails need to reflect what they’re hearing from the traveling minstrels in the taverns about the trolls, while your information comes from the townspeople themselves.

You share what you’ve heard with the gnome, and he describes in better detail what he’s gotten from drinking mead with the minstrels. Once you have shared information and come up with an agreed-upon way to approach your emails that the gnomes can follow up on, your gnome thinks it will work and turns to stone. He only transforms back to check on your open and click-through rates and see if they are turning into revenue.

(Contrary to what some might believe, marketing and sales can work together. In fact marketing can empower sales. You are both on the same side and want the same thing: leads to become customers. By sharing data, you can align on your approaches, so marketing can prime and ready a lead to be turned over to sales.)

Not a Roll of the Dice

Campaigns might experience many other obstacles. If pirates from the competition have beaten you to the punch and are using messaging, themes, and an offer similar to what you were going to do in your email, you might spice up the copy and design, and work with sales on making a different offer—as long as it all aligns with what your data says your customers want.

You might feel that a rival marketing magician has placed a hex on you and that is why your open and click-through rates are low, even though your offer, the copy and design, they’re all good. However, you can overcome that hex by having your team remain in good spirits and come at their approach to email marketing in a different way, by trying to derive different insights from your data and using different topics, themes, writing, and visuals to enchant your audiences.

Of course, RPG campaigns often count on a roll of the dice to win their battles. Digital marketers do not. What they do is not random but comes from a strategy and plan they all contributed to. Rather than dice and playing cards, they have an array of marketing methods and best practices to utilize. They do not have to draw a sword from a stone but are working off a strong set of data that comes from their customers’ preferences, A/B and multivariate testing, analytics showing the results of their past campaigns, and their own experience and talents. Coming together as a team of digital marketing heroes, they can count on each other and that their approach to marketing draws upon solid numbers and their own ingenuity.

What are the tools a digital marketer needs on their quest to reach and connect with their customers? Marketing automation can be a great help, but you can also create magic with cross-channel orchestration, data management, testing and personalization, and digital analytics. Find how Oracle Marketing Cloud can make a difference with your campaign.