E-mail marketing can be exquisitely targeted or it can be spam, depending in large measure on the work done by the sender to ensure relevance to the recipient. One method of targeting is to use search engines.
Relevance is the coin of the realm in e-mail marketing. Despite all the talk about how spam kings get rich, the truth is that hardworking, legitimate e-mail marketers enjoy a far more lucrative and customer-friendly existence. Jupiter Research, in its report entitled The ROI of E-Mail Relevance, noted that conversion rates for carefully targeted e-mail reach nearly 4%, while traditional broadcast e-mail techniques barely approach 1%. Moreover, using these techniques to deliver relevant offers yields 18 times more profit than the simpleminded blast approach.
Using everything from CRM systems to Web analytics, marketers can identify the right message for just about anyone. Did you purchases a laptop three years ago that may be wearing out now? The CRM system knows to spit out your e-mail address. Have you visited the Web site and looked at the same product line twice in the last week? The Web Analytics system can notice that and possibly get you contacted.
But how do you generate unique offers for each of these very targeted groups? It’s incredibly expensive to create custom pages for so many offers.
Multifaceted search comes to the rescue. If you’ve already loaded up your product catalog in a multifaceted search engine, you can use search queries as your URLs in your e-mail marketing campaigns. BevMo.com and Northern Tool, for example, send e-mails that can drill into their product catalogs for just the right product or category of products, allowing shoppers to then drill yet deeper to find what they want.
Your CRM-based e-mail can do the same. Why not send those laptop owners e-mail pointing them to the top catalog page of your current laptops? Every feature is listed so that drill down to the best one is easy.
Your Web analytics system can do likewise. Why not send all who abandon your site e-mail offers that send them to a broader collection of products—maybe they did not know that you really have what they want. Again, the multifaceted interface allows shoppers to explore your products to find the one they want.
If you only use your search engine to help your Web visitors, you may be missing the boat. Your search facility is an easy way to generate dynamic content pages with no effort at all. Couple that ability with a targeted e-mail system and you may juice your sales sky high.
