Who should manage the email marketing campaigns for your company? Certainly you already thought about that, but maybe my answer will surprise you.
The usual thing is to assign these tasks to:
- Advertising Managers
- Marketing Managers
- Commercial managers
- Secretaries
Or in some cases, anyone with computer skills who can use an email marketing software.
Is this the most appropriate option?
We may think that if the marketing director set the goals for the email marketing campaigns.
And the parameters were set correctly.
A designer could create a template for the newsletter. Turning the task over to someone else who would be in charge of managing the marketing actions:
- Import the template.
- Choose the segment indicated by the marketing director.
- Plan when to send the newsletter.
- And bring the results to the marketing director.
It would be something like that, right?
Management of email marketing in a traditional way
Most companies start thinking about sending a newsletter when planning a new marketing action and discover that they need a reliable way to contact their customers.
Marketing managers usually want to:
- Develop a content strategy.
- Increase sales.
- Get information from customers (surveys).
- Announce some aspect of the company.
- Etc.
You will need to plan to respond to this need.
And for good planning, you need to meet some parameters
- Targeting potentially interested customers.
- Design the newsletters.
- Decide what texts will be included.
- What promotion will be offered to your subscribers.
- Contents to be shared.
These specifications should be included in the organization chart.
Going through the designers, who will create the newsletter design.
To the person who will be responsible for managing the email marketing software, who will have to create the campaigns in the system.
- And send it to the mailing list.
And this person will be responsible for collecting the data generated by the campaign.
This data will be sent to the marketing department for analysis.
To modify the next campaigns and improve the results.
It is one of the methods used by many companies for managing email marketing campaigns.
It is not an exhaustive description of the process, as this was not my intention.
But this will obviously depend on each company.
Companies with a smaller team will have to delegate several tasks to the same person.
While companies with a larger team can have multiple people working in the same task.
This is not the most crucial aspect.
What I want to clarify is the management structure.
We have a vertical email marketing management:
- Something very useful in most situations
By using this strategy, the message will be:
- Uniform
- Clear
- Focused on the company’s overall goals
This is critical for companies of all sizes.
Also:
- It will be easier to measure the results if everything is centralized
This is obvious.
But we have other alternatives, right?
Yes, yes.
And why do we need an alternative if it works well?
Because we have the opportunity to make it work even better!
So, I’ll propose another way to manage email marketing:
As you certainly know, we are entering an era in which marketing is increasingly becoming social.
Which is something very positive.
(I see this as the counterpoint to automated marketing, but this is another topic altogether.)
But
How to transfer this to your email marketing strategy?
Let me start with a story.
A few months ago I visited Barcelona, and as soon as I arrived I decided to buy a small gift.
After walking around the mall for several minutes, I entered the store of a company called Lush.
Lush manufactures cosmetics and natural products with minimal packaging.
But this is not relevant to this topic.
The interesting thing is the attention I received from the person who helped me:
- Interested
- She tried to understand which product I wanted.
- Ability to suggest related products
- I insist, products really related to my need, not just the ones the company wanted to sell
- Adaptation to my changes of opinion
- Cordial and human treatment
- Ability to close the sale
- And generally offer me a positive shopping experience
Wouldn’t you like to create email marketing with all these features?
For me, of course, yes.
And what is the obvious answer?
Perhaps to promote the best seller in the company so he/she would be the marketing manager and would be responsible for creating and managing all email campaigns?
No!
It would be much better to delegate only part of the email marketing management to this seller.
So that he only contacts the people who interacted with him:
- his sales.
- his customers.
As you can see, this is a horizontal email marketing management strategy
Developing subsets where each employee would be in charge of managing a mini subscriber list with which he interacted:
- Direct contact with each customer.
For this seller will know:
- his tastes
- What the customer is looking for
- Aspirations
- Demography
And the best is that these people:
- Already know the seller personally
- And they will remember that the person was nice to them when they needed help.
I am sure that this would positively affect your open rates.
We should work with social marketing.
That way, we humanize the newsletters, since the seller can write in the first person.
The seller would know the subscriber, his tastes and the things that he would be interested in buying.
So the company could send him:
- Articles and products that would be relevant.
The advantage is clear:
Many employees have a great knowledge of:
- The company’s products.
- The needs of customers.
If the campaigns are created by executives, who don’t talk to customers on a daily basis and therefore don’t really know what they need; this feedback can’t be used in the company’s digital marketing strategy.
However, there are some tricky points that we should consider:
- It is necessary to train employees in email marketing.
- The company communication will not be unified (each seller will send his own newsletters with different messages).
- It is necessary to set limits and standards that everyone will have to follow.
For many companies, the fact of not having unified communication is a problem.
And it is true that it is something delicate.
But I would not be surprised if in the future we saw strategies like that.
What do you think?
In the end, in relationship-oriented marketing, we want to connect with our customers.
What we want is to establish more lasting ties with them.
And to this day, there is no better strategy than direct contact.
As you can see, it pays to involve the company’s employees in the email marketing strategy as far as possible.
Você poderia convidá-los a participar na criação de campanhas para:
Maybe as a first step
You could invite them to participate in creating campaigns for:
- Social networks
- Blog Content
- Send contributions for the newsletter (without managing it)
- Publish success stories with customers
- Tips
- Etc.
In this way, we can begin a slower transition process, so we can evaluate what is happening step by step and make the necessary adjustments.
What do you think?
Do you think we will see companies using these email marketing strategies in the future?
Or maybe not?