Go forth and "integrate"

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on March 24, 2008

Most of us are still trying to comply with basic best practices. But if you're running along nicely and wondering where to go next, have a think about integration.

Now that's a lovely buzzword, but I'm never too sure what to make of it.

After much reflection, the most benefit seems to come from seeing integration as a way of thinking about your email efforts.

A lot of promising email marketing practices and ideas fall out naturally when you simply adopt an "integration" mindset. Which just means shifting your perspective away from viewing email as a standalone direct response sales machine.

Consider email and email marketing instead as just one piece in a bigger jigsaw puzzle. How might your email marketing benefit (or benefit from) other parts of your business?

Such a change in perspective opens up a whole palette of possibilities...from branded signatures in business email through to pre-testing subject lines using paid search listings.

It's this mental switch that underlies much of the advice and commentary given by those at the advanced end of the email marketing spectrum.

We talked a few days ago, for example, about the return of email newsletters as a customer relationship and branding tool. Jeanne Jennings takes up the story in her latest article, with an in-depth exploration of "true email marketing."

Here's another example stemming from "integrated" thinking...

Matthew Finch recently wrote about gaining email insight from other channels, more sophisticated segmentation and re-targeting based on a subscriber's website actions. When you dig down, all these suggestions arise from an "integrated" perspective.

His last point, about using web metrics to drive email targeting, also reflects a more formal idea of "integration," this time of email with web analytics.

Your web analytics can tell you what your subscribers did after clicking a link in your email. A concept that is now free and (relatively) easy to implement, thanks to Google Analytics.

You can see how many pageviews they generated, which whitepaper they downloaded or how much they spent on products.

All of which means you can better judge the success of those emails and apply the lessons to future campaigns.

You can also send emails based on what your web analytics tells you about a subscriber. This covers buzzwords such as event-based emails, trigger emails and behavioral targeting.

Stefan Pollard and Dan Miller explain the principles in this article, while Sally Lowery outlines some of the opportunities here.

An "integrated" approach also changes the way you think about email and the organisation. It implies there is value in getting those outside email marketing to understand email's benefits. So marketing colleagues and senior executives can better exploit email to the benefit of other channels (and vice versa), a point made by Aaron Smith in a call to email arms.

Once you stop thinking of email in isolation, other concepts become obvious. Like the importance of the landing page: how the email message and the web page it points to must be part of one continuous whole, rather than two discrete entities unrelated to each other. MarketingExperiments explore this idea in more detail in their latest brief.

So, how are you applying integrated thinking to your email marketing?

More on advanced tactics | Tags: email marketing, integrated marketing, behavioral marketing

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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