Our email expert says that centralizing all company email is key to keeping this channel efficient and effective. Read on to understand why (and how).
Over the past several months, I've covered several specialized ways to improve your email delivery. This month, however, I'll be discussing a broader concept that involves a little more effort, but could make all the difference: centralized email. Understanding the importance of centralizing your email systems is key to fully leveraging my prior tips on list hygiene, reporting and reputation.
Despite the challenges posed by spam, phishing and other attacks, email still remains an effective and economical medium for customer acquisition, retention and conversion. Due to email's successful track record, more and more companies are beginning to realize just how valuable the channel is to their overall online strategy. That realization is driving larger budgets and a greater need to control that investment -- and that's usually when, if they're smart, companies start talking about centralizing their email.
Centralizing all customer email (marketing, transactional, customer service) on one platform gives companies the power to better coordinate their efforts for improved delivery, more effective marketing programs and enhanced customer service. Plus, as the volume of marketing email that consumers receive increases, companies are turning to centralization to better manage their brand and sender reputation.
Email can play a significant role in building or destroying your brand, so it's critical to know how it's being affected by every email sent by your organization. If you don't have good answers to the following four questions, you're putting your brand at risk.
- Whether you're using one system or many to send your email, are you making sure that every email is sent according to the same process?
- Is your brand being applied appropriately across all campaigns?
- Are you able to gather the same data for all campaigns?
- Do you know how many emails each of your customers receive on a daily, weekly and month basis?
Unless you're currently coordinating email across your organization, you're not likely to have good answers to those questions. Centralization provides the control and clarity needed to maximize the effectiveness of your customer communications and safeguard your brand.
As more and more marketers begin to use tactics such as personalization to improve relevancy, the use of email across the enterprise is also growing. Yet many companies have not yet centralized their email programs, and even fewer are able to control important factors like message frequency, which is a vital component of personalization.
Without a centralized system, you can't effectively analyze subscriber behavior data or coordinate messaging and brands across different departments and initiatives. Not having access to this information jeopardizes the customer relationship and your brand.
Email is being used increasingly to address multiple needs and opportunities, such as customer service communications, promotional marketing, public relations and order confirmations. In many companies, all of these types of communications are handled by different departments, which may or may not follow the same rules and branding guidelines. Without centralization, it's hard to institute controls for maintaining your brand.
Additionally, centralization simplifies the coordination of activities between departments. For example, an airline could customize marketing emails based on a consumer's recent customer service inquiry about flight schedules or vacation packages. The airline could also closely monitor delivery of automatic flight confirmation emails to help prevent complaint calls into customer service. In short, centralization gives you the ability to personalize each customer message based on the last interaction, regardless of the department where it was initiated.
Given the benefits, it's surprising that more companies aren't centralizing their systems. When I ask companies why they aren't, the response is usually around cost. Few marketers are willing to put the strategic dollars behind email up front in order to have continued control and increased ROI in the long run.
The other problem is that when evaluating the costs of centralizing, they aren't factoring in the money that could be saved by gaining oversight over their email programs. Further complicating the problem, many companies feel that email is already optimized from a cost perspective, not realizing that small changes can make it even more effective.
So why aren't more companies centralizing their systems? If it will create efficiencies and make one of the most effective forms of communication even more effective, why wouldn't you do it? It all comes down to education. Once you understand the benefits to be had across the organization, the decision to centralize becomes pretty obvious. Bringing everything to a centralized point within your company will enable you to keep track of your brand as well as manage your customer relationships more effectively. Good luck and good sending.
Spencer Kollas is director of delivery services for StrongMail Systems. Read full bio.