How can you, as a marketer, help your clients to build and run some incredible campaigns?

These strategies might help:

• Agree on goals and objectives. It’s vital that everyone knows what this campaign is working towards. Do you want to build a subscriber base? To increase sales of a particular product? To boost your reputation in the industry? Knowing exactly what you’re aiming for will help everyone to pull in the same direction.
• Agree on what success looks like. Say you want your campaign to boost your subscriber base. How will you know that you’re succeeding? Establish clear metrics and KPIs to measure your success. This isn’t always as easy as it looks – for example, an increase in subscribers might seem to indicate a successful campaign, but can you be sure that your campaign was responsible for this boost? You can narrow things down by making sure that your objectives are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely).
• Clear communication is key to every successful campaign – but it’s even more important when you’re working as an agency. From the very first strategy meetings, you need to make sure that a clear and easy to use communication infrastructure is in place.
• Structure and schedule. You’re communicating well, everyone knows what they’re responsible for – so far, so good! Now you can nail it all together with a clear structure and schedule. Make sure that everyone is clear on their own responsibilities. Set tasks, and agree on completion dates. Apps like Asana or Trello can help keep your structure and workflows clear and accountable.

Segmentation 101

Personalisation should be integral to your campaign strategy. Modern consumers aren’t interested in content that’s not relevant to them – and they’re not willing to stick around to find relevance where it’s not immediately obvious.

This means that you need to get to know your customers, to find out about their issues, their pain points, their lifestyles – and feed that back to them in relevant, personalised content.

Of course, if you’ve got a big email list, it’s impossible to personalise every email individually. This is where segmentation comes in. By dividing your list into personalised segments (for example, by age, location, interests, and so on) you can craft personalised templates for each segment. You can then add things like dynamic content for that extra relevance.

When creating your segments, consider the following:

• Get consent. Segmentation relies on customer data. For years now, the marketing industry has been trying to improve trust between marketer and consumer, but people are still wary about data security. So, always be open and transparent about when you’re gathering data, where you’re storing it, what you’re going to do with it, and so on. Make it as easy as possible for your subscribers and customers to change their preferences or to unsubscribe. Asking your subscribers if their information is correct is something that can feature in your email journeys.
• Be inclusive. There are some obvious, broad criteria for segments – things like demographics, location, and so on. But you don’t have to restrict yourself to these. It’s possible with segmentation to drill down into as much detail as you want (although you should probably avoid getting too personal – more on that in a bit!). Think about things like engagement styles, position in your sales funnel, and so on.
• Don’t be creepy. There’s a fine line between personalising and being intrusive. It’s like the difference between smiling at someone in the street and following that person home. Remember, segmentation and personalisation are done for the sake of the customer. The whole idea is to give them more of what they want – and I can guarantee they don’t want to feel like you’re stalking them. So, don’t micro-segment so intensively that it’s creepy. Keep it relevant, keep it friendly, but respect their privacy.

Automation – when and how to use it

Automation can help enormously with running campaigns, segmenting, personalising, and more. They are capable of tirelessly crunching data, constantly learning, drawing deep insights, and putting those insights to work in hyper-relevant campaigns.

All in all, good automations are a major help for the modern marketer. They help us to get closer to our customers. They can also provide customers with perfect, personalised content without the need for human marketers to slog through terabytes of data or work unsociable hours.

However, automations can’t do all of this by themselves. They do need human guidance. To get the best out of your automations, consider the following:

• Automations need human input. Automations are incredibly useful, but at the end of the day, they are tools. They need human input to work effectively. While it’s tempting to leave them to their own devices, they do need to be fed high quality data and content to have the best effects. They also need frequent reviews from human marketers to check that they are working at optimum.
• Automations need to recognize consent. As I’ve mentioned, data consent is very important. Artificial Intelligence and automation, however, won’t necessarily understand the nuances of consent unless you order them to. Make sure that your automation can’t use data when they haven’t got explicit permission to do so. For example, if your app uses biometric data (like facial recognition) to log in, don’t let your marketing AIs take that data and use it to ‘recognize’ and target your customers elsewhere.
• Automations can make your content more accessible. Accessibility is going to be very important – because automations can make your content more accessible than ever. For example, think about all the customers you’re not reaching because they have visual impairments and can’t read your content. A simple text-to-voice automation can make your content accessible, and bring these audiences into your fold. So, when it comes to boosting your accessibility, look into what new and emerging technologies are capable of.

Make it a year of incredible campaigns

Get it right, and this could be the year your clients pull off some incredible campaigns. Through new and developing tech, you can get closer to customers than ever before, and create the kind of personalised, relevant content that converts.

Remember, though, that tech is only as good as the people who are using it. Make sure to communicate clearly with your clients and team – and keep a close eye on what your automations are doing. Automations are nothing without the right human guidance, they can do incredible things with email marketers as their guide.