Zrinity Email Marketing Blog

Email continues to grow in importance and use in business communications today, despite the headaches caused by spam and viruses. The two most common types of business email are transaction and marketing. Transaction email is email sent to a customer during and after a business transaction. These emails typically guide the customer through a purchasing process and then advise them of the progress of their order. Marketing email is simply any email sent to a customer or prospective customer to solicit business or promote a product.

Transactional email is expected today. I recently made a purchase online on a site that provided very little feedback in the form of email notifications and the email I received was irrelevant to my actions. They sent me a marketing email (Yes, an advertisement for the product I just bought), instead of an order confirmation. I also didn’t receive any followup concerning my order status, including shipping date. My purchase was over $300 and I was understandably concerned. I emailed the company to inquire about my order, since there was no customer support link or order status form available on their site. I didn’t receive a reply within 24 hours, so was about to contact my credit card company to challenge the transaction when the mail man knocked on my door and delivered my order. If a software engineer would react this way, consider the number of chargebacks this company may need to process. For those of you with no experience building online businesses or handling credit card chargebacks, let me just say the process of defending a transaction is painful. Credit Card clearing companies will not tolerate a high rate of chargebacks for two very good reasons. It indicates poor business practices and it costs them a lot to process chargeback requests. If you do business online, you must make your customer comfortable and confident.

Marketing email is also in demand. It’s truly amazing that people spend so much time opting into to marketing lists. Doing so, means they are genuinely interested in one or more of your products or services and would like to know more. The shame is that almost all organizations totally ignore the customer after they make this request and blindly blitz them with similar marketing messages until they eventually unsubscribe from the list or more often report the message as spam since opting out so often creates more spam from their perspective. Suddenly, your effort to comply with a request for information turns on you and develops a negative vibe for your organization from the perspective of your customer. You’re now a spammer! If you don’t observe the actions of your customers and act on them, you will lose customers. For marketing email, this means evaluating the content that the recipient found interesting by tracking link-throughs, not opens and segmenting lists to send appropriate content at appropriate times.

Good marketing message design will include content that is interesting to the recipient even when it doesn’t directly impact sales. If every message I receive contains only an ad, I will grow tired or reading them faster and may no longer be reading them at the time when I’m motivated to purchase that product. That means I may have purchased the product from another company. Marketing messages should always be designed to build brand awareness and loyalty. Community contributions are valued by customers. They love to love the companies they buy from and they root for them like they would a basketball team they support. They most like the companies that see them as an individual and listen. Watch how I do this. All of the content in this blog post to this point is for the community. You don’t have to purchase any of our products to do these things, which would dramatically improve your customer confidence level and loyalty, but we have spent a considerable amount of effort to study this and implement it into our CampaignIntelligence email management system. That’s my ad! I’ll bet that wasn’t too painful and if we continue to keep a good balance of marketing and community content, I expect you’ll come back and read more of our bloggins