We’re asked this question all the time by agencies and other service providers who we work with. Although we believe nearly all brands and organizations that consider email to be a core marketing and communication asset can achieve increased engagement and participation rates with GroupVine’s Interactive Email, there are some characteristics that can positively bias the results. These are characteristics that apply to the brand or organization itself. These characteristics may already be in place or may be something the organization recognizes as critical and is working towards.
- Relationship Marketing and Customer Insights are highly valued. It’s not just about achieving a short-term or transaction result, it’s also about long-term customer value.
- Focus on people, not just brand. Current eCommunications are “people-friendly” designed to give recipients the sense that they are connecting to real people involved with the brand or organization (as opposed to a brand, feature, etc.). The organization understands that people engage with people, not brands or organizations.
- Understand and want to talk about lifestyle. They love to talk about ways their product, service, or brand are used in real life.
- Prefer targeted and succinct email style rather than (or in addition to) the “email buffet” style of newsletters (ie. covering so many topics that there’s a virtual guarantee that every recipient will find something they like). They prefer or are willing to experiment with “simple and focused” over “cluttered and busy”.
- Value social marketing, but continue to believe that direct email marketing is driving the measurable results. They love the idea of pulling the upside of social marketing (social awareness, influence, and relationship-building) into email.
- Engage in real-time conversations with their customers in social channels so they have competence and resources that can carry those conversations over to email (even though they’re not used to real-time, frictionless conversations in email yet).
- Would prefer to hear the customer’s voice more often than their own. They are comfortable engaging with recipients in an open and transparent manner, or they would like to take baby steps in that direction.
- Can offer “organic” incentives for participation. By organic we mean that the recipient’s experience will be shaped, influenced or somehow improved if they participate or engage (vs. a “10% off” kind of incentive). For example, Raptor Ridge winery motivated their Flight Club members to tell them which wines are in their top 3 by hinting that their future shipments might be tailored based on their responses. Their response rate improved over 200% (even when compared to their attempt to offer free T-shirts!) and enabled their recipients to become more comfortable engaging with them via email.
Here's the example Engagement Widget that Raptor Ridge put into a recent email:
As we learn more we'll tweak and update this list. In the meantime we're all ears if you've got other suggested additions for our list.
