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In addition to being the cornerstone for customer acquisition and retention marketing, your email database also provides dramatic opportunities to accelerate customer lifetime values and generate significant incremental revenue streams for your business. In fact, for some companies, incremental revenues from their email database actually exceed primary email revenues. Here are 8 best practice strategies to help drive incremental revenues with your email database. Cross-Sell and Upsell Offers Personalized product recommendations deliver an effective consumer-friendly presentation for the incremental cross-sell and upsell offers that deepen profitable relationships with your existing customers. So effective, in fact, that a whopping 35% of Amazon’s revenues are generated by its ground-breaking product recommendations engine. (1) In developing the most relevant cross-sell and upsell offers for personalized recommendations, it’s critical to grasp the specific needs of your customer base by analyzing all their behaviors, purchase transactions, and demographic data points in your database. Create dynamic high resolution customer profiles and use these segment personas to mastermind the compelling new products, line extensions, and secondary offers you can cross-sell and upsell via email. (2) External 3rd Party Offers Relevant and compelling new product offers deliver value to your existing customers – even if the products are “external” and not your own. By making your emails available for rental to select 3rd party advertisers with curated products that are non-competitive, you can generate significant incremental email revenues plus also deepen the engagements with your existing customers. By way of example, Hearst Magazines enables select non-competitive advertising partners to reach millions of engaged Hearst readers through its Hearst Perks Premium Email Media program. With co-branded 3rd party dedicated emails reaching inboxes in limited frequency from trusted 1st party Hearst brands, advertisers experience email prospecting performance with response rates that exceed industry average by 5-10X. (3) Email Retargeting and Autoresponders Incremental email revenues can be accelerated with follow-up remail campaigns retargeting two distinct segments of email responders. For responders who opened a previous email but did not click thru, retarget them with a different email creative like a “Last Chance” message that increases urgency as offer expiration dates approach. For responders who clicked but did not convert, retarget them with a new or slightly sweetened product offer they cannot refuse. This “click abandon” cell includes shopping cart abandonment emails which are especially productive in generating incremental revenues. Autoresponder emails are pre-configured retargeting emails automatically triggered to deploy by specific consumer response behaviors. They can be targeted to new signups (i.e. Welcome Series) or to open and click responders in an email campaign. With a hierarchy of relevant offers pre-scheduled in carefully timed launch sequence, autoresponders frequently generate response rates and per email revenues which are 5-10X higher than those in original batch campaigns. Postal Retargeting Just as you can retarget shopping cart abandons with email, you can also retarget them with personalized direct mail on demand. Customized formats including postcards, bi-folds, tri-folds, etc. can help drive responders deeper into conversion funnels via business reply cards, inbound call centers, website URLs and even physical retail locations with in-store coupons. To illustrate, HGTV Magazine integrated personalized postal retargeting on demand to their email click abandons and achieved incremental order response rates as high as 34%. (4) Where direct mail addresses are available in email databases along with appropriate consumer permissions, postal retargeting can deliver robust incremental revenue streams and elevate the consumer buying experience. Integrated Content and Ad Units While emails and newsletters are delivering your featured content and primary offers, they can also be configured to simultaneously include relevant external content and discreet ad units that generate guaranteed incremental revenues. The content and ad units can be seamlessly integrated into email creatives in real time, akin to having a display banner ad server for email. Space ads, native ads, text links, button links, content links, opt-in messages, and sponsored ads can all be included in your ongoing email and newsletter campaigns. To ensure these additions do not detract from the impact of primary messaging or undermine consumer trust and brand credibility, it is important to carefully A/B test and closely monitor all core performance metrics including opt-out and complaint rates as well as click thru and conversion rates. Data Asset Rentals Most email databases house a variety of valuable additional data elements. With required consumer permissions, compliance notifications, opt-out processes, and privacy policies in place, these data elements can provide a number of incremental opportunities for revenue monetization. Postal addresses are valuable for direct mail marketers, phone numbers are relevant for call center operators, online behaviors are impactful for digital target marketers, IP addresses are critical for geo-location marketers, and response data is meaningful for behavioral marketers along with relevant date and time stamps. Referrals and Social Sharing Referral marketing and social sharing strategies help leverage the powerful influence of existing email customers to attract new customers to your business.(5) Uber and StitchFix both utilize popular referral marketing programs with existing customer and offer them incentivised rewards to engage new customers. Referral rewards should be carefully crafted to deliver relevant value to existing customers, like meaningful discounts on future purchases, free gift cards or store credits, etc. Referral requests can be included in transactional emails and billing emails which typically have the highest open rates. Likewise, referrals from social sharing can be accelerated by streamlining the referrals process with efficient easy share links. Most importantly, always remember to say Thank You for Sharing! Data Hygiene and Email Co-ops Undeliverable addresses and risky emails should be periodically purged from your database to eliminate hard bounces while increasing inbox delivery rates, user engagement and mailer reputation. Specialized Email Change of Address (ECOA) services are also available to help keep your email database well-tuned by updating inactive or undeliverable emails with active and responsive emails. Publisher email co-ops can also generate incremental revenues by enabling you to refresh email activity dates with the freshest activity dates experienced by any other contributors to the co-op. This effort is especially valuable when your stale inactive emails are found to be active on another publisher’s list, making them prime candidates for your targeted winback reactivation offers. Footnote Credits: |
Email Revenue Monetization
