The following blog post was written by Alyssa Jarrett, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Iterable.
Over the past decade, the rapid advancement of technology has created an unprecedented era where information is abundant and services are instantly available. This evolution has shifted how people live, shop and communicate in what industry experts call the “Now Economy.”
Consumers’ attention spans are shortening and their expectations of brands are growing. Businesses are expected to meet their customers’ needs at the moment of open—wherever they are, whenever they want.
However, the average consumer experience is falling well short of their expectations. They’re being bombarded with messages that hold little relevance to them, and 80 percent of consumers receive inconsistent brand messaging across channels.
In the Now Economy, marketers must work harder than ever to cut through the daily noise and retain a loyal audience. You’ll need a robust growth marketing strategy to achieve omni-channel relevance and defeat the competition.
Email’s Role in Growth Marketing
Email marketers specifically play a critical role in a brand’s ability to accelerate the growth of their business. After all, in a company’s early days, its core marketing strategy often begins with nothing more than a website and an email list.
As the business becomes more sophisticated, more channels are added to this strategy—SMS, mobile push, web push, social media, or even direct mail—but brand messaging quickly fragments across these various siloed technologies. When the average marketing stack consists of 12 tools, it’s no wonder why most teams aren’t delivering seamless customer experiences.
Nobody wants only a partial view of their subscriber base, but too often an organization’s MarTech stack hinders its ability to provide exceptional customer service. Imagine if you could:
- Engage your audience across all channels, personalizing down to each individual subscriber?
- Unify all customer data—from all first- and third-party sources—in real time?
- Deploy campaigns automatically, without requiring any custom scripting or engineering support?
By upgrading from your standard ESP to a modern growth marketing platform, the email marketer takes back their power. Once you no longer need an army of developers to get campaigns up and running, you’re free to focus on creating innovative, engaging experiences that your customers love.
The Five Pillars of Omni-Channel Relevance
We at Iterable firmly believe that the ability to power omni-channel relevance is the new measurement of success when it comes to marketing efficacy. This is the difference between brands being noticed vs. being embraced.
Achieving omni-channel relevance is challenging but far from impossible. Here are the five pillars that make up the foundation of a stand-out growth marketing strategy.
- Cadence: Email marketers consider cadence as the timing and frequency of messages, but it’s important to coordinate communications across all channels to tell a cohesive story that resonates best with your audience.
- Automation: If your team spends more time slogging through the manual work that it takes to execute campaigns than taking swift, decisive action, then you’ll be lacking the ability to respond to every customer signal in real time.
- Mediums: Although email is still a mainstay in most marketing strategies, many channels rise and fall in consumer popularity. Consider your brand story as the sum of all its parts, regardless of what’s currently on trend.
- Personalization: You already know that customizing content goes far beyond “Hi [First Name].” Make sure you’re segmenting your customers on their terms and facilitating 1:1 conversations with each subscriber.
- Value: It’s important to give more than you take; only by putting in your due diligence can you achieve lasting credibility with your customers. Treat each interaction as an opportunity to strengthen rapport and reinforce your reputation.
Understand what role each pillar plays in your business and answer these questions for a quick gut-check on how your marketing can reach the next level.
- How does a customer’s experience vary as they engage with each channel?
- How quickly can you act on newly captured customer data?
- How would integrating a new communication channel complement the email experience?
- How unique are your messages to individual subscribers and segments?
- How often do you request customer feedback to improve personalization?
- How useful are your communications from your customer’s perspective?
Turning Growth Marketing Strategy Into Reality
If you’re serious about elevating the consumer’s perception of your brand, now is the time to go omni-channel, using these five pillars of relevance to guide the way. No business becomes an overnight success…well, overnight…but you can make incremental improvements today to optimize your growth marketing programs.
Whether you’re taking baby steps to go beyond the basics or ready to win a marketing marathon, here is an easy-to-remember action plan to crawl, walk, then finally run your way to true growth marketing.
- Crawl: Identify how adding multiple channels would influence your marketing strategy and which would deliver the highest ROI.
- Walk: Test not only the messages within a channel, but also which channel better performs.
- Run: Focus on facilitating 1:1 conversations with customers in real time, regardless of marketing channel.
To learn more about equipping yourself in the Now Economy and implementing a modern growth marketing approach, check out Iterable’s latest whitepaper, The No-Nonsense Guide to Achieving Omni-Channel Relevance.
About the Author:
Alyssa Jarrett is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Iterable. You can follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn. For more information on Iterable, follow them on Twitter.
