What brands do with the 1P data they collect is the key to success. What customers share with the brand is not nice-to-know information. It’s customers telling brands two things - What they expect to get back and their level of trust. The greater the brand trust, the more customers will divulge.

Many email programs collect lots of 1P data. Customers expect value in exchange for creating a login, building a profile and sharing what they want. The way brands start the conversation is called a welcome email and the best come in streams of communications, not just one automatically generated “hello” from a robot. From our experience working with hundreds of email marketers, here are the best practices:

• What happens after signup? A welcome message triggered upon signup is good, but what comes next is more important. The best brands consider these campaigns over time in a stream of communication
• Use the 1P data customers share. The best brands have a formal email welcome campaign, built to nurture the customer relationship. These emails help users get started with suggestions and ideas. They are designed to encourage people to re-engage. They take the opportunity to remind users what they signed up for, and may repeat back 1P data. The email program then uses customer data to customize the relationship
• Let's get personal. The best brands make their email campaigns completely personalized using 1P data. For example, different customers get different offers, messages, creative assets and cadence and this begins from the welcome stream. Check out this great example...

Nordstrom’s welcome stream explains the benefit of the email program as well as its loyalty program and is customized to reflect recent purchases

The way users sign up for email and what happens next is a best practice in email marketing. This is a chance for Marketing leaders and Technology to show the organization they can work together. The problem spans marketing technology, content management systems (e.g., forms), tag management, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) etc. Without Marketing leadership, they become disjointed tools. But how brands use 1P data is foundational to success.             

What are the best practices for customer signup?

• The process is easy. Customer can find where to signup and the form is intuitive. We know there are a lot of ways users can sign up for email (web pages, footers, social media fan pages). And a lightbox can interrupt at any time and to ask for an email, which customers find annoying. So, the best brands plan this out. The lightbox is intelligent and doesn’t ask customers for emails if they’ve already provided one
• The signup form is short. Signup form only asks for the information necessary, but has a way for consumers to disclose more about themselves and what they are looking for. The best practice here is to make it very easy to signup, but allow customers to add more either with other forms or the welcome stream of email communication that follow. Many brands set expectations during signup, for preferences, but also how email marketing will provide value (not just promotional deals)
• Brands use what they collect. This is the most important practice – if brands collect information, customers expect the brand to customize the experience.

I was just featured on Northwestern University's thought leader series on digital marketing. The topic was how retailers are embracing digital as fast as possible to not only counter the Covid crisis, but improve the customer's UX in the process.

Email is effective, has great ROI and customers depend on it for information in times of crisis

You may be asking yourself: should I write to my customers about Covid-19? What about sending promotional emails? Is email still a good way to communicate? The answer: Email marketing was there to help in 2008 and it is indispensable now.

Marketers Guide to Effective Email: Part 5

Analytics is the key to an effective email marketing program. Email campaign analytics usually have numbers for the basics including:

Marketer's Guide to Effective Email: Part 4

It’s easy to forget – email marketing is part of a brand’s Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC). The best email marketers see email holistically along with mobile, social and offline marketing. The broader our vision of email, the more successful we can be in the eyes of the customer. The customer sees brand not channel. How does email integrate with Customer Service? Field sales? Store associates? Each of these touchpoints can- and should trigger an email. If we ignore this, we will never get off the wheel of batch and blast and our customers will become numb to email communication.

Marketer's Guide to Effective Email: Part 3

The best email marketers I know welcome “failure.” What I’m referring to is cultivating a culture of continuous testing where failure is seen as learning. Marketers play offense by testing everything and that moves the ball forward. But failure is a way to play defense and a test result can be an early warning not to rollout a message, price change or offer and make a costly mistake.

Marketer's Guide to Effective Email: Part 2

Marketer's Guide to Effective Email Part 1:

The most successful marketers leverage email to strengthen the bond with their best customers. Customers seek out brand emails in a cluttered inbox. Customers feel like they are having a conversation with the brand. We have spent years analyzing email strategies from the best marketers in the world to uncover five things that make them great: