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4 Strategies to Create Customer Dialogs
SUMMARY: Personalizing your email newsletters for an individual customers’ interest can creates a more relevant communication. The more relevant your content, the more likely subscribers are to engage with your messages.
The marketing team at Sprint revamped its customer email newsletter with dynamic features that deliver targeted content based on subscribers’ wireless devices, service plans, locations and preferences. These changes, combined with testing, have achieved double the clicks of the team’s other campaigns, and are generating sales without being overtly promotional.
THE CHALLENGE: Over the past several years, the marketing team at Sprint has gradually shifted its Sprint Connection email newsletter strategy away from promotional content. So, when they planned another revamp of the newsletter in December 2007, they wanted to complete the product’s evolution from a promotional vehicle to a customer-loyalty tool.
The purpose behind the new email structure focuses on new content and features to make the newsletter a benefit for existing customers. And they wanted to offer the most relevant information — personalized content targeting each subscriber’s needs and interests. “We knew there were specific, one-to-one dialogs we wanted to initiate with our customers,” says Pam Messier, Marketing Manager, Email Programs.
THE CAMPAIGN: The team began using dynamic content features that would deliver a customized, highly targeted version of the newsletter to each customer, based on their wireless device, service plan and interest areas from their existing, highly detailed customer database. They also adopted a rigorous testing strategy to optimize layout, content selection and subject lines.
These are four strategies they used to guide the changes:
Strategy #1. Create template for newsletter content: The team organized monthly newsletter content according to a new template. Each newsletter featured:
- A table of contents above the fold
- Customer handset and account details
- A news item
- A monthly tip for customers’ handsets or service plans (with what they owned)
- A customer perk, such as a free offer from Sprint or partners
- Interactive features, such as polls, sweepstakes, online chats and Q&A
