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by Paula O’Connell

on Mar 19

Centralised email marketing

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Organisations have typically left email marketing to individual departments, often leading to inbox overload. But a new ‘best practice’ is emerging, with centralised email marketing the way of the future, writes Paula O’Connell.

Many marketers for both big and small brands know the ‘right things to do’ yet fail to know how to get those right things done. A good case in point is email marketing, which is often decentralised and inadequately staffed.

An employee may be responsible for running an email program, but that person may not have any authority over the website, the database or creative content. The employee may end up spending a huge amount of their workday just focusing on email.

Fortunately companies are starting to allocate greater resources to email marketing, establishing full-time email marketing roles to manage the whole process across the company. This is very good news for the industry as traditionally email marketing within companies has been very much an ad hoc process with no clearly defined outline or strategic plan.

The nature of the ways emails are deployed has matured so much over the past couple of years and there is a definite need for dedicated email specialists to develop and implement the complicated strategies that have such a great impact on email marketing. According to Jupiter Research, only 38 percent of companies have a single department handling email communication, while a huge 24 percent have six or more. This leads to a lot of confusion and badly managed email marketing campaigns.

The email marketing manager role should allow for a dedicated person to be responsible for managing the entire chain of email activities including: privacy and opt-in policies, design and content development, centralised database management, vendor selection and management, delivery improvement, legal compliance, frequency management, segmentation strategies, list management, reporting, corporate email strategy and beyond. The director or manager of email marketing should be charged with enforcing guidelines on how often subscribers can be contacted and what kind of messaging they receive, which should all be based on subscriber opt-in preferences.

With many marketing teams currently trying to hold together their existing marketing roles, it makes sense to question how the business units in companies can avoid producing different results. For example, marketers in one group within a company may teach themselves how to test, optimise and segment email. Their counterparts in another group may blast away with little or no interest in what is working effectively. This is why centralised email marketing is really emerging as a ‘best practice’ within the industry.

Centralisation is all about putting a core team of email marketing specialists in place to handle the often complicated and laborious tasks most marketers are not quite equipped to handle. There are three approaches that could be used:

  • creating a completely centralised group that acts as an internal agency and handles every single aspect of every group’s email marketing program
  • tasking a central team with email oversight (business units still produce their own emails, yet the centralised function offers advice and oversees the execution), or
  • partnering the internal agency with an external company with a dedicated key contact to work in tandem.

It doesn’t really matter which approach you choose, although you do need dedicated specialists who are living and breathing email and who can understand the pitfalls, apply best practice and focus strategically on how to use email to drive business results.

The centralised team should take on those tasks that require email specific expertise. For example, the centralised team could share information with internal staff from brand managers to designers, to writers and website programmers.

External companies just focusing on email marketing are usually very well-informed regarding legislation that affects the industry, in this case spam legislation. Therefore, the team could also oversee permission and privacy policies that ensure compliance with the legislation, as well as any major changes to regulations. They can also control quality by enforcing email design, messaging and programming best practice.

Here are some additional benefits in having centralised email marketing:

  • all companies’ business units use different templates along with ‘from’ and ‘subject’ lines that have to make sense – this central team and external company partner can catch any brand-damaging mistakes such as incorrect links, broken images and offers that are no longer relevant
  • reporting can also be done by both teams to ensure the value of email marketing is communicated to management and across departments – in the language the boss understands
  • market research, such as customer satisfaction surveys, can also be managed to give all departments the customer feedback they need to better understand the user and accordingly improve offers, and
  • a centralised team will be best placed to manage vendors, agencies and technology – many companies discover that they are under contract to a number of email service providers and are working with multiple agencies or freelancers with varying degrees of expertise.

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