Talk to as many customers and prospects as possible, as often as possible, in a relevant way.

At Relevanz this is the mantra that we are guided by when working with clients. CRM & Email Marketing is not just about talking to engaged customers and loyal customers, it is also about talking to infrequent customers and prospects who rarely engage with us or don’t engage at all. Brand growth comes from getting more customers buying more often.

So, let’s unpack this mantra in more detail.

1.     Reach - Talk to as many customers and prospects as possible

If a Marketing Director was to tell the board that CRM or Email Marketing activity is only sent to 75% of the contactable database and that regular contact is made with a lot less than that, I would imagine they would be horrified not least because of the potential revenue that this is being lost.

But in our experience that scenario (numbers may vary) is a common one. In fairness, often the Marketing Director is in the dark about the level of contactability. That is because most clients report at a campaign level rather than a customer or prospect level. If you’re sending out emails to several hundred thousand people twice a week then the monthly reports that go to the board will show millions of emails going out with campaign metrics such as open rates, click-through rates and possibly revenue.

What the monthly report doesn’t show is how many individuals were contacted and how many received nothing.

So why wouldn’t you talk to everyone that you could? The simple truth is that most CRM and email marketing teams believe that engagement is their goal and succuss should be measured by rates such as open, click and unsubscribe (campaign-level metrics). To these guys there is a very simple reason why ‘25%’ of their contactable base are never contacted. The ‘25%’ are inactive, they don’t engage and if they were included in a campaign then all the metrics would go down.

And they would be right if all we looked at were percentages. But in our experience the so-called in-actives do respond, just at a lower rate than the actives. So if you contact everyone on your database your percentages might drop but your absolute numbers will increase – more total opens, more total clicks and more total revenue. One retail client we work with was only sending email campaigns to those that had engaged within the last 3 months, excluding millions of opted-in customers and prospects from their activity. By increasing reach to talk to everyone the overall impact was very positive – despite percentage metric reductions. Total clicks increased by 37% and total revenue was up by 29%.

Back in the days of direct mail, cost was often the deciding factor when it came to increasing reach. Contacting customers and prospects was a ROI decision. How far down the contactable database could you go before it was not profitable to do so. With digital communications such as email, push notifications and even SMS, cost is rarely a prohibitor.

Deliverability and unsubscribes can be a concern when you maximise reach. But both of these can be managed with some common sense, If you start contacting customers and prospects that you haven’t contacted for a while then you may want to warm them up first and you should also manage send volumes to see what impact you are having on deliverability and unsubscribe rates.

2.     Frequency - Talk to customers and prospects as often as possible

If you had two brands with similar customer profiles and data quality, but Brand X sent one email per week and Brand Y sent two emails per week to their customer base, then Brand Y would have more total opens, clicks and revenue.

Why? Very simply it all comes down to opportunities to see. You may believe that your customers and prospects are avidly waiting for you to contact them and pay attention to all of your communications. The reality is very different. Mental availability (being thought of, being noticed, being acted on) is driven by frequency of contact as much as anything else.

Also most clients talk about campaign frequency not recipient frequency. Clients with larger databases are often targeting different customers with different campaigns. So while they might be sending out 10 campaigns every month, on average a customer is only receiving 5 communications.

So, what is the optimum frequency? Well, there’s no easy answer to that question. But generally, it’s more frequent than you think. You will know if you are over contacting your customers and prospects when your unsubscribe rate goes through the roof. Have a look at what your competitors are doing. If they are contacting twice a week then you need to do that or more. Again it comes back to share of voice and getting high mental availability.

When you send more emails and you use open rate to measure engagement, you are likely to be believe that higher send frequency is a bad thing because your open rate percentage is likely to go down. However, your total opens, total clicks and total revenue will likely go up.

3.     Talk to customers and prospects in a relevant way

Whilst we are big advocates of maximising reach and frequency, you need to avoid meaningless contact and blanket communications.

You need to contact customers in varied and interesting ways. Relevance is at the heart of CRM & Email Marketing. More now than ever, customers want to be understood and spoken to as individuals. They want to be engaged through their preferred channel, device or platform. They want to be surrounded by content and experiences that are inspiring, helpful and customised to them.

CRM & Email Marketing achieves growth by being more relevant to more people on more occasions. But your customers don’t just belong to you. Your customer base is in constant churn and so you need to engage all customers about the things that matter, in the moments that matter, across the entire customer journey.

Reach & frequency drives brand awareness

CRM & Email Marketing is not just about bottom-of-the-funnel marketing – driving conversions and purchases. It is also about raising brand awareness and shaping consumer behaviour at the top of the funnel.

Impacting the top of the funnel with CRM & Email Marketing happens whether an email gets opened or not. You don’t have to open an email with the subject line “Up To 50% Off this Weekend” to understand and be influenced by the message.

When maximizing reach and frequency you have to stop thinking that your non-openers are inactive or unengaged and start thinking of your database as a list of opted-in prospects and customers. All of whom have given you permission to talk them. Every email you send to them is an opportunity to convert them into openers, clickers, traffic and revenue but also to increase mental availability.

The final word

If you want to improve your overall CRM & Email Marketing performance, then the first things you look at and arguably the things that will have the biggest impact are reach & frequency.