But its very vastness can also be disconcerting, and the myriad choices available may impact customer loyalty.

The truth is that people still long for a small-community feeling, which is one of the reasons social networking sites have been so successful: they humanize the web and enable participants to feel part of something special.

What if you could capture that trend and make it work for your brand? What if you could instill loyalty while giving customers exactly the experience that they’re looking for?

Enter customer-centric communities, a strategy that takes branding and website usage one step farther than web 2.0. With customer-centric communities, any company can use branded tools to offer a community experience that turns prospects into customers, customers into loyal customers, and loyal customers into evangelists. How? By taking the familiar look and feel of social network sites, wrapping them in one’s brand, and providing the intimacy of a small, local group to people spread out across the world.

The advantages include full control of the look and feel of the community, full control over ads, the ownership of data for acquisition purposes, full control of features, and robust metrics and measurement.

An ecommerce site that offers high-end gift products, for example, might offer a customer-centric community that contains wish lists, discussion forums on gift-giving where participants can give each other gift suggestions and ideas, message boards enabling communication directly with the company about future product lines and services offered, and all this with invite-a-friend capability that ensures viral growth of the community.

Another site might offer pet products. Here community members can post pet photos, share pet stories, receive advice from the site’s resident pet expert or veterinarian, communicate with the company about future product lines … and, again, have the invite-a-friend capability that keeps the community growing.

How does it work? The steps aren’t very different from other programs your company may execute. Choose goals (what does success look like?), identify what would add value to the community for people, identify who is responsible for managing the community, lay out a content strategy, figure how to integrate it into the company’s business, and then launch, measure, adjust, and grow.

What makes these communities so special? They provide the customer with what the Internet does not: intimate surroundings and the ability to feel part of a community that shares one’s interests and cares about one’s opinions. At the same time they provide marketers with an opportunity to capture customers’ preferences,  keep customers’ attention focused on the company’s website, not only for shopping but as a destination, and to engage in constant dialogue with customers.

These communities aren’t cluttered with advertising or with the obnoxious behavior that many social networking sites seem to bring out in people: they’re focused, engaged, and loyal—both to other community members and to the sponsoring company/brand.

We no longer have the option to not think globally; but we do have the option of retaining the feel of local markets where our names and faces are known to the merchants who sell us their wares, where our preferences and opinions are sought and remembered, and where we share a sense of community with those around us.

Say a regular customer visits your website and leaves again without making a purchase. Traditionally, companies have only tried to reengage that customer if he or she placed items in a shopping cart, and the method of reengagement typically used is an in-the-face intrusive pop-up offer. This is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons: in addition to the intrusiveness of the pop-up, more than 90 percent of website visitors never reach the shopping-cart stage!

So … what if you could contact your customers after they leave your website without making a purchase—and without even starting a shopping cart—and offer them the opportunity to return and complete the shopping process? What if you could do it via email, a method of communication they have already opted in to receive from your company? Would that feel a little too much like evil Big Brother, or is Big Brother there to lend a helping hand?

Most people appreciate the help. The proof is in the numbers:

1. Typical website remarketing campaigns generate open rates greater than 50 percent, click-through rates greater than 35 percent, and sales per email four to 10 times higher than those generated by standard emails programs—including those going to carefully segmented lists!
2. Unsubscribe rates, complaint rates through feedback loops, and direct to company complaint rates are not significantly different coming from these emails as they are from the company’s monthly newsletter or other email campaigns.

(Actual results for three ecommerce companies)

Note the insistence on “Now Data”—website remarketing works best when it’s immediate, not a n hour or a day later when customers forgot altogether that they’d been browsing your website. Timing is everything: you need to set up your remarketing emails so that they respond immediately.

Remarketing enhances customers’ shopping experience by reminding them of their unfinished business on the site, providing additional product feature information, delivering information on current promotions, and enabling them to complete purchases in a timely manner.

Website remarketing is also an ideal way to help customers achieve their site visit goals without abusing the customer relationship, and that isn’t just an edge—it’s the whole purpose and essence of good promise-based marketing.

Big Brother can watch, or Big Brother can help, and that’s where all the difference lies.

Did you know that …

• Weekends are becoming more and more the best days for b2c clients? This also applies to very early on weekday mornings – starting at six o’clock. Most people get up early on a weekend and navigate to their computers with a cup of coffee to catch up on personal emails and online shopping.

• For b2b, Wednesdays around 10 am and 2 pm work best? By Wednesday, most businesspeople are somewhat caught up in their work. By 10, they’ve read their morning mail; after lunch is a good downtime for exploring online options. Both these times get some decent open rates.

Keep in mind that this is different for every customer and every client, depending on the company’s individual audience.

How do you determine what’s best for your clients and customers? Test, test, test! With a few weeks of diligent testing, you can easily find what works best for your customers, and get the timing of your email messaging just right.

Assume for a moment that this picture represents a year’s worth of emails sent to a specific group of your opt-in subscribers. The upper left represents when this group first opted-in to receive your campaigns, and the lower right represents disengagement – when they ceased to respond.

Obviously for some companies the lifetime value of a list is shorter than one year, while for others it could last decades.

Tracking email campaign responses over a long period of time from multiple companies in the ecommerce, retail, and catalog industries, we found that for every one of the most successful companies we tracked, the diagram above represented the response structure. And because these companies were able to use the diagram as a baseline, they were able to focus on tweaking their strategy to provide additional upticks in response rates and outperform their competitors.

But what does the picture actually show?

Basically, the first email sent to new subscribers significantly outperforms most additional campaigns sent to those same subscribers over time. In addition, the initial group of emails sent to new subscribers outperforms ongoing campaigns sent to those same subscribers. But at some point, response rates simply level out predictably. Whether the initial group represents three emails sent over a period of one week or 24 emails sent over a period of three months is unique company by company, but it is possible for companies to extend the value of what I call the new subscriber transition period, increasing the number of high performing campaigns sent to subscribers.

The diagram also shows that, although subscribers have passed the transition period and settled into an ongoing response mode (typically profitable if not dynamic), there are additional things marketers can do to send or trigger campaigns that significantly outperform their base level campaigns, and in some cases equal or even exceed the results they get on their welcome emails.

The amazing thing is that these significant upticks in response rates have absolutely nothing to do with great ideas, great campaigns, great creative or anything else that costs marketers bundles of money. The upticks are triggered by the company having a strategy in place to respond quickly and effectively to two different types of customer actions:

1. The first customer action is what we call induced triggers. This is an action a customer takes in direct response to an action taken by the company, for example the company sends an email – the customer opens the email – the company sends a follow-up email to openers. Another example would be the company sending an email to someone who received a catalogue or direct mail piece that day.
2. The second, and by far most effective and profitable uptick, comes from what we call free-will triggers. This is an action a customer takes for no induced reason, such as an opt-in subscriber who visits the company’s website without being asked or directed there, and is sent a follow-up email after they leave, or someone who has just called the 800 number and placed an order, or requested product information, and is sent a follow-up email. These types of emails have been shown to generate as much as 10 times the response rates of standard email campaigns.

Here is one example, based on a website reengagement program.

(Actual results for three ecommerce/retail companies)

So how does all this translate into building a successful email strategy for your company?

1. Draw the picture of your current company results. Focus on the initial campaigns sent, to see how many campaigns a subscriber receives before reaching their performance baseline and the time period over which those emails are being sent.
2. Track the triggered campaigns you send and overlay the results across the baseline to see the points in time when they are being sent, as well as the frequency with which this strategy is being used. It is important to separate out campaigns based on induced triggers from those that are based on free-will triggers.

The expression says that forewarned is forearmed, and that’s truer than ever in the emarketing space. If you follow these simple steps, you’ll be able to plan ahead effectively and use those great ideas—not sporadically or spasmodically, but as part of a well-defined overall email strategy, which is what will help you acquire and retain good customers.

So let’s say that you are a terrific email marketer. You have a responsive email list, you send out welcoming messages to new customers (maybe even a little transition marketing to make them feel really welcomed), and you get solid results on your targeted campaigns. Your e-marketing strategy is working—as far as it goes. But it could go farther.

What are you missing?

Successful email strategies combine two initiatives: recency and frequency. You probably already think about frequency quite a lot; you want to send emails as frequently as makes sense for your business, but not so frequently as to annoy your customers (which you determine by monitoring response rates—opens, clicks, sign-ups, purchases, unsubscribes and complaint rates).

Recency is another way of looking at communicating with your customers. It refers to communicating with customers as quickly as possible in response to an action taken by that customer. The impetus doesn’t come from you; it comes from the customer, and it’s responding to that customer’s action that can make all the difference in driving revenue and loyalty.

It’s essential that I underline that last bit, because that’s where great CRM comes into the equation. You care about your customers mostly—let’s face it—so that they remain your customers. I recently noticed a company proclaiming that it has “legendary customer service,” which I think may be a little over the top—nothing in the world of marketing, frankly, is world-shaking enough to generate legends in the great scheme of things—but the truth is that one area of intense competition among marketers is in fact great customer service: it can mean the difference between keeping and losing some valuable income. So great email marketing requires great CRM, and that’s why it’s essential that the timing of your email campaigns corresponds with what your customers have indicated that they want.

In other words, time your email campaigns and cascades to be in synch with how your customers want to hear from you. Do they want follow-up emails? Do they need to be reminded so that ordering XYZ from you (which they’ve already indicated in some way that the plan to do) stays top of mind?

So recency marketing, as I just pointed out, is most powerful (and most successful) when it’s connected to a freewill action by the customer. What are some of these actions?

• When a new customer comes on board: your welcome email and offer sequence need to immediately follow the signup to drive optimum revenue.
• When customers visit your website: reengagement technology enables you to send additional emails to customers who leave the site without making a purchase (even before filling a shopping cart!). These emails drive up to 10 times the revenue of your standard email campaigns. In addition, they generate open rates in excess of 50%.
• When customers contact your sales or service departments: this is a great time to send a thank-you email and reaffirm immediately how much you appreciate their business—always remembering to include an offer. Again, time here is of the essence.

Additional recency opportunities exist, less powerful, but also providing a significant revenue boost over standard email:

• When customers open emails and then take no further action, a quick follow-up offer expanding upon the offer in the original email drives strong sales.

• When customers receive offline media, for example catalogs or other direct mail pieces, coordinate your email to arrive just after these offline initiatives to keep your brand in the customer’s mind.

A well-defined and well-executed recency strategy is a must-have part of any email strategy—as important as your testing strategy, segmentation strategy, landing page strategy, and creative strategy. It costs almost nothing to implement … and provides you with the best CRM ever: it gives your customers the sense that you listened to what they said and responded to it.

Which is what everybody really wants, at the end of the day.

Email costs are a problem for any emarketer working within a shrinking marketing budget. So finding ways to stretch one’s dollar while bringing in more sales is at the top of everybody’s wishlist.

A source of lost (or unrealized) income are website visitors who spend time on an ecommerce website and may or may not proceed as far as the shopping cart, finally leaving without making a purchase. Finding a way to positively reengage these visitors and monetize their visits would allow the emarketer to receive that unrealized income as well as provide a valuable service to customers. 

The solution we selected is a technology known as website reengagement. After identifying opt-in customers/subscribers from the marketer’s email database when they visit the website, and assuming that the customer does not complete a transaction during the visit, a special email campaign is sent shortly after the customer/prospect leaves the site.

In order to keep within emailing best practices, only one reengagement email should be sent to each customer in any preset time period (12 to 24 hours is optimum), no matter how many times that customer visits the marketer’s website. The point is to reengage the customer in a positive way.

Once it has been established what pages were visited, a single email or a series of email messages is sent to the customer responding to his or her actions.

We have identified three types of messages that can be thus deployed:

1. Default message: a single universal message sent to all identified customers visiting the site, regardless of which page(s) visited;
2. Shopping-cart message: a specific message sent to customers visiting one or more of the shopping cart pages without making a purchase;
3. Page-specific messages: marketers can design unique campaigns to go to people who visit specific pages on their websites, or groups of pages selling similar products.

In order to test this technology, we conducted a blind study of three customers for a period of six months prior to, and six months following, their integration of a website reengagement program as part of their overall email strategy. What we discovered was that website reengagement lowers vendor email costs between 21 and 32 percent.

Website reengagement enables companies to identify their opt-in email subscribers when they visit the company’s website and send them a reengagement email messages shortly after they leave the site. The functionality is rules-based. Typically, companies:

1. Do not send reengagement emails to subscribers who have made a purchase over the previous two weeks.
2. Send no more than one reengagement offer per day.
3. Limit reengagement offers to current site offerings (typically a reminder of free shipping or a special code that can be used for a discount on the site).
4. In addition, reengagement emails may offer product content based on specific pages the subscriber visited while on the site.

It should be noted here that website reengagement is not the same thing as shopping cart abandonment. This tool reengages subscribers whether or not they have visited shopping-cart pages. In view of the statistic that only five percent of site visitors ever get to the shopping-cart stage, as noted in the eWayDirect white paper Confronting Website Abandonment and Reengagement to Increase Customer Retention, shopping-cart abandonment strategies engage only a small percentage of customers. Website reengagement engages every customer.

How was the savings percentage calculated? 

For each customer, we measured how much it cost the customer (vendor costs only) to generate one dollar in online revenue (tracked purchases on the site directly linked to emails). First we studied the cost to generate one dollar in revenue for the company prior to instituting a reengagement program. Next we used the same calculations starting four months after the reengagement program had gone live (in order to eliminate the possibility of lift being due to the newness of the program). 

How did website reengagement affect complaints and unsubscribes?

There was no significant rise in unsubscribes or complaints directly from customers or through ISP feedback loops once the reengagement program was instituted. There were minor differences in complaint and unsubscribe rates after the program was launched, in some cases slightly higher and in others slightly lower. 

The numbers

1)   Customer One is a cosmetics ecommerce company.

• Without using a website reengagement strategy, the company sent 4.7 million emails at a cost of $2.00 per thousand. The total cost was therefore $9,400.00 to send those emails, or $0.03 per email. Total revenue was $141,000.00. The bottom line? The cost of generating one dollar in revenue was $0.066.
• Using a website reengagement strategy, the company sent 4.7 million emails at a cost of $2.00 per thousand, and an additional 141,000 emails at a cost of $2.00 per thousand. The total cost was therefore $9,682 to send those emails. The revenue generated by the reengagement emails was $46,500, for a total of $187,500. The bottom line? The cost of generating one dollar in revenue was $0.052.
• Website reengagement saved this company 21%.

2)   Customer Two is a women’s clothing retailer and catalog company

• Without using a website reengagement strategy, the company sent 1.2million emails at a cost of $3.00 per thousand. The total cost was therefore $3,600.00 to send those emails, or $0.06 per email. Total revenue was $72,000. The bottom line? The cost of generating one dollar in revenue was $0.o5.
• Using a website reengagement strategy, the company sent 1.2 million emails at a cost of $3.00 per thousand, and an additional 66,000 emails at a cost of $3.00 per thousand. The total cost was therefore $3,630 to send those emails. The revenue generated by the reengagement emails was $36,300, for a total revenue of $108,000. The bottom line? The cost of generating one dollar in revenue was $0.034.
• Website reengagement saved this company 32%.

3)   Customer Three is a catalog and online furniture/home décor company

• Without using a website reengagement strategy, the company sent 400,000 emails at a cost of $4.00 per thousand. The total cost was therefore $1,600 to send those emails, or $0.06 per email. Total revenue was $5,600. The bottom line? The cost of generating one dollar in revenue was $0.29.
• Using a website reengagement strategy, the company sent 400,000 emails at a cost of $4.00 per thousand, and an additional 11,000 emails at a cost of $4.00 per thousand. The total cost was therefore $1,644 to send those emails. The revenue generated by the reengagement emails was $2,057, for a total revenue of $7,657. The bottom line? The cost of generating one dollar in revenue was $o.21.
• Website reengagement saved this company 28%.

4)   Customer Four is an electronics retailer

• Without using a website reengagement strategy, the company sent 1.6 million emails at a cost of $4.00 per thousand. The total cost was therefore $6,400.00 to send those emails, or $0.14 per email. Total revenue was $22,400. The bottom line? The cost of generating one dollar in revenue was $0.29.
• Using a website reengagement strategy, the company sent 1.6 million emails at a cost of $4.00 per thousand, and an additional 72,000 emails at a cost of $4.00 per thousand. The total cost was therefore $6,688 to send those emails. The revenue generated by the reengagement emails was $18,576, for a total revenue of $40,976. The bottom line? The cost of generating one dollar in revenue was $0.165.
• Website reengagement saved this company 44%. 

What we saw with these four customers adding website reengagement to their normal email practice is a lowering of email costs from 21 percent to 44 percent.

What this study points to is the necessity of thinking about how one generates a dollar of revenue. This is different from the traditional marketing approach of calculating return on investment, but the reality is that bringing down emarketing costs is what will provide, in the end, greater revenue.

Risk that needs to be factored in to the acquisition equation.

Take a page from Email Marketing 101: successful (and legal) email marketing, including acquisition, is closely associated with the concept of permission.

Permission is where legality meets common sense—everyone is much more likely to read an email that they asked for. If they didn’t ask for the email, theymight read it anyway. Or they might not. Or they might even report it as spam, and there’s the risk: your company or brand, your bottom line, and even your ability to do business can be compromised.

The less expected or wanted your email is, the more likely you are to get labeled a spammer. Be very clear about that: it’s not just that particular email that will be labeled as spam; it’s your company or brand that will be labeled.

And being labeled a spammer is, as we all know, one of the worst things that can happen to any online marketer. When a significant number of your emails are dead, abandoned, or hard-bounced, the receiving ISP may blacklist you, compromising your ability to get any emails delivered in the future. And getting out of that label is a lot more difficult than getting into it.

Many (if not most!) customer-acquisition solutions focus uniquely on numbers. The problem with that approach is, of course, that more is not necessarily better.

A customer-acquisition strategy that puts more attention on the quality of leads as opposed to the quantity of leads is one that will lower the risks inherent in acquisition, lower the costs associated with acquisition, and—to the point—will not hurt your online reputation.

eWayDirect understands this risk and delivers valuable new online and mobile customers for business-to-consumer organizations looking to grow and drive revenue, by evaluating consumer interest and validating purchase intent at a cost that equals or surpasses PPC, third-party email, and affiliate marketing. And does so at the lowest risk in the business.

Why not check it out today?

Yet it’s sometimes gotten a bad reputation, not so much because of what acquisition is, but rather because of how lists are all-too-frequently acquired.

In fact, new-list-acquisition can perform as well as or better than many other acquisition channels, can scale, and do it all at a comparable cost. We’re doing it at eWayDirect. So what is it that we know that other companies apparently don’t?

Well, there are a few best practices that really help make customer acquisition work:

1. Never, ever, ever present a prospect with prechecked permission boxes.
2. The company sending the email must be named. The prospect who is signing on must be clear about who will be sending them emails.
3. You have to tell the truth, part one. “You are signing up to receive emails from Company A” is clear and honest. “Check here to learn more about getting rich” isn’t.
4. You have to tell the truth, part two: your first email to the prospect has to follow up directly on what they signed up for. If you offered a free gift, give them the free gift.

It comes down to something that’s fairly simple: thou shalt not spam thy neighbor. Follow these best practices, and you won’t have to worry about your new customer acquisition!

Because the reality is that none of the listed strategies is particularly new:

1. “Grow your existing customer base” — this is one of the major tenets of chatter marketing, which we’ve been advocating for a few years now. I remember writing an article that declared, “retention is the new acquisition,” and it’s still one of the best tools in any marketer’s repertoire. Great CRM will always bring in new customers as well as keep the ones you have.
2. “Apply the Purple Cow principle” — Seth Godin’s expression (which echoes an old Apple tagline: insanely great) is at the heart of what most marketing companies want to do: have a product or service that’s fantastic.
3. “Utilize viral campaigns” — Again, this is Chatter Marketing 101. Customers will come to you when their friends and family are recommending you.
4. “Cold calling” — Well, yes, if you’re in sales, you cannot get away from the cold call. But the goal of marketing is the support that effort.
5. “Become a social media expert” — Experience using the various social media sites and knowing which ones attract which demographic is indeed essential.

These are all absolutely true, if not necessarily new. Here’s the thing: acquisition isn’t a one-time deal. It’s a process that you have to keep tweaking, measuring, studying. Devising a strategy that encompasses the various avenues—all of these, and more, including our own CertainSource—makes sure that you’re not “leaving money on the table” and gets you the most bang for your acquisition dollar.

A Nielsen survey in the UK shows that 68% of smartphone owners use their devices to check email, with a similar number using devices for accessing websites and doing social networking. Clearly, world retail is going mobile.

Are you?

Those numbers cited at the beginning of this article are impressive, so it’s particularly baffling that some brands are still not optimizing their emails for mobile devices, or are doing so slowly. Another recent survey noted that 39% of businesses have no strategy in place for mobile optimization. And how much more useful can “Now Data” be than when used via mobile devices?

“Now Data,” the immediate data offered by customers and instantly available to marketers, is as mobile as it gets. The trick is in the response time. It’s essential that marketers use that “Now Data” quickly enough that they catch the customer while the customer is still on the device and still has that retailer in front-of-mind.

Immediacy is key. The internet moves at the speed of thought, and thought moves on quickly. If a customer clicks on an email offer at breakfast, responding to that click while they’re still at breakfast is key. “Now Data” is exactly what the name says: it is being transferred now, in this specific precise moment, and the successful marketer is the marketer who’s ready to go mobile and be with the customer in the moment.

Because it may be the only one you’ll have.