Reaching Your Customers Efficiently and Effectively isn’t Monkey Business

It’s not far-fetched to say that online marketing has evolved to become so sophisticated, it’s almost, well, creepy—an indication that segmentation is becoming ever more important.

When I first took a job out of college as an Online Marketing Specialist, uninformed people would ask me if I was the guy that made those annoying popups appear on sites. I wasn’t, but at the time that was really the only frame of reference most people had for the fairly new term “online marketing”.

Those “one-visitor-fits-all” popups have proven to be ineffective and sites that still use them are labeled as suspect. Now, online marketers have looked to targeting customers based on the information that is available to them such as past purchases, demographic information, and what you volunteer to tell the site about yourself. (Yes Facebook, I know, I’ve been “in a relationship” for awhile. I get it. You can ease up on the engagement ring banner ads.)

The one medium in online marketing that has stood the test of time and is consistently evolving is email. In a recent Gorilla pitch meeting, the CMO of the prospective client called Email, “old School, but very effective.”  This is a very common sentiment among etailers, with Forrester reporting that etailers spend anywhere from 12% to 26% of their online marketing budgets on email, depending on industry.

To stay effective, email marketing platforms such as MailChimp (www.mailchimp.com) have to evolve with the industry and technology. Features like list segmentation, template and custom theme creation abilities, and A/B testing, not to mention ease of use, make MailChimp a powerful, yet affordable email marketing solution for etailers of all sizes. Gorilla’s client marketing consultants have vetted MailChimp integration with Magento Enterprise as one of the best combinations of Ecommerce Platform and Email Service Providers in the industry.

With that in mind, here are 5 tips to enhance your Magneto and Mail Chimp marketing. 

5.  If You Write It Make Sure it’s Read – Promote your blog via email. MailChimp allows you to set up a RSS feed to notify MailChimp whenever a new blog is posted. You can then automate which list receives these updates.

4. Bricks and Clicks – For those Magento etailers that also have retail physical locations, use MailChimp’s list creation module to segment customers into groups of those who shop in store to, those who shop only online, and those that shop via both channels. Through Magento’s promotional code engine, it’s easy to create promo codes to entice visitors of one channel to try the other channel. Such as offering 10% off online purchases on the physical store receipt if “INSTORE11” is entered at checkout.

3.  Living Social – Be sure to enable the MailChimp Facebook application to make it easy for your Facebook followers to add themselves to your newsletter list. Combined with Magento’s newsletter module for on-site visitors, your list can grow exponentially.

2. Variations are Key – Utilize MailChimps A/B testing application to adjust email titles, content, and calls to action to easily learn what works for future emails campaigns. 

1. Segment & Target – With Magento’s attribute features, marketers can transfer product and customer details into MailChimp segment lists. Do you want to target the purchasers of Sony LCDs in the past 2 months? You can do this very easily with minor programming knowledge and utilizing Magento Connect’s MailChimp extension.

Beyond these tips, at Gorilla we typically like to take it a step further and add some minor modifications to the checkout process. We can create a form field that allows users to check which product line or demographics they fit into. For example, if you are a sporting goods retailer, a simple drop down list of sports could appear at checkout if the person elects to be part of your mailing list for exclusive offers. Once that person selects, say lacrosse, and checks out he will be automatically entered into the MailChimp Lacrosse-Customer marketing list. You are now able to create content targeted to that email list of Lacrosse purchasers and including the Magento Enterprise promotional codes to generate sales and repeat customers.

If you have questions about Magento’s MailChimp Integration, email marketing, or enhancing Magento to fuel your marketing engine, feel free to contact us.