We help bridge the gap between you and your community

 

The eBridge opt-in/out strategy consists of a simple, yet sophisticated 4-step program:

  1. Getting to "yes" - your privacy policy
    Must be clear, comprehensible, believable, and consistent with past experience.
  2. Your "Statement of Trust"
    What will you…what you won't do with your e-mail data?
  3. Your opt-in policy – an opportunity to upgrade opt-in level
    Why should a customer give you their e-mail address and permission to mail them? Multiple opt-in options improve chances of success.
  4. Your opt-out policy
    Honor your Statement of Trust. If someone wants out, get him or her off the file.

 

How we execute a successful e-mail strategy:

 

Acquire e-mail data

  • Treat e-mail address acquisition the same as new customer acquisition efforts
  • E-Mail match – an important first step despite fact that match rates are still below 20%
  • Review options, identify best contenders, negotiate terms
  • Acquire opt-in e-mail addresses from postal customers

 

Mount a multi-media e-mail acquisition campaign

  • Promote loudly, repeatedly, and aggressively
  • Utilize all media: pages in publications, inserts, websites, other customer communications

 

E-mail messaging

  • Develop and test a series of compelling offers
  • Evaluate performance in terms of "cost to acquire"

 

Assure e-mail data quality and deliverability

  • Create marketing relational databases with multiple attributes including demographic, psychographic, and transactional
  • Utilize database technology to segment and target offers
  • Track both on and offline results in single database to leverage a total view of the customer
  • Conduct data hygiene which is critical to ensuring e-mail Quality
  • Conduct ECOA (>31% of all e-mail addresses change each year)
  • Identify alternative e-mail addresses—to process unmatched records (many consumers have more than one e-mail address)
  • Check and correct data for typos, expired domains and other data entry errors
  • Validate data—identify mistaken addresses for correction or suppression
  • Preview campaign - test delivery prior to executing campaign to resolve problems in time
  • Monitor data delivery by campaign, over time, as compared to industry benchmarks
  • Actively interface with ISPs, blacklists, etc.
  • Ensure accurate recording of unsubscribes and analysis of bounces.

 

E-mail monetization
ALC eBridge maximizes the value of your customers by establishing online communities and through sophisticated database marketing.

 

Customer-centric strategies build retention and create new revenue streams

  • Create blog to build community – Allow customers to offer their favorite tips and opinions
  • Partnership marketing—Extend special offers of 3rd party products and services to your customers
  • Monetize exit traffic – partnership offers can appear on order confirm pages and gain revenue share

 

Endorsed e-mail marketing
People are more likely to open up e-mail from a familiar sender and mail is less likely to be blocked by ISP.

Keys to success

  • Identify products/services consistent with customers’ interests and their expectations of you
  • Model and segment file for relevance, affinity
  • Create non-competitive, compelling and exclusive offers
  • Personalize pitch (i.e. "Special offer from The Territory Ahead")
  • Test and optimize economics

 

Non-commercial messaging
Not all communication is commercial, which is why we recommend that more than half your e-mail messages to your community be high-value, non-commercial…no strings attached (gets your subscribers into habit of opening and reading your e-mail):

  • Information about new products or services in advance of general release
  • A newsletter or blog
  • Surveys
  • Research studies
  • White papers
  • Opinion pieces

 

Solo Direct Marketing

  • Promoting follow-on sales
  • Exploiting cross-selling opportunities
  • Enhancing ad sales
  • Direct consumer and/or business research

 

"Viral" Marketing

  • Use to capture additional e-mail data
  • "A friend of yours is a friend or ours"
  • Test series of offers geared to incentivize existing customers to pass-along catalogs and offers to friends and colleagues; secondary offers geared to induce contacts to respond
  • Doesn’t require your customers to give up info about their contacts
  • Everybody wins

 

ROI analysis
All commercial campaigns and initiatives must be evaluated on performance against pre-established benchmarks, including:

  • Cost to acquire an e-mail address for an existing subscriber—by promotional effort; by media
  • Cost to generate an incremental sale
  • Cost to conduct endorsed e-mail marketing promotion
  • Return on investment

 

Let us help you bridge the gap between your direct mail and online marketing programs. Call and ask for an eBridge Data Marketing specialist.

 

Our clients include the leaders in every category of business.