People's desire to connect to each other has never been so great… or so greatly achievable. YouTube and MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn all contribute to the growing sense that everyone everywhere is connected to someone all the time. And maybe that's the case.

To my mind, Web 2.0 is all about giving control of the online marketing relationship to the customer, and we love it. As marketers, however, we’re not so sure.

Out of both necessity and opportunity, marketers have begun focusing more of their efforts on establishing and nurturing individual lifetime customer relationships rather than placing the greatest emphasis on pulling strangers to the brand. For some, this shift from marketer-centric to customer-centric messaging poses unique challenges that can sometimes make online marketing seem more like a minefield than a discipline. But the availability of exciting new tools, tactics and strategies for developing highly relevant messages are actually making it easier than ever to create and execute even the most complex campaigns.

Email marketers who understand the rules for success in a Web 2.0 world recognise the value of implementing sophisticated campaigns that incorporate Web analytics, dynamic content or survey data. Email marketing programmes that are high in relevance and low in effort become possible. New tools and little-used tactics that draw on Web 2.0 technologies can take your campaigns to new levels of success.

Robust email marketing solutions that capture the power of Web 2.0 give marketers the means to create personalised advertising to individuals or groups, as well as the ability to measure response and alter messaging on the fly. These new abilities in an era of customer empowerment have spurred a focus on retention, as marketers recognise the business maxim that it is five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an old one.

Web 2.0 is driven by data. To be successful in the long-term, enterprise marketers must -- at their core -- understand and embrace the value of data. One way is to begin thinking two-dimensionally about your email list.

Rather than focusing strictly on the size and growth of your list, focus also on adding relevant recipient data. Email is the only platform in the marketing mix that can tie together your need to understand what customers want with the ability to quickly respond on their desires.

Ask yourself, “What do I want to know about each recipient? How can the necessary data be gathered and incorporated into my list? Once incorporated, how can I act on the data, and how will I analyse my results?” Today's email marketing solutions can store and automatically act on a wide variety of data points that provide meaningful context for promotional messaging.

By thinking of your list as the database for a marketing execution platform, and filling it with actionable data, you’ll be opening up unprecedented avenues of opportunity for relevant messaging now and in the future—and laying the foundation for a powerful, results-oriented marketing programme. Your email system can become a communications dashboard for every marketing touch-point.

As you develop and cultivate an enterprise marketing strategy for the Web 2.0 world, keep these five key takeaways in mind:

1. Within a permission-based relationship, marketers can gather and use attributable data to build unprecedented customer insights.
2. Unlike traditional broadcast and direct marketing techniques, email marketers can use this detailed data to create messaging that customers find individually meaningful.
3. By drawing on a rich store of attributable data, email marketers have the ability to actually give customers what they want, and to do so in a way that is transparent and welcomed.
4. Data is becoming easier to bring together and act on through techniques such as incorporating Web analytics or survey data into the email database.
5. The availability of powerful and usable marketing applications finally is giving marketers the ability to create complex campaigns quickly and easily, enabling them to realise the promise of one-to-one relationship marketing: high lifetime ROI and strong customer engagement.

In today’s era of two-way online communication, an email marketing message is an invitation to begin or continue a conversation, and is a vital tool for building lasting and profitable customer relationships. Email and other software-on-demand solutions are making this not only possible, but even easy for marketers. The new Software-as-a-Service models have freed marketers from the shackles of the IT department and created a new environment in which marketers don’t have to be technologists to use technology. Web 2.0 email technology is allowing marketers to create, execute and measure campaigns more quickly, easily and efficiently than ever.

 

Michael Weston, Managing Director, Silverpop EMEA

About Michael Weston
A passionate advocate of email as a tool to improve companies’ relationships with their customers, in 2004 Mike founded Digital Oxygen, the digital marketing services company that identified Silverpop as the only email services provider with a proven ability to translate the qualities of the best offline direct marketing to email.

In 2005, the agency was acquired by Silverpop to become the foundation for the London office.

Prior to this, Mike’s career has covered the intersection of marketing and the technology that helps drive more sophisticated marketing, including senior roles at Yahoo!, Engage, and Associated Newspapers, where he’d transitioned from an old media in print to the setting up of their online business in 1997.

Mike speaks regularly at conferences in the UK, Europe and the United States on subjects covering the use of digital marketing (such as email) to unlock the power of customer and other online commercial relationships.