The War for the Hearts and Minds (and Wallets) of Customers
Marketing has never been simple. It’s part art and part science. Thanks to Google, the science part of marketing usurped the previously black box, creative, almost immeasurable world of artistic advertising. Facebook, Twitter, and a deluge of social media applications have continued to put science into marketing and fragment traditional channels. But at its core, the holy grail of marketing is being able to have a one to one relationship with the customer and it is getting harder and harder to use the tools available to build that relationship effectively. Filling the customer funnel is no longer enough to win and keep a customer.
I met Matt and was introduced to Sendwithus earlier this spring. I immediately recognized both the problem he was solving and the impact his solution would have on companies and marketers. As a former brand manager, I launched multi-faceted campaigns to reach our target audience. We didn’t have the technology tools like Sendwithus to manage the entire customer journey from welcome to thank you and everything in between. As an investor, I look for technologies that automate (as much as possible) functions in the enterprise. In particular, I believe technology should help us do each core function better, faster, and with more real time feedback. Sendwithus removes the engineering inefficiency from transactional email so that marketing can focus on delivering the core value proposition of building the customer relationship.
Today’s marketers have to contend with not only cutting through the noise, they also have to leverage marketing to maximize the lifetime value of a customer. Every touch point is a valuable opportunity to deepen a customer relationship. Marketers are increasingly turning to transactional emails as a core piece of their marketing toolkit. Transactional emails have a 69% higher open rate than traditional campaign marketing emails (Source: Epsilon). Engagement rates are also higher, 164.5% greater than regular email campaigns. While the results are compelling, transactional email is tricky because they require coordinated efforts between marketing and engineering. Each new email template requires an engineer to build or modify code. The simplicity of Sendwithus is its ability to replace the engineering heavy aspects of transactional email so that marketers can truly leverage the power of one to one communication with their customers. Marketers can do template management and creation, A/B testing, asset management, and collaboration from one platform.
Marketers fight tooth and nail to win the hearts and minds of customers. Being nimble and adaptive in customer messaging and engagement will be increasingly important for companies to build lasting relationships with their users. It is exciting to see what marketers can start to do when they have tools that are adaptive, easy to use, data rich and, in the future, highly automated.
