Last week, we announced the launch of our Partner Program – a program that further empowers some of the most innovative and prominent digital marketing tech and data consultancies to drive customer success with the benefits of Movable Ink’s contextual marketing engine for email.
Over the next week, we’ll be bringing you real world marketing insights from industry experts from our charter members. In today’s post, we talk to Ryan Shaw, VP of Sales & Strategic Partnerships of C.TRAC.
C.TRAC is an interactive agency located outside Cleveland, Ohio that specializes in digital and direct mail marketing, database management, and related support services. For over 40 years, they’ve helped clients target the right message to the right people from the right channel. As one of 17 Salesforce Marketing Cloud Platinum Partners, they leverage technology and data to create targeted, cross-channel marketing solutions for both B2B and B2C.
Ryan, how does email marketing fit into the larger digital marketing picture for C.TRAC?
Many of our clients use email marketing as a way to keep their audiences regularly engaged with their brands. This could mean providing special deals or promotions. It could mean providing content that would be relevant and useful to their audience. It could mean providing regular company updates and happenings. In essence, it’s a distribution channel that allows brands to retain customers, drive traffic to the site, and serve as yet another touch point in the digital strategy.
How have you seen email greatly impact your business?
We always hear that email has the greatest ROI of any other digital marketing strategy. And we always hear that, because it’s true. When done well, email marketing can keep consumers engaged, which in turn, can lead to more sales and a greater return on your investment.
In what phase of a campaign is email data most critical to your efforts?
Good data, particularly the data you can obtain from an email campaign, is crucial at every step of the marketing cycle. It can help you determine who you’re speaking to, how to speak to them and at what frequency.
It can also give you the insights you need to further refine campaigns, allowing for more definitive segmentation. Finally, it can help you measure which campaigns are most engaging, which in turn can help show ROI while uncovering potential growth opportunities.
What do you see as the single most disruptive force coming to the world of email marketing?
Personalization. As digital marketers continue to gather more data and learn to create actionable insights from that data, we’ll see less and less “bulk” marketing.
What excites you most about leveraging contextual marketing as a part of your strategy?
Digital marketers have one goal in mind: Serve the right content, to the right person, at the right time. With contextual marketing, we can get one step closer to achieving this goal, particularly if we come into the strategy process knowing we have a tool in place that can allow us the flexibility to serve up content based on personal preferences, location, weather, time of day, and more.