CRM Tip #1: Optimize your CRM schedule with themed campaigns

Despite the name, writer’s block doesn’t just concern writers! It is just as much an issue for marketers.

Who hasn’t sat in front of their campaign schedule, pulling their hair out while looking for new topics to promote, to add just a touch of personalization to the marketing schedule?

Mass communications go through multiple validations, are often planned weeks in advance and are quite corporate in nature. These are essential for business and allow you to maintain an important link with your customers.

However, mass campaigns tend to bore your customer base in the long run and can eventually lead to unsubscribes and revenue loss. Also, as their name suggests, they leave little room for personalization.

The playing field for targeted campaigns is much more open, but these are also more difficult to set up. Setting up a good personalization strategy and finding the right tools requires a significant human and financial investment. Targeted campaigns are still the unique opportunity to reach a select audience of customers, with topics that really speak to them.

Once your corporate and mass communications have been validated, what topics do you have left for your targeted communications? And if your generic topics are already decided, then how do you easily add personalized content, without falling into a downward spiral of looking for new content?

After countless experiences and conversations with customers, today we’re starting a series of articles that will give you tips to easily fill your marketing schedule with targeted communications, and help you move from writer’s block to writer’s flow.

So let’s start off with the first tip: targeting is not just about being responsive. Plan recurring strategic topics that you will be able to use for any occasion.

Themed campaigns: structure and consistency for your CRM schedule

At Splio, we call these recurring campaigns, which complement your normal schedule and can be used throughout the year, “themed campaigns.” These campaigns accompany your mass communications and ensure consistent planning.

The idea is simple—decide on two or three campaign themes that are strategic for your business, but too specific to send to everyone.

Think for a minute, I’m sure you have a couple themes that fit these criteria.

Here are a few questions to help you find them.

• Maybe you don’t have enough opportunities to highlight your own brands that aren’t as well known as your partner brands?
• Or perhaps your company developing specific labels, like an eco-label, that you would like to develop more communication for?
• Do you manage overstock or marked-down items, but don’t want to communicate about this on a large scale?
• Are some categories in your catalog potentially too specific? For example, baby products in mass retail or men’s care in perfume?
• Are your partner brands asking you to have more space in your communications?

To sum it up, take a moment to think about strategic and reusable themes. Two or three will be more than enough.

Adding themed campaigns to your CRM schedule

Let’s stop for a minute with a real example from a reseller.

This is their usual schedule. It consists of two mass campaigns sent out every week.

And by adding a few recurring campaigns, this is what it could look like.

 

In this new schedule, three themed campaigns have been added by our reseller.

As you can see, two of these go out on the same day. Thanks to relevant targeting and the use of efficient tools to manage marketing fatigue, the level of precision of your segmentation will be so high that you will be able to send the right message to the right customer, at any time. Without risking to bore your customer base. Indeed, a client should never receive two campaigns from you on the very same day.

The first recurring topic pushes a brand new, eco-responsible label that our reseller wants to communicate on. A portion of the base is more sensitive to this communication—a smaller portion, but a much more qualified one.

For the second topic, our reseller decided to push sale overstock. By only pushing this topic to part of the base, this avoids sending a special offer to everyone.

And finally, the last topic is a niche category within the catalog—a category that rotates every week. In our example, this week it’s coats. Next week, it could be purses.

Our reseller has, therefore, three additional topics to push every week—personalized topics for targeted portions of your base. In fact, Splio allows you to find different audiences for each of these topics, which will naturally change from week to week, as customer behavior evolves.

Although we used a reseller as an example here, in reality, these examples could be applied to any industry.

In the food industry, for example, the first topic could focus on organic brands and the second, on the week’s special offers (there are always some!). The last one could be the opportunity to highlight a particular department, pet products, cosmetics, soft drinks…the sky’s the limit!

Streamlining your themed campaigns

In order to optimize producing themed campaigns, you will need to consider implementing simple and flexible graphic templates.

This will allow you to reduce campaign production time, so you can adapt to changes and last minute requests.

Above all, these templates can easily be reused every week for each of your themed campaigns.

You just need to modify your visuals for each of the themes every week.

Worried about this step? Don’t panic, in this series of articles, we’ll give you a few tips to help you to simplify your templates.

Then, all you have to do is choose how often you want to push these themes. Every week or every month—it’s up to you.

These themed campaigns will add consistency to your communications throughout the year. They will quickly become something to look forward to for a small portion of your base.

From then on, your CRM schedule will easily be expanded with highly-targeted topics that strongly resonate with a select group of your customers.

And the blank page that tormented your mind every month….it will always be full of ideas!

In the coming weeks, we will be publishing more articles on the same topic, including creating quality email templates that will help you easily optimize your targeted CRM schedule.

Stay tuned!