Customer centricity is a key theme for 2018

It’s that time again, time to make good on your new year’s resolutions for both work and play and as an email marketer it is time to look forward to how you will make your impact in the coming months.

If you surf the web now you will start to see articles about the trends and tips for email in 2018, which if you are anything like me you will be thrilled to see that email is still in the forefront of marketers’ minds. Email continues to change and evolve as it year on year proves itself as the most powerful of all the push channels.

As marketing teams break down the channel and activity silos, email becomes more and more prominent due to the fantastic opportunities that it presents. Automation, personalisation and flexibility can bring a seamless customer journey with fewer disconnects. Putting customer experience at the heart of all in and outbound marketing efforts – no longer just a priority of the website as it has been in the past.

Kath Pay, founder and CEO of Holistic email marketing, is passionate about this change in mindset for B2B mareketeers. Kath lives and breathes email marketing and is one of the World’s Top 50 Email Marketing Influencers (Vocus, 2014). She devotes her time to developing customer-centric ecommerce & B2B journeys using a holistic, multi-channel approach. Kath is recognised as the UK’s leading Email Marketer and heads up training for Econsultancy on Personalisation and Email Marketing.

“Our customers are more and more savvy” she explains, “and their expectations have changed. Now they expect a seamless journey, they expect personalization and expect brands to help them – whether it is through email tips or reminders or helping with a purchase through abandon basket functionality”

“Email is a valuable and highly powerful channel, but marketers should start to view it as a helpful channel. It is the channel where we deliver on our promise, putting customer needs ahead of traditional marketing goals” Customer-centricity will underpin every strategy, as marketers mindsets move from conversion to experience. Of course, email automation is key to delivering on this promise – triggered emails offer scaleable personalization and will continue to be embraced by B2B marketers.

B2B marketing is so diverse, with differing audiences, perceptions, personas and customer lifecycles that it is hard to find a single piece of advice relevant to all, but two things stand out. For those B2B marketers that haven’t started with automated emails – get started, start small and build.  There are lots of marketers that haven’t started as they want to start too big and get overwhelmed with all the possibilities then don’t know where to start.  The answer is just start and build. Equally some B2B marketers have set up some trigger mails and automated series, but they forget about them and think that they are complete as soon as they are running – optimisation is key and that is not something that can be forgotten about. Test, test and test again, as small incremental changes can sometimes be all it takes. Rome wasn’t built in a day.