I often tell the story about the first client assignment I got when I first founded Flightpath back in 1994 – managing the nascent email (listserv?) list for Bon Jovi on behalf of Mercury Records.
Email marketing has certainly evolved since then but it took a very interesting new leap last week with the introduction of a new email marketing platform called Square Marketing. Yes. Square Marketing comes from the company that to date has been known as an innovator in the credit card payment space.
All of the data that Square is able to collect via credit card purchases is now able to be unleashed in service of targeted email marketing campaigns. This set of tools lets brick and mortar businesses act more like online retailers when it comes to email marketing. One of the breakthroughs of this system is the way it tightly ties the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns directly to ROI/sales within physical retail shops.
By default, the system segments customers into three groups: loyal customers, casual customers and lapsed customers. This makes it easy for retailers to send out targeted messages with very specific messages, with an end goal of turning casual customers into frequent ones.
As per any email campaign, the requisite testing and ongoing optimization is necessary for best results but initial data sets and associated tools give merchants a great start and leg up.
I look forward to seeing more innovation in the email marketing space in the days to come.