E-mail marketing + WOM = Killer combination

This is a very interesting article in eMarketer. It says that e-mail marketing is a very power channel for building customer evangelism. The autors discern a two-step approach on creating customer evangelists. Traditional email marketing aims at enhancing a company's relationship with its customers. That might mean direct response sales messages, CPG coupons, building brand awareness, weekly or monthly e-newsletters, service messages about packages shipped or funds available in bank accounts, driving traffic to a company or brand Web site,...

But more and more, once you learned through all of the above programs who your most valuable customers are, you can start to use segmentation techniques to identify customers who might forward e-mail messages to friends and family.

"That might mean offering discounts or samples to customers who've bought over a certain amount within a recent period, and then inviting them to pass-along that offer to others."

But more importantly: New research revealed the key success factors to take into account whether a brand can start a customer evangelism campaign. "Marketers surveyed by Osterman Research for BoldMouth, a word-of-mouth marketing company, indicate that satisfied customers, along with great products or services, are the most important things needed to generate word-of-mouth". I know, it's an open door, but as I said in previous posts: nothing can beat a bunch of convincing statistics.