Do Business Well

A basic part of managing lists involves facilitating subscriptions entry of customer profile details and also unsubscribe. This facility will typically be set up to occur automatically via the web site. It should also enable adding e-mail and other profile details collected offline, such as by phone and events. You should assess the package to see whether it enables you to import these details readily from other packages such as Excel. This is a basic capability, and most packages will enable you to tailor profile fields you add into the database.

You will need to decide whether to collect e-mail addresses and profile data via your web- site content management system or customer database management system, or through a data collection module which is part of your e-mail package. Some e-mail subscription management simply uses a white page, which does not give a great customer or brand experience because it is clearly not integrated with the main site. If using your e-mail package, this sometimes require a separate web address; however, it is best if it can be set up as a virtual sub-domain of your own site, with your own branding, which makes it appear more integrated. HSBC for example, manages content for its business newsletter through http://www.knowledge. hsbc.co.uk (the subdomain is ‘knowledge’. I use a sub-domain `e-mail‘, http://e-mail. davechaffey.com, which is used for profiling and management and is actually managed by my e-mail service provider rather than my hosting provider (Email Reaction, www.emailreaction. corn). This makes it much easier for me to enable subscription and setting of communications preferences, without coding on my part. An alternative is to setup a different domain.

A more complex aspect of list management is integration of data related to the e-mail campaign with the customer database. In most organizations this is a major issue, since the data integration between the two (or more) systems can dramatically affect the capability to target, personalize and analyse campaign effectiveness. It is important to realize that your e-mail management system effectively has its own separate customer database additional to your existing customer database(s). As within any separate databases, this raises issues of data integration between the two — when data (such as an e-mail address or personal details) are updated in one database, the two need to be synchronized to the most recent one. Data from the customer database will be needed within the e-mail broadcast system to personalize any messages (using merge fields). It will often also be useful to import measures collected by the e-mail system into the customer database — for example, for each individual, which e-mails they opened and clicked on, and which items they clicked on. It may also be required to return data to the customer database about communications preferences, including e-mail subscribes and unsubscribes. The options to achieve data integration are:

1. An ad-hoc import/export process, i.e. customer profile information for personalization is exported from the customer database before a campaign as required, and changes to communications preferences are updated after each campaign
2. A regular batch synchronization process, where the system can be set up to exchange data at a regular time — daily, weekly or monthly
3. A real-time synchronization process, where direct communications are set up to occur between the e-mail database and customer database using application programming interfaces (APIs).

The best option will depend on the frequency of the e-mails you send, the size of your list and the degree of personalization. As size or complexity increases, you are likely to need to move from (1) to (3). Real-time synchronization is also preferable if you are undertaking a lot of event-triggered e-mails (where e-mails are sent according to response to other media or at particular points in the customer lifecycle).

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