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A contact plan describes in specific detail how you will contact prospects and customers over a period of time to meet your specific goals. Each contact plan should contain the following sections:

A Written Contact Strategy

Your contact strategy spells out your goals and describes how ongoing customer communication will be used to meet those goals. When thinking about your contact strategy, be sure to consider the online service imperative. What are you going to offer your existing and prospective customers in exchange for giving you permission to contact them? When Wegmans Food Markets developed its contact strategy, it focused on extending the service and customer-oriented approach that you’ll find in its retail stores to email communication. It has developed a contact strategy that is focused more on delivering relevant content and information than on selling. Its goal is to ensure that it provides its customers with notification of special produce, recipes, health tips, and more in order to simplify their grocery shopping and food preparation tasks.

Wells Fargo Bank’s small business group uses email in a comparable manner. Its goal is to provide a helpful service to its small business customers by informing and educating. Its contact strategy includes book reviews, tax information, and offers for additional value-added services. A somewhat different approach is taken by EGreetings.com (www.egreetings.com), the Internet greeting cards service. Its contact strategy is to focus on tapping into its large user base to deliver product and service promotions on behalf of other advertisers. It sends targeted promotions in addition to delivering content and information regarding its own site.

And then there is wildbrain.com, the online division of WildBrain, Inc., one of the country’s largest animation studios. wildbrain.com’s strategy at this point is to develop an audience for its Web-based animation episodes, which it calls “webisodes.” It sends amusing and entertaining animated email alerts that invite people who have signed up to view the latest webisode.

Because a lot of people will probably be collaborating on your contact strategy, it should be in writing and very detailed. That way you can be sure that your strategic framework and the goals of the program are shared by everyone.

Program Offerings

What programs does your site offer to men in their late thirties, women in their early twenties, busy professional mothers, or empty nesters? Understanding which of your products and services appeals to specific market segments is critical to the success of your email marketing programs. It will drive all your efforts to personalize both the email and website experience for visitors, prospects, and returning customers.

By developing distinct program offerings you’ll be making it easier for your subscribers to get value from your email marketing programs. You’ll undoubtedly want to offer sale notifications to your customers during your company’s biannual sale, for example. To do so you may develop a separate program offering called Sale Notifications and allow customers to opt-in or out. You can further refine this offering by deciding that certain segments don’t need to be told about sales at all. You might, for example, send people you know are simply not price-sensitive timely, useful replenishment notifications and updates when certain new products and styles are introduced.

Let’s take a look at a hypothetical company, Lola’s Lingerie. The following chart shows a matrix of five lifestyle-oriented customer segments and five possible program offerings.

There is, of course, some overlap, but this kind of chart clearly demonstrates the need for tailoring specific program offerings to specific segments.

As you might guess, gender plays an important role here and is critical in helping define the type of communication you’ll have with your customers. The Romantic segment, for example, is geared mostly toward men. The services offered are therefore focused on romantic tips, gift services, and recommendations. A service that provided style guides would be less interesting to the male segment but might appeal to the busy professional woman.

A Message Plan

Once you have segmented your customers and defined separate program offerings, you’ll be able to create and manage the different contacts that each segment should receive as well as determine how frequently to send messages. You’ll want to create individualized message plans that allow you to deliver a personalized, timed, and sequenced stream of communication to each customer.

Based on the segmentations above, Lola’s Lingerie would want to implement a message plan around gift reminders and suggestions. This plan, which would be primarily geared to the male segment, would identify relevant events and dates such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, wife or girlfriend’s birthday, etc. and specify an appropriate sequence of messages designed to service the male segment. Petopia might develop a message plan specifically geared toward dog owners who live in large cities. It would tell them about dog walks in the city, helping introduce and bring together communities of like-minded pet owners.

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