We’re all aware that marketing emails are vital to keeping your clients and prospects engaged. But how do we get the messages out the door when say, you’re a big-deal retailer in the US but are trying to break into the Canadian and Mexican markets? What pitfalls should you avoid?
One can either- staff up your existing HQ with marketers who can send language-appropriate emails; or, as is increasingly the case, have local teams in each country, or region, who will ensure you’re sending out appropriate content for the given region. Local teams ensure the messages can be translated with the appropriate nuance for a given region. It’s not just about language translation, cultural differences need to be accounted for as well. An image that’s totally fine to use in France, may not be appropriate at all in more conservative French-speaking countries.
Make it easy and they shall come
We’ve been speaking with a number of QSRs and retailers who have tried to empower their teams with homegrown, or permission-driven communication tools, only to see poor adoption rates, due to complexity in training and usage. Unfortunately, teaching and training regional marketers (or worse, non-marketing business teams within a region) on an intricate email service provider system can be a daunting and time-consuming task while running the risk that one of these users might accidentally break automations or global campaign settings.
This is why purpose-built distributed marketing tools are a great alternative. As they provide an easy-to-use platform with features like email building blocks and reusable templates, they enable regional teams to quickly assemble branded emails and help give email marketing campaigns a higher adoption rate. Overall, it’s a compelling solution for businesses that want to empower regional teams to launch email and/or SMS campaigns – without forcing non-marketers to learn a complex system.
What does a distributed marketing solution need to be successful?
- Make it easy: if a local marketer’s day-to-day is focused on a host of tasks, with email or SMS being just one of many responsibilities on their plate, a complex interface is going to scare them off.
- Don’t reinvent the platform: ideally, the right solution can leverage your existing marketing automation platform and functionality, while providing guardrails to help local teams stay on brand. This ensures that the marketing team at HQ gets all the juicy marketing data feeding off the regional campaigns so they can better understand their clients.
- Keep it safe: your solution must protect PII so that users only communicate and see data for appropriate customers within their regions.
- Trust, but verify: a streamlined review and approval process ensures centralized teams can maintain brand consistency while empowering local teams to operate quickly and efficiently.
With the right tools in place, everyone is happy
“Happy?”, you might ask who cares about happiness? Well, shouldn’t we all strive to make our organizations happier places? Happier teams make for greater productivity, and happier customers. And happier customers lead to a healthier business overall:
- By utilizing the right Distributed Marketing solution, corporate marketing teams will be happier because they’ve scaled their marketing efforts without having to spend as much time day-to-day supporting individual regions.
- IT and operations will be happier that they don’t need to support clunky homegrown systems and know that the PII is locked down to the location level.
- Regional teams will be happier that they have a sense of autonomy and ownership and will be more likely to continue using the solution.
- The executive team will be happier because of operational efficiencies and revenue growth.
Ultimately (and most importantly) your customers will be the biggest beneficiaries, as they receive more relevant communications that resonate with them.
Please feel free to reach out and we can discuss how Sageflo can help your regional marketing improve their capabilities and time to deployment of communications.