A little unpredictability’s exciting when you’re talking about what to have for dinner or where you’ll go on your next road trip. When you’re planning an omni-channel marketing campaign with significant resources behind it, predictability is your friend. You need to approach the right audience, send the right message, and assess ROI accurately – no surprises needed.

That doesn’t mean unexpected events have to be unwelcome in an email campaign, though. For me, uncertainty sparks creativity. Here’s how I like to build in enough flexibility to take advantage of variables while retaining a solid foundation for my marketing strategy.

Bring in Knowledge from Outside

Marketers who eat, sleep, and breathe marketing still learn about other things too, and sometimes inspiration strikes from surprising directions. Did you read an article on how the brain processes vision? That might be your incentive to incorporate more color or higher-contrast graphics into your email. Recent IT security issues in the news could be an excellent lead-in for a campaign based on protecting data or other investments. Marketing doesn’t take place in a vacuum, and when you can link relevant concepts to your email marketing message, you can forge some fascinating connections that add interest to your content.

Prepare Flexible Templates

It isn’t always easy to craft marketing email from scratch on short notice, but if you have templates in place that you can easily adapt to sudden shifts or important news for your customers, you’re in far better shape to communicate with them quickly. Be ready to tell your audience right away when you win an industry award, need to notify them of a product upgrade, or react to news coverage. It’s hard to predict unforeseen events, but having a strategy for dealing with them and email messaging that can be trimmed to fit will help you act quickly.

Take Advantage of Time and Place

Marketing is often sensitive to outside factors. A week of hot, sunny days in your area might mean it’s time for a sale on lawn furniture. If it’s rainy, focus on how well your product line holds up to wet weather instead. We tend to think of B2C sales as seasonal, but B2B sales often have their busy seasons and lulls as well. Email marketing timed to coincide with these organic rises and falls can elevate the peaks and help fill in the valleys.

Let Your Leads Lead You

Email nurture programs work best when they allow leads to flow naturally from one stage of buying readiness to the next. To make this process seamless, your email marketing has to align with leads’ behaviors. Setting up an email marketing program that delivers different content based on a whole spectrum of possibilities lets marketers devote more time to content development, lead generation, or other aspects of their role. Automation doesn’t force leads down pre-determined paths; it responds to the paths they take and acts as a guide to the next steps along the buying journey. To do that, your email marketing activity has to have some flexibility built into it.

Email’s beauty is its immediacy; with it, you can instantly be a part of trending topics, tie in timely concepts, and keep pace with your leads.

Copyright 2016 – Kenneth Fierro, Fierro Marketing, All Rights Reserved.