Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. We’re all familiar with that phrase from an environmental standpoint, but have you thought about it from a marketing point of view?
As marketers we spend a lot of time and effort creating campaigns. We have to prepare our target list, write our messages, design our landing pages, alert the sales team on what we’re sending out, etc., etc. It takes a lot of momentum to get something like this out the door. In environmental terms, we use a whole lotta energy. But for many of us, it’s a one shot campaign, whether it performs poorly or exceptionally. We’re usually thinking about the next campaign and moving on to the new cycle of preparing our target list, writing our messages….you get the idea.
However, if you look back at your campaign results from 2008, I’m sure that you’ll see a few campaigns that are worthy of a repeat. My friends, there’s no shame in this. Be green! Recycle those high performing campaigns and squeeze some extra life out of them! You can re-run the campaign to the same audience as before, just focus on the new leads that have joined your database since the original campaign. Or consider a new target vertical and tweak your message as needed.
When you’re a green marketer you can increase your productivity. If your goal was to run one campaign this quarter, you can increase that two – one shiny new one, and one recycled proven performer.
(My thanks to Chris Petko, Eloqua’s Director of Marketing Operations, who first introduced me to the term Green Campaigns.)
Agreed! Another trap that marketers can fall into is thinking about marketing content from their own perspective: “We published that white paper a year ago. It’s old news.” This inherently undervalues the importance of the customer’s buying cycle — just because it’s old to you, and just because you promoted it to one of your leads a year ago, doesn’t mean it’s not worth putting it in front of them again. What may have been completely irrelevant to the lead a year ago may be very relevant to that same lead today, and no one can actually retain all of the links they *didn’t* click through on an e-mail from a year ago because it wasn’t relevant to them at that point in time. So, sure, reuse the campaign. But, you can also tweak it by including some notes/testimonials about the information that you picked up the first time you ran it to further validate the quality of the content: “One of our most popular white papers…” for instance.
[...] 13, 2009 in Email Marketing I was reading a post from MarketInsights. Loved their analogy on recycling your email campaigns. Probabaly this will apply all sort of [...]
Tim,
Excellent point about the buying cycle and timing, as well as updating the content with testimonials from the first time around. Thanks!
-Heather
I like “Green Marketer”. I called it Eco-marketing in this post: The Recession is Here – Time to Become an Eco-Marketer
Wow, Chad – great post you have there!! Some really good, specific ideas. Thanks for sharing!
Good points, the right attitude I think. Does this include email campaigns as opposed to just paper campaigns. Are you referring primarily to the paper trail or also the effort it takes in setting them up? Andrew.
I’m really referring to the effort it takes to set up an online campaign. There’s the email, the landing page, the offer (whitepaper, case study, etc) – so why not re-use them all?