start the value loop designed to turn ordinary buyers into buyers who purchase from your brand again and again.
If a customer just bought a tent and four sleeping bags, for example, you could assume that she’ s looking to head out to the campground, and you could send her a coupon code for a camp stove. If a customer just bought a subscription to a social media training event, you could offer him follow-up training on email marketing.
An ascension campaign is a great way to move customers along the customer journey and build a long-term relationship with them. In an ascension campaign, you give customers what they want and then a bit more.
An ascension campaign should do the following things:
Overcome or inoculate against known objections. Prescribe the next logical step. Increase the average value of customers by selling more to them, more often. Increase customer trust. Make customers ascend to fans.
Segmentation campaigns
A segmentation campaign is a manual campaign sent to your entire database as a promotion designed to segment your subscribers by interest.
Consider a small publishing company that sells high-interest nonfiction books to teachers and librarians. That company is releasing a series of science books on gardening and plant growth. The books have similar content, but some target early learners, others middleschool students, and still others high-school students. The marketing department, being wise and astute in the best practices of email marketing, decides to send out a segmentation campaign. The department staff craft an email listing the books that are available, with clear guidance on what age level each book is appropriate for. Then the staff sends the email as a broadcast campaign to the company’ s entire mailing list. This campaign makes the company’ s entire list aware of the new product, and possibly more important, the resulting click data allows the company to segment the list by which subscribers are interested in early-learning content, which are interested in middle-school content, and which are interested in high-school content. The marketing department can create audience segments and send additional emails that meet those customers’ exact interests. Figure 11-7 shows a segmentation email from Home Depot. The email lists six categories in which subscribers can get savings. When a subscriber selects one of these categories, the marketing team knows that this person responded to this email and clicked a particular product category. That person would then be segmented, and Home Depot would likely send follow-up emails on the product the subscriber selected.