Best Practices for Integrating Your E-Marketing Efforts

Every e-marketer who's been in the space for any period of time has a significant repertoire of strategies by now — email marketing, search marketing, social media marketing and so on. In addition to these strategies, there are also many phases to marketing — acquisition, transition, campaigns, re-engagement, loyalty and customer service.

Which strategy is emphasized at any given time, however, often depends on factors that have nothing to do with a solid overall e-marketing strategy. Integrating all of your e-marketing efforts so they complement rather than compete with each other is the key to success in 2010.

Here are some tips that'll help with integration:

• View e-marketing as a continuum, not a group of separate strategies. Moving customers along that continuum and keeping them engaged need to be seen as holistic endeavors, not segmented ones.
• Now that Google has introduced real-time search, it’s more imperative than ever to have your message constantly available in multiple channels. That means constant engagement: Tweets have to be written and answered, branded communities must be monitored, websites kept up-to-date, and search marketing must reflect your attention to the changing face of the internet.
• Craft messages that can be used throughout these multiple channels to drive business to your website, email address and telephone number.
• Keep branding and the look and feel consistent throughout all of your e-marketing efforts.
• Integration is all about communication; communicate frequently with customers through all available channels — newsletters, blogs, customer support, customer-centric communities, special offers, etc.
• Integration is also about internal communication. Your sales force must work closely with the PR department; marketing needs to know exactly what's going on in the technical department. Perhaps it’s even time to stop thinking of them as discrete departments!
• Partner with vendors who offer all the services and products you need. This saves time, money and aggravation, and vendors are often able to help you strategize. Customer service isn’t just for customers; it’s for you, too.

Too often marketers see the different components of their overall strategies as being at best separate and at worst in competition with each other. Integrating them saves time, money, resources, and delivers a better product or service.

Neil M. Rosen is president and CEO of eWayDirect, a Southport, Conn.-based e-marketing services provider. Reach Neil at neil@ewaydirect.com.