How to check the maturity of your digital marketing programs

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Your email marketing program drives your digital marketing strategy. It can be used effectively to drive true consumer engagement across channels.

The challenge is that many business leaders think that email is a cheap way to communicate and a way to drive a quick buck. So they spend less and beat it to death to drive what they think are 'maximum' results.

There are truly five stages of email 'maturity' (if I may)within organizations.

Stage 1, it is Cheap

Stage 2, it is Quick

Stage 3, it can be Tracked

Stage 4, it can be Personalized

Stage 5, it can speak across channels, Multi-channel

1 – Cheaper than paper – your company does email because direct mail costs are higher and email helps subsidize those costs.

2 – Quick way to communicate – it is a very fast way to get your campaigns out of your door into the prospects inbox.

3 – Track effectiveness of campaigns – you are concerned about measuring success of your other channel campaigns, so you are interested in seeing what is really working effectively.

4 – Personalize your messaging – you want to track what people are doing, place them in segments, and personalize each message uniquely (or strive to) towards recipients.

5 – Ability to leverage information across channels – you are using email as a means to build preference repositories and create a two way dialogue with recipients across channel.

Assign yourself a number for each one of the bullets above – most marketers have moved from two to three and some are beginning to reach stage four. There are very few companies that are in stage five.

Usually, the higher your number; the higher the level of your 'email maturity.'