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There is no denying the necessity of personalization in email marketing. Personalization increases open rates, and it shows your audience that you acknowledge and understand their wants and needs. It leads to more engaged readers driven toward action, and it’s pretty central to an effective lead nurture strategy. According to Epsilon’s research, 80% of consumers…
The post What Is Email Personalization and Why Is it So Powerful? appeared first on Benchmark Email.

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You may be familiar with the adage, “Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.” As much as we don’t want to think about the terrible things that can happen in business and life, negative occurrences are inevitable. Whether it’s a product defect that leads to a recall, a security breach that leaves our customer’s data vulnerable, or violence or disasters in the workplace, bad things are bound to happen at some point.
While it’s not the happiest of thoughts, it’s realistic. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of opting out from negative occurrences. Still, we do have the ability to plan ahead so that when the unthinkable happens, we’ve already thought of it, and have a plan in place to limit the damages.
If none of what you’ve read has you rocking in the corner, and you’re actually excited by the possibility of being the person a business turns to in times of crisis, you might be perfect for a career in Crisis Management. Throughout this piece, you’ll learn what a crisis manager does and how to be a great one, according to service experts. 

Crisis Management
Crisis management is how organizations prevent, prepare for, and respond to events that could be detrimental to employees, customers, or the organization as a whole. This field helps identify uncertain conditions that could cause harm and mitigate the impact if you can’t prevent them. It is an essential aspect of any business and can save millions of dollars in fallout, not to mention saving a brand’s reputation.
Throughout this piece, you’ll learn what a crisis manager does and how to be a great one, according to service experts.
What is a Crisis Manager?
The job of a crisis manager is to be proactive, identify threats, and the process they’ll use to work through them before a crisis ever happens. A crisis manager is involved at every stage – before, during, and after a crisis. 
While everyone in an organization may be involved in carrying out a crisis management plan, the crisis manager is responsible for devising this plan, making sure it runs smoothly, and communicating with employees, customers, shareholders, board members, and the public so the experience does not damage the organization’s reputation.
Crisis Manager Tasks Before or Pre-Crisis

Identify risks
Establish early monitoring systems
Develop a crisis plan to minimize risks

Crisis Manager Tasks During a Crisis Response

Lead the crisis management team
Communicate with employees and shareholders, customers
Speak with the media to maintain a positive public reputation

Crisis Manager Tasks After or Post-Crisis

Continue to lead the crisis management team
Review the response plan, identify what did and did not work, and make any necessary changes

How Much Does a Crisis Manager Make?
Before we dive into what it takes to land a job as a crisis manager, you might wonder what an average crisis manager’s salary is. While compensation can vary based on experience, geographic area, the company you work for, and many other factors, the average salary for a crisis manager is $56,359, according to Indeed.com. For example, in Los Angeles, CA, Zip Recruiter shows a range from $24,882 up to $158,820 and determined an average of $63,110.
How to Become a Crisis Manager
Before we dive into education and certification, let’s look at what personality characteristics you must have to be a great crisis manager.
In order to excel in this field, you’ll need to be:

Calm under pressure
A great communicator
Solution-focused
Able to think clearly and act quickly
Able to handle stress
Proactive
Concerned for the wellbeing of the organization and your team members

Critical thinking skills are essential, as are strong leadership and interpersonal skills. You will have to motivate employees to take action during difficult times and keep them calm enough to be effective.
Does this still sound like you? Perfect! Now, it’s time to determine what you need to do to make a career out of your passion and abilities.
While many careers have a very obvious path beginning with a specific college degree, Crisis management is slightly different. If you’re looking at becoming a crisis manager, there are very few job-specific degrees available. However, emergency management is a common educational path for crisis managers as-is business administration.  You will also find a number of crisis management positions that look for a degree or experience in public relations with classes in crisis communication.
There is an Institute for Crisis Management (ICM) that offers certification and provides training in:

Identifying and preparing for a business crisis
Evaluating vulnerabilities
Gaining support from senior management
Essential communication tools
Preparing recovery plans

You can also look for communication courses and resources through organizations like the Institute for Public Relations (IPR).
Like it or not, every business will experience challenges, setbacks, and full-blown crises throughout its lifetime. As a crisis manager, you will be responsible for looking into the future to identify these challenges before they turn into major issues and creating a plan that will help minimize the damage these situations could cause.
You can be the difference between a business being destroyed by a crisis or surviving relatively unscathed.

Just like every building needs a foundation, every business needs brand architecture. It’s the structure that allows you to organize your offerings, develop a brand identity, and gain brand equity.
The right brand architecture provides clarity around your products or services and influences how your brands and sub-brands relate to one another.
Without this framework, there’s no connection between your brand’s offerings, messaging, and identity. This inconsistency can confuse consumers and dilute the overall value of the brand. (Think of it like walking through a building where every room has vastly different interior design).
To ensure your brand architecture fits your business, this post will share the various brand architecture models, highlight real-life examples, and provide steps to choose the best structure for your company.
What is brand architecture?
Brand architecture is the organizational framework a company uses to structure its brands, sub-brands, and products or services.
The framework helps define both the breadth and the depth of a brand, which makes it easier to develop marketing campaigns, identify growth opportunities, and ensure consumers understand the offerings.

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Companies use brand architecture to inform internal efforts. It acts as the foundation for the brand identity, style guide, and brand story, but it also helps increase efficiency by highlighting opportunities for cross-promotion, brand awareness, and mergers and acquisitions.
Brand architecture isn’t always obvious to consumers, who use it as a way to categorize the company and understand how it meets their needs. For example, people may not know that Alphabet is the parent company of Google. But they have a specific perception of Google’s brand equity and transfer it to products like Google Sheets, Google Docs, or Google Search.
Ultimately, brand architecture is meant to bring order to a brand’s offerings and build brand equity. Not every architecture will work for every business, so let’s look at the options to see which may be the right fit for your brand.
Brand Architecture Models
The most common brand architecture models are branded house, house of brands, endorsed brands, and hybrid brands.
Branded House

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A branded house architecture combines several house brands under a single umbrella brand, leveraging the well-established master brand for its equity, awareness, and customer loyalty. Oftentimes, the house brands are designed to target different audience segments to maximize reach and revenue.
For instance, Apple uses a branded house architecture to create a seamless look and feel across its sub-brands: iPad, iPhone, iMac, Watch, and TV. By leaning on Apple’s loyal customer base, the sub-brands increase their equity and more easily attract buyers.

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The following companies use a branded house architecture:

FedEx: FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, FedEx Freight, FedEx Office, etc

Virgin: Virgin Mobile, Virgin Pulse, Virgin Money, etc

HubSpot: Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, Operations Hub

House of Brands

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A house of brands architecture downplays the master brand in order to feature the sub-brands. This structure allows the sub-brands to shine on their own because they aren’t tied to the messaging, appearance, or positioning of the master brands. But it also increases the complexity because each brand has a distinct audience, brand identity, marketing strategy, and equity.
Due to that complexity, companies that use a house of brands structure are often large global brands with established equity. While the master brand may be widely recognized, like the consumer goods company Unilever, it can also be behind the scenes, like the fast-food company Yum! Brands.

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The following companies use a house of brands architecture:

Procter & Gamble: Pampers, Tide, Bounty, Bounce, Dawn, Tampax, and more

Yum! Brands: KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and The Habit Burger Grill

GE Appliances: Monogram, Café, GE, GE Profile, Haier and Hotpoint

Focus Brands: Aunties Anne’s, Cinnabon, Jamba Juice, Carvel, and more

PepsiCo: Pepsi, Lays, Quaker Oats, Gatorade, Aquafina, Tropicana, and more

Hybrid Brand

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A hybrid brand architecture combines the house of brands and branded house models. The goal of this structure is for the sub-brands to have similar styles as the master brand while maintaining distinct brand identities.
Companies that use a hybrid architecture may mention the master brand in marketing, but most adopt this model as a way to keep the master and sub-brands separate after rounds of mergers and acquisitions. It’s also a good approach for brands that want to cater to vastly different target audiences, like Marriott Bonvoy.
By taking a hybrid approach, the company maintains a diverse portfolio of brands that includes luxury hotels, such as the Ritz-Carlton, alongside budget-friendly options, such as Residence Inn.

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The following companies use a hybrid approach:

Alphabet: Google, Nest, YouTube, Fitbit, Waze, and more

Microsoft: LinkedIn, Skype, GitHub, Mojang, and more

Amazon: AmazonBasics, Presto!, Mama Bear, AmazonFresh, Zappos, and more

Levi’s: Levi’s, Dockers, Denizen, and Signature by Levi Strauss & Co

Endorsed Brand

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Another option for brand architecture is the endorsed brand model, which has a master brand and sub-brands that rely on an association with it. Each sub-brand benefits from the strength of the others because they all share the same endorsement.
Oftentimes, an endorsed brand incorporates the logo and colors of the master brand. Of course, this allows the sub-brand to leverage the reputation of the main brand for improved brand equity, awareness, and security.
The endorsed approach is great for companies that use a hybrid approach and want each sub-brand to have its own identity, without separating it from the master brand. Unlike the house of brands approach, the endorsed model lets everyone know the main brand behind the products or services. And unlike the branded house approach, an endorsed brand can have a different look or feel from the master brand.

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The following brands use an endorsed approach:

Nescafe by Nestle
Playstation by Sony
Rice Krispies by Kellog
Polo by Ralph Lauren

How to Develop Brand Architecture
Defining brand architecture is one of the first steps a company should take when building a brand because it lays the foundation for an organized, intuitive branding strategy. Although brand architecture can become complex, with dozens of sub-brands, the right structure can ensure each brand remains true to its identity.
You can develop a brand architecture for your business in three steps: research, strategy, and application.
1. Research
Strong brands don’t simply choose a model and run with it. Conducting research is an essential step to developing brand architecture because it gives you the information you need to organize offerings in a way that makes sense for your company, customers, and industry.
The more data, the better. But gathering the following information will provide the insights you need to get started.

Brand audit – Brand loyalty, brand awareness, brand perception, brand equity, brand assets, and brand portfolio

Market research – Buyer personas, market segmentation, product/service use, pricing, customer satisfaction, and competitive analysis

Before you make any decision, it’s wise to review your company’s mission, vision, and values to ensure the brand architecture aligns with business goals.
2. Strategy
With data in hand, it’s time to design the brand architecture. If you’re revamping an old architecture, this step may require tough decisions on whether to get rid of or sell brands that don’t fit into your desired architecture. If you’re starting from scratch, you have to decide how closely you want your current (or future) sub-brands to be connected to the master brand.
You can test out each architecture by seeing what the brand would look like in each approach and creating a list of pros and cons. Maybe the branded house model won’t work because you have several distinct brands that can’t be grouped under the parent brand.
When you find a structure that may work, outline the connections between the master brands, sub-brands, and products or services. You need to know how everything works together because defining distinct brands, designing cross-promotions, or marketing to customers.
Along the way, make sure to consider your available resources (employees, budget, time). Certain approaches take more work than others, so you want to choose a brand architecture that fits your current capacity as well as your future vision.
3. Application
Choosing a brand architecture is just the start of creating a lasting brand that people love. But for the sake of this article, the last step is to share the finalized structure with your team.
Since brand architecture is part of your brand identity, you can unveil it alongside your overarching brand positioning strategy. Make sure to include a clear structure that highlights the relationships between the master brand, sub-brands, and offerings, in addition to any connections between sub-brands. Everyone on the team should know the strategic role of every brand within the architecture framework and how it relates to customers.
As your company grows, your brand architecture must change to include any new offerings or brands — whether it’s the result of a new product launch or an acquisition.
By taking time to conduct brand research, develop a brand architecture strategy, and share it with your team, you’re setting your entire organization up to make efficient branding decisions that have a long-term effect on brand equity.

List building is a strategy that allows marketers to target customers based on their needs, goals, or other personal criteria (e.g. purchase history, location, age, etc.). These lists can be applied to all marketing materials (as well as the work of sales and service reps) to help your team offer customers a personalized and delightful customer experience.
Automated list building software exists to help your team create and manage accurate, up-to-date, and easily applicable lists in a way that’s quick and easy.

What is automated list building?
Automated list building is the process of using a tool to help you automatically create lists of audience members, whether buyer prospects or customers.
Automated list building software is a type of marketing automation tool that allows you to do this. We’ll review some examples shortly.
Benefits of Automated List Building Software
Here are some examples of the many benefits that you’ll get from using automated list building software.

Segment customers into groups for targeting.
Identify your most qualified leads and personas.
Personalize customer experiences to help you retain more customers.
Offer your customers the information and content that they care about.
Automate the workflows to share tailored emails, SMS, and campaigns to the right customers at the right time.
Analyze your lists as needed over time.
Ensure your lists are automatically updated with new contact data.
Share lists with Sales and Service reps for easy prospect/ customer handoff.
Better understand your buyer personas and customers.

Automated List Building Software
1. HubSpot Marketing Automation Software

Price
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub comes in four plans: Free, $45/mo (Starter), $800/mo (Professional), and $3,200/mo (Enterprise).
Key Features
HubSpot’s Marketing Automation Software allows you to build beautiful and automated email campaigns that are sent for you based on predetermined triggers. This way, you know your tailored content is being sent to the right recipients at the right time.
Since HubSpot’s Marketing Automation Software is integrated with Marketing Hub and your CRM, your lists will be automatically updated for you with new or updated contact information.
Use HubSpot’s advanced segmentation logic to determine which customers are added to your workflows and at which point in the buyer’s journey that happens. HubSpot also pulls information about your recipients via the Contact Database so each email is customized.
2. Adroll

Price
AdRoll offers a free plan and a Growth plan that’s $19/mo.
Key Features
AdRoll is a marketing platform for email, web, and social media. To help you identify your audience, you can retarget prospects and customers at the right time (e.g. after purchase or sign up) with automated email series.
Trigger form display for email capture by your customer segments and their activity. You can also track then use AdRoll to track the success of those ads and emails in a single dashboard.
3. OptiMonk

Price
OptiMonk has four plans that range in price from free to $199/mo. There’s also a customizable plan that requires you to contact a sales rep.
Key Features
With OptiMonk, you can build email lists of your website visitors who are most likely to convert based on their behavior. Then, OptinMonk will help you create and send emails that include tailored offers for those recipients.
In addition to email, you can subscribe your list of visitors to Facebook Messenger as well as use the tool’s widgets for gathering phone numbers of your website visitors so you’re able to create SMS campaigns.
4. Outgrow

Price
Outgrow has four plans ranging in price from $14 to $600/ month.
Key Features
Outgrow is a marketing platform that helps you create interactive quizzes, polls, calculators, and chatbots. Increase engagement across your content with dynamic text and charts that are based on user inputs.
You can segment your leads and assign them to campaigns that are tailored to their needs and interests. You can also use those segmented lists to help you personalize confirmation emails for your visitors.
5. Klayvio

Price
Flexible pricing with the option of a free plan for Email, SMS, or Email and SMS depending on your needs.
Key Features
Klayvio is an email and SMS marketing automation software. With Klayvio’s Flows feature, you can set customizable triggers to split audience members into different lists or groups. Customers are then sent down unique paths based on their list/ grouping with emails and texts that are specific to their needs and goals.
You can also set up list automations so that customers who subscribe to your business, they’re sent a welcome series via email and/or SMS. Additionally, create and share messages based on audience segments such as region, past purchases, and more.
Automate Your List Building
Automated list building helps your team accurately and efficiently create prospect customer lists and segments that can be used by Marketing (as well as other internal teams) to tailor marketing content and materials to individuals. By automating the personalization of the buyer’s journey, your team will have the ability to convert, delight, and retain more customers.