Automation often gets a bad name, but when it comes to email marketing, it can dramatically enhance the content you send to your customers’ inbox and allow your brand to adapt to the ever-changing landscape, instantaneously.
Email has always been regarded as the back bone of successful digital marketing strategies and remains a key component in the customer journey – from the initial enquiry, through the sales process and beyond – but like most things it has had to adapt to stay relevant and effective in the multi-channel world. Good email marketing has become increasingly dependent upon the ability to store and manipulate more relevant data about customers’ behaviour and use efficient tools and methods to automate sending highly personalised and automatic messages.
Why?
Well for starters, manually planning and implementing an email marketing campaign, which is highly personal and fulfils all your business requirements, is virtually impossible in the digital age. As the volume of data needed to deliver these campaigns proliferates across multiple silos across your business. Customers are more demanding too. You have to give your customers the feeling that they are getting the information they want, when they want it. Otherwise, they won’t feel valued or like they are being spoken to on a personal level. Inboxes are becoming a far more crowded place as well, so competition for attention is extremely high. According to Forrester Research, the number of commercial emails received per person per year could reach 9,000 by 2014. So if you’re slow to respond or deliver irrelevant communications, you run the risk of losing some of your customers or worst, fail to convert new customers from your crucial first email message. The longer you wait to respond to a registration transaction, the higher the chance that your customers will lose interest. Email accelerates the pace of customer conversation, so it’s important that you have the systems in place to manage and respond to customer activity as soon as possible and provide your customers with the exact information they are expecting.
So what’s the big deal with automation? For starters, many of us, probably without thinking about it, take advantage of email automation on a daily basis. Messages such as order confirmation, notification of shipping and password enquiries are all handled by an automated system which delivers messages to customers almost instantaneously. These transactional emails typically have very high open rates; and are just one of the many opportunities marketers can exploit in order to communicate more information about their company or advertise current product offerings to customers. So we have already bought into automation in some form. Despite this, marketers still remain sceptical about investing into an automated email marketing solutions. But, with the right software, you can develop an email communication strategy that goes far beyond transactional emails and registration.
Consider the example of a bookseller whose bi-weekly customer newsletter advertises newly released titles and best sellers – not just random titles – but a selection of titles that reflects the interests of each individual recipient. At the same time, the bookseller must make sure that reduced-price publications aren’t advertised to customers who have already purchased the publication at full price. Sophisticated email software makes this possible. This detailed insight not only adds value to the customer and builds a stronger customer relationship, but it can also help to dramatically increase sales.
Halfords is a great example. Its key objective was to drive customers to its online store, with a particular focus on identifying and acting upon “moments of truth” within the customer lifecycle. When customers abandoned their shopping carts in the online store, Halfords cross-referenced the abandoned product against a table of matching products. Using this data, it sent customers a targeted and personalised email the following day, with three similar products – one cheaper, one matching in price and one slightly more expensive – to incentivise them to return to the online store. In moving away from a blanket email marketing approach, Halfords saw open rates and click through rates increase to 60% and 14% respectively.
Achieving this is all down to data. The rise of the cloud has significantly increased the amount and type of data that can be stored about products, customer preferences, and customer behaviour. But, no matter how much data you hold, it doesn’t provide you with any value unless you don’t put the systems in place to collate it. This process can help you to identify your target groups and their characteristics to create the most targeted and personalised email possible which reacts to the changing behaviours of your customers. The result? High open, click through and conversion rates. A successful email campaign uses all available customer data to craft messages that contain relevant content and highly personalised offers in a desired form and sends it out to customers at a desired time, without any need for increased personnel.
So why should marketers invest in email automation? The first thing you need to ask yourself is – am I making effective use of the data I hold about my customers? If you’re not sending out highly targeted email messages, you need to consider why. It’s probably not because you don’t want to; but because you don’t have the systems in place to do so. Automated email campaigns allow you to spot opportunities, identify weak leaks in your customer communication strategy and patterns in your customer behaviour. In addition they allow you to analyse why your customers have disengaged with you – whether that’s unsubscribing from your mailing list or abandoning their shopping cart. Essentially every single customer activity – registration online browsing, or a simple service email – presents your company with an opportunity for valuable interaction. With a sophisticated email software program you can take advantage of every opportunity to create and deliver personalised content – an indispensable tool for any marketing department.
