Email remains the most effective tool in any marketer’s armoury to create and develop customer relationships.
Claims that social media would be the death knell for the medium have so far proven to be unfounded. In fact, email has never been in finer health.
Forbes recently stated that email was “still more effective than social media”, while a recent article on Econsultancy cited that “marketers still rate email as the best channel for return on investment after SEO”.
Furthermore, the DMA Customer Acquisition Report, released earlier this year, revealed that email was not only marketers preferred channel for customer communication, it was also the channel consumers trust the most.
Despite these positive statements, email has had to and must continue to adapt if it’s going to maintain its significant place within the marketing mix. Increases in volume, competition for attention and segmentation tools, such as Gmail’s email categories, have all changed the way marketers think about email.
Moreover, it changes the way they approach it in order to ensure their recipients continue to receive the right content at the most influential time in the customer journey. Social media has also played a part in that evolution, but rather than surpassing it, marketers have used it to help amplify content, by giving the recipient the ability to interact with it and share elements with their contacts, their way.
Data has played a key part in email evolution. I’ve talked before about the necessity to adopt a data-driven approach to marketing and how it should be considered best practice, but in the context of email specifically, unless the right data is being collected and then used in the right way, its effectiveness very quickly diminishes.
The email newsletter was once a key piece of collateral that brand marketers used to reach out to their customers. Whilst it does still have a place, it should only be viewed as one element in a much wider CRM campaign, which includes dynamic content, real-time targeting, lead generation and customer segmentation. This is where the importance of data comes in.
Over the past two years’ we have seen a significant increase in the amount of data being collected by brands. Our ecommerce study into the behaviours of the top 50 online retailers has showed that the majority of these companies are now collecting data on their customers through a preference centre and using it in their email marketing campaigns. Whilst this is very positive, it’s really only stage one.
The content of a weekly newsletter may be relevant to a large proportion of your customer base, after all they have opted to receive specific pieces of information from you in the first place, but it’s unlikely to entirely fulfil all of their needs or excite them in the same way it might have done previously. They now expect and require far more information.
Email therefore needs to go much further and add value to the recipient who receives it.
Furthermore, the DMA Customer Acquisition Report, released earlier this year, revealed that email was not only marketers preferred channel for customer communication, it was also the channel consumers trust the most.
The preference centre provides you with basic demographic information and interest preferences, but it doesn’t take into account live behaviour information, the sentiment of social media posts or help marketers understand their consumers’ previous browsing or purchase history. These details are significantly increasing in importance, as they not only provide marketers with a richer insight in to their consumers but they allow them to target them far more effectively than they were able to previously, in real-time.
If you are a department or clothing store, you may know your customer ‘Claire Jenkins’ loves shoes and maxi dresses, but she hasn’t bought anything from you in the last month. Why not send her a voucher for a discount on your latest line as an incentive to come back? The key here though is in knowing when she wants to receive that email. If she normally opens messages in the evening don’t send her an email in the morning with a code that will have expired by the time she opens it. Equally, if she doesn’t open it for a few days, make sure that when she opens the email, the offer is dynamically updated to reflect what you currently have in stock.
Contrastingly, if you are a car retailer you’ll know ‘Ben Jones’ bought his last car three years ago and has been browsing your website for a new model. He has had a family in the interim years and so his preferences have changed. He is no longer in the market for a sports car, he now needs a family saloon. If you have collected and analysed this data, your emails need to reflect that. So make sure you let him know about the latest offers and deals on what he is currently looking for, not what he purchased in the past.
So how do you ensure your email marketing is truly working for you?
The first thing to realise is that transformation doesn’t happen overnight, but you need to make sure you are continuously evolving. Email enables you to capture data, reconnect with prospects and customers and target individuals with relevant, personalised, timely content. That requires data and data insight.
If you invest in the right technology to make sense of your customer data and evaluate it in the minds of your consumers you’ll be able to pinpoint when and how they like to be targeted and what information is going to fully satisfy and excite them. Through continuously looking at how that data can be used to not only benefit them, but also drive activity to your website, increase sales or simply build brand affinity and engagement, you will see your email campaigns remain the lynch pin of your CRM activity.
The organisations that are successful in doing so will reap the return on investment rewards and maintain a market-leading role.
