Everyone wants their email to achieve better results but many marketers realise they are becoming part of the unwanted inbox ‘noise’. Long used as a tactical channel due to its low cost and ease of execution, email’s diminishing returns mean this can’t continue. Irrelevant email doesn’t enhance the customer experience and is potentially damaging to your brand.
In its mission to become more strategic, email has to become more intelligent .The challenge here is not to try sending fewer but more effective emails but simply to send more emails which are opened, read and actioned. In other words, become a lot more relevant. This isn’t a major strategic revelation but if done properly, email has the ability to deliver relevant communications more powerfully than any other medium.
To make this possible you need to address three things. Delivery, or reaching the inbox and being readable; relevance i.e. messages targeted at audiences that want them; and creativity, or keeping audiences engaged. Working in combination, this trio makes email more strategic so your email can deliver the right results.
First, take delivery. Forrester Research found that even after 10 years of email marketing, 30% of marketers are still concerned with managing bounces and unsubscribes and a quarter want to increase the percentage of delivered mail. In a similar vein, a Marketing Sherpa study revealed that 30% of marketers don’t take the time to figure out their actual rate of delivery. Careful management of the interconnected drivers of email deliverability will impact your success rate. Ensure your email is wanted in the first place, monitor ISPs’ deliverability rules, keep lists clean and create messages which are readable by everybody and your delivery rates will go up.
Next, increase relevance by applying more intelligent insights. Build a proper segmentation strategy and create a unique picture of each customer.
When building segments, don’t just use customer data from email or online metrics but take advantage of multiple data sources to create multiple segments – email is after all a highly dynamic medium allowing you to easily send different messages to different groups. Princess Cruises sometimes has less than a week to fill its empty berths but using Alterian’s Analytics Platform and Alterian’s Dynamic Messenger email software the marketing group can now develop, personalise and send campaigns in almost half the time.
Feed email response data back into your database so that customer segments and models can be built using the responsive data. Being ‘joined-up’ and applying powerful analytics is one of the key things you can do to improve relevance.
Trisha Fairless, Marketing and Development Director at Targetbase Claydon Heeley, underlines just how vital powerful analytics are to email: “We pride ourselves on getting it right every time and delivering campaigns that really work for our clients. The company believes that data and insight drive creativity and the Alterian Integrated Marketing Platform enables us to directly target campaigns for our clients, ensuring that the right people are reached by the right creative, at the right time.”
Thirdly, keep audiences engaged by removing any barriers to rich media delivery so dynamic content becomes the norm – the degree of personalisation should only be limited by the amount and type of content available to you. Make messages personal, encourage interactivity and link to other digital assets so email is a gateway to your brand, not an isolated communication.
Combining the deliverability, relevance and creativity needed to drive more intelligent email is the big challenge but Alterian software helps make it practical. Designed to automate and integrate many parts of the email process, it eliminates the pain of complex delivery and insight challenges, while supporting your creativity.
Download the full whitepaper on intelligent email. See our case studies and whitepapers to the right.
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