One of the best ways for businesses to communicate with customers is through email. In person sales are no longer enough on their own, and businesses need to extend their promotions beyond time of purchase. This can explain the rapid rise of email marketing, standing as one of most effective ways to provide ongoing updates, share company news and remarket to previous customers.
The average person receives around 120 emails in their inbox every day, and it’s highly unlikely all of them will be read – not necessarily because of lack of interest, but more a shortage of capacity and time. Everyday recipients subconsciously make decisions about the emails they engage with, picking and choosing the ones that seem meaningful to them as an individual. Nowadays, businesses have to be working behind the scenes to attract customers, rather than relying on people to discover them naturally.
In theory it sounds self-explanatory, yet many businesses are still failing to instil email marketing in their communications strategy. With that in mind, this blog will outline how marketers can ensure it’s their emails that are prioritised over hundreds of other messages.
What is email marketing?
Now considered one of the most effective forms of digital marketing, email marketing is recognised for its ability to deliver messages and build relationships at a much lower cost than traditional services.
Email service providers (ESPs) have undergone years worth of development to ensure their services are equipped to support the varying goals of business owners. From sending out drip campaigns to imported data lists, to emailing a few dozen engaged contacts, ESPs have the breadth to offer large scale promotional support, and the attention to detail to manage intimate recipient lists.
Any trusted ESP will automate a post-campaign report too, separating the email engagements into deliverability details and recipient interactions. This makes tracking and managing performance a straightforward process through the pre-generated publication of email opens, clicks and unsubscribes in a ready-to-view format.
For any strategy to reach completion, results are key. Not only do these results need to drive growth, but they need to be analysed to maximise future responses. Particularly for B2B mailers, these reports are useful to send to clients when feeding back on the latest campaign and organising the next steps.
Why is personalisation in email marketing important?
Personalisation is the process of using recipients’ data within the email content to create a direct and tailor-made experience for the receiver. People want to be treated as individuals and not just a number on a checklist. It’s very common for contacts to skip past unsolicited emails because they feel meaningless, and talking to big groups no longer resonates with customers. But even when thousands of emails are sent at once, there are ways to make each contact feel as though it’s only addressed to them through simple personalisation.
Gathering subscriber data (such as their first name or birthday) and creating more thought-out lists helps deviate from mass messaging and focuses on making the customer feel special in turn. It sounds minor, but small tweaks like these are what grab people’s attention and encourage customer loyalty.
How effective is email marketing with personalisation?
Although written explanations are useful, quantitative research is often more convincing and effective at putting things into perspective. Here are some key statistics that prove exactly why businesses need to be personalising their emails:
- Personalised emails are opened 82% more than emails that aren’t personalised
- By including the customer’s name, it already increases the chance of the email being opened by 35%
- Personalised subject lines increase the likelihood that the email is opened by 26%
- 52% of consumers say they’ll search elsewhere to find what they’re looking for if an email isn’t personalised
- Personalised emails produce six times more transactions than non-personalised emails
Having seen the impact simple personalisation can have on email open and click rates, the combined knowledge of ESPs and marketers has led to the development of deep personalisation. Addressing each customer by their name certainly offers more relevant, individualised content than generic emails. However, a lot of competition will have gone beyond this, including personalised images, product recommendations and cart abandonment emails based on subscriber behaviour.
Important subscriber data can be discovered through highly targeted segmented lists which zoom into customer interests, behaviour, purchasing habits and marketing engagements. List segmentation is crucial for the creation of automated customer journeys enhanced by personal offers. In doing so, businesses will soon have customers looking out for their emails instead of fighting for a response.
If your business finds itself in need of email marketing support, please get in touch with our in-house team to discuss next steps.
