Email Marketing: What Do Your Customers Really Want?

Like it or hate it – email continues to reign as one of the most effective tools to engage with consumers in a personalized way. A research conducted by campaign monitor reveals the key insights that can help increase your ROI. Here's a summary:

Consumers Still Prefer Brands to Communicate via Email

Key finding: There is no doubt, consumers still love email. More than half (52.7%) of those surveyed in the U.S. check their personal email account more than 10 times a day, and it is by far their favorite way to receive communication from brands  (compared to direct mail, mobile apps, social media, push notifications, and mobile wallet).

PREFERENCE OF COMMUNICATIONS FROM RETAIL BRANDS

Marketers are Delivering on Personalization

Key finding: 76% of consumers agree that retail brands are sending relevant, accurate emails which reflect their shopping preferences, location or purchase history. Companies across all industries are delivering on the promise of personalized emails. Overall, consumers overwhelmingly prefer to receive personalized emails across verticals.

AGREEMENT THAT BRANDS ARE SENDING RELEVANT EMAILS ACROSS INDUSTRIES

Along With Personalized Subject Lines, Discounts Drive the Most Opens!

Key finding: Across verticals, the top reasons consumers will open an email from a brand are personalization and discounts. Consumers are just slightly more inclined to open an email offering a discount (72%) than one with a personalized subject line (62%).

CONSUMER PREFERENCE BY EMAIL ATTRIBUTE ACROSS INDUSTRIES

Millennials Lead the Way in Making Purchasing Decisions Based on Email

Key finding: Preferences based on personalization and type of content received from brands did not vary widely among age groups. However, when it comes to taking action based on an email, millennials are far more likely to do so. 58% of millennials “always” or “most of the time” donated to a nonprofit while just 18% of respondents 55+ did the same.

PROPENSITY TO TAKE ACTION BY AGE GROUP ACROSS INDUSTRIES

The bottom line? Marketers must know their audience to run a successful campaign. Consumers prefer when brands personalize their email marketing campaigns, across age groups and verticals, and are seeking more of it. Brands must continue to personalize email campaigns to drive even more success and engagement, particularly with millennials. This trend will continue over time, as email continues to reign as one of the most effective tools to engage with consumers!

Link: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/insights-research-report/

Ways Content Marketing Will Change in 2015

Like the 29.6% of respondents to a Smart Insights survey, I too believe (I know) content marketing will be the biggest part of marketing for my company in 2015.

One of the major changes highlighted in the article is an enhanced focus on personalization. With the increased volume and depth of data attributable to your profile following you around the internet, marketers now have the ability to personalize content to your specific interests/profile.  At my company, we just evaluated a couple of automated marketing tools (Pardot and SharpSpring) that have the ability to reverse look up a users IP address, identify when you visit our website, download a whitepaper, click on our ads, etc.  Either of these platforms will pull data from social media sites and elsewhere into our CRM tool and build a full profile so we can then personalize emails, landing pages, and other messages they receive.

A second change mentioned in the article is "better use of visual content" - both videos and infographics - since these mediums typically perform better than static text.  We learned in class that 2015 would be the year of video content, so this article supports that point.  While video may not make sense (at this point) for my firm, we definitely will be increasing our use of infographics (and graphics in general).

Why the Customer Journey Officer is the New CEO

The world is changing, and consumers no longer want marketing targeted towards the masses, but personalized, custom communications, speaking to where they are within their journey as a consumer, and communicated based on how, and through what mediums, they prefer to be spoken to. As a recent AdAge article states, “Personalization is no longer a feature – it’s an expectation.”

The article goes on to say that “the future of marketing is, quite simply, the process of mapping and optimizing journeys for customers.” The best marketers have stopped relying on the “destination”, or in most cases, the sale, and instead shifted their thinking to focus on the “journey” and what drove the customer to make that sale, and how they can replicate that journey for future customers.

Previously, marketers were expected to develop and distribute messaging, and hoped that some portion of that messaging stuck enough to drive a sale. In today’s world, marketers are expected to understand where consumers are coming from, the different types of messaging different consumers would like to see, how the company should react if a consumer chooses not to purchase, how to eventually drive the purchase, how to thank the customer after the purchase to ensure they come back, and basically everything in between. It is no wonder then that many are saying that the Chief Marketing Officer should now be referred to instead as the Customer Journey Officer.

The article also laid out four questions that are fundamental to understanding the customer journey:

1. Do you know your customers? - Customers expect to be connected with on a more personal level. By truly proving you know your customers, you can go from “a company that’s cool” to “a company that’s cool for me.”
2. Do you know where they are in their journey? - Is this a former customer? A customer prospect? Do they interact with your company on your app or have they not yet downloaded the app? Knowing all this information helps ensure you can deliver highly targeted messaging.
3. Do you have a strategy to move customers along in their journey? - Having all the right information is great, but if you don’t have a strategy surrounding how to use it, you may as well not even have the data. Your strategy should be mapped out across every touch-point, in every channel.
4. Are you able to measure the business impact? - You should be able to see, at every point in the customer journey, how much closer they are to purchasing, and if a step is not adding any incremental lift, to use this data to adjust your strategy.

Having worked in the world of digital marketing, and having built campaigns around personalization, I have seen firsthand the value of mapping out a customer journey and delivering a highly customized marketing strategy. I really do believe that in the next few years all CMOs are going to start, or be forced to start, to think of themselves as a Customer Journey Officer. 

Read the entire article on the Customer Journey Officer here. 

Watch out! You may be inside a "filter bubble"!

A recent TED talk by Eli Pariser describes some of the perils of personalized search. He explains how as Google gets better and better at knowing who we are and what we like it starts to filter competing and conflicting points of views out of our personalized search results. Similarly, Facebook has gotten very savvy at figuring out which of our friends we click on most often and bumping their posts to the top of our news feeds. While this may seem like a sophisticated development on the part of these companies, Pariser argues that personalized search is narrowing our awareness of the world and forcing us into an invisible "filter bubble".

Why? If an individual is less likely to click on links about current events than about entertainment and Google notices this and begins to filter news-related links out of this person's search results, there is little hope that s/he will ever become an informed citizen. If someone clicks in a way that shows Google s/he is more interested in one political party than another, and Google then removes all links relating to the opposing party, how will that person ever learn the opposing parties' arguments? Just these two potential scenarios seem to stand in the way of a fully functioning democracy. What else is being filtered out of our search results and what are the possible consequences of these omissions.

How will this play out? Will consumers demand more autonomy in personalizing their own results? Will Google and friends start to see how intense personalization of search can be a bad thing when taken to the extreme? Is Pariser wrong to worry about the "filter bubble"? Is this actually a positive advancement?

The quest for ever-more personalization

We've talked in class about the benefits online retailers enjoy when they can personalize the experience of users browsing the site, presenting products or offers that are tailored to the interests of the visitor. As the tools for such activities increase in sophistication and decrease in price, a larger cross-section of web retailers are personalizing their user experience in new ways, in the hopes of boosting business. The WSJ posted an interesting summary of this trend here. (if you can't get to the article or don't have a subscription, email me and I'll forward the text).

The use of recommendations has been one winning way for online retailers to boost sales volumes. We saw this when Amazon introduced its "customers who bought this item also bought..." feature, way back when. Netflix also relies heavily on recommendations to keep its customers coming back for more movies, and in late 2006 took this quest for personalization to a particularly interesting dimension. The online DVD rental company offered $1MM in cold, hard cash to anyone who submits an idea that will increase the accuracy of its movie-liking prediction feature by 10% over the existing recommendation system, which synthesizes user ratings of given movies to predict how a user will like another movie. The contest (http://www.netflixprize.com/) has not yet produced a winner...

Given the money that these larger online sellers are willing to spend to secure effective personalization tools, it'll be interesting to see what becomes available in the next few years. For those of us going into marketing, I'm sure we'll be expected to know the latest tools and how to use them. I'm still skeptical of the longer-term implications of having everything "your way" -- will it ingrain already-held beliefs and preferences and turn society into trapped, narrow-minded consumers (not only of products, but news and information as well!)? Or will it reach a balance and then stop? Call me a cynic, but I'm fearful of what might happen if what we see on the all the websites we visit is chosen for us based on our past behavior and that of other, similar users.