Contextual Marketing with Email Intelligence

In our digital world, consumers are met with thousands of messages daily. From remarketing to video pre-roll, banners to sponsored social posts, we’re almost always surrounded by brand communications. With so many messages happening simultaneously, traditional strategies simply aren’t enough to stand out. You need an innovative marketing strategy to create an environment that drives engagement and builds relationships.

You need contextual marketing.

How Does Contextual Marketing Work?

Contextual marketing is achieved through behavioral targeting. It creates a personalized experience for the customer, based on who they are and what actions they take online. Every time a customer engages with a brand, new data is created marketers can use to drive subsequent engagements.

Contextual tactics can complement virtually any email marketing strategy – so long as you have the right customer data in place. The more information you can collect or obtain about the contacts on your list, the more you empower yourself to place meaningful messages in front of the right people, at the right time and in the right place.

What types of data are useful for contextual marketing?

• Behavior data, including website analytics, email analytics and purchase data.
• Demographic data, including age, residence, income and hobbies.
• Social media data, including networks and activity levels.

In fact, a recent AdWeek article encourages marketers to commit to data on a daily basis. “Marketers should stop simply using analytics retroactively and take advantage of predictive and real-time analytics,” the authors explain. In other words, don’t just use your data to conduct postmortems on last week’s campaigns. Instead, use the real-time information at your fingertips to react and revise your messaging to drive better brand experiences.

Focus on Adding Value

Any marketer worth their salt should be intensely interested in producing long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. Nowhere is this more important than with contextual marketing. After all, as Corey Eridon at HubSpot explains, “Personalized and relevant marketing is typically not the kind of marketing that annoys the living daylights out of people. Win-win!”

It’s not just about targeting an attentive audience, either; successful contextual marketing is completely aligned with your customer’s interests. Think about what your customer’s buying cycle looks like, and use these insights to identify where email might be most relevant. In the Forrester report The Power of Customer Context, analyst Carlton Doty suggests marketers, “Work with your customer experience team to build a marketing strategy to address the end-to-end customer journeys – before, during and after the purchase.”

Ultimately, contextual marketing can change the entire course of your customer relationships. As new opportunities emerge, you can raise the level of engagement with your customers through personalized, real-time messages that provide a true lifetime value.

Interested in learning more about using email intelligence to personalize your messages? Check out our free report!