The Top-Tier Email Marketing Path to Higher Revenues

In my last post, I described the four basic methods that can be employed by all email marketers to boost revenues. In this post, I’ll focus on the leading-edge methods being adopted by top-tier email marketers to enable them to continue to achieve significantly higher ROI than their peers ($80 per dollar spent vs. the $44 average and $20 low end).

Top-tier email marketers tend to adopt the most modern email marketing techniques that enable them to optimize deliverability, engage prospects and increase conversions. Going forward, these marketers will continue to push the ROI envelope by employing the most advanced techniques available today, including:

• Data-driven marketing
• Email remarketing and retargeting
• Browse abandonment
• Geographic or location-based targeting
• Behavioral marketing
• Real-time dynamic personalization

As many studies show, triggered email, personalization, real-time marketing, multichannel marketing and marketing automation all produce higher open rates, click-through rates, conversions and revenues. The trend is toward delivering optimized customer experiences and one-to-one, individualized messaging.

Laser Focus on the Individual

Engaging consumers at multiple touch points with personalized content is the path top-tier marketers are pursuing to achieve higher revenues. Thus, systems are being put in place to track consumers’ activities and serve them personalized content prepared dynamically in a variety of situations or contexts (i.e. – during browsing sessions, when they abandon shopping carts, when they request whitepapers and other information, when they search with search engines, when they open emails, and more).

Thus, when a customer is browsing for shoes on a fashion site, for example, a wealth of information about the buying history, habits and persona of the shopper is brought to bear in the content that is presented: special offers, coupons, suggested styles, etc. The customer will be tracked and marketed to even when she leaves the site, is about to leave the site, abandons a shopping cart or visits another site. If she does purchase a product, personalized transactional, thank you and other follow-up emails will be sent to further engage her.

Achieving this degree of one-to-one marketing is where behavioral marketing, data marketing, real-time marketing, buying personas, triggered email and personalization all converge. As Silverpop relates, there is a common theme running through these trends, “an emphasis on building a connected, unique customer experience for every person with whom you do business.”

Getting More Dynamic

To achieve the one-to-one marketing vision requires collecting comprehensive data about each visitor and applying that data in real time to deliver a personalized message for each specific buying situation. This requires building systems that can trigger the delivery of dynamic email content in a multitude of contexts.

As Colin Rogers of Tahzoo explains, the highest levels of personalization enable rich profiling information to be applied to specific shopping situations or contexts. “With the introduction of personalization, this directed experience can be made even more relevant through the contextualization of the experience based not only on campaign source, but combined with the triggers associated with each visitor, like time, geo location, previous web visits and more.”

Delivering this sort of dynamic content takes more effort but produces greater results. Dynamic landing pages that serve personalized messages have proven to be more effective than static pages that deliver a one-size-fits-all message. Dynamic emails triggered in response to user activities also have proven to be more effective in generating revenues. In addition, emails that contain dynamic content-such as bank account activity, weather forecasts or personalized special offers-increase engagement and revenues.

Target, Target Everywhere

With targeting and personalization at multiple touch points throughout the overarching strategy, email retargeting is among the dynamic mechanisms being employed to boost engagement and revenues. Email retargeting systems present ads that reinforce your message or special offer to recipients who visit particular websites.

The retargeted ad is triggered by a line of HTML code or cookie you place in the email and, when the subscriber opens the email and visits websites with retargeting ads enabled, your ad will be displayed. As Caroline of ReTargeter notes, “This is a particularly powerful way to keep your brand in front of your email list without sending more emails.”

Browse abandonment is another form of dynamic re-engagement that is gaining popularity. Engaging shoppers who abandon shopping carts has proven to be effective in winning business that would otherwise be lost, and this practice is being extended to website visitors who abandon product pages and other information pages. Like email retargeting, browse abandonment requires you to insert tracking code on web pages that is integrated with your email and ecommerce platform.

It Starts with Data

Collecting the data necessary to build customer profiles and personalize messages at particular moments of engagement is key to the one-to-one marketing process. This is why there is so much emphasis on data enrichment, building comprehensive customer databases and achieving 360-degree customer views.

As Silverpop explains, “To implement behavioral marketing automation, you’ve got to have an integrated system that can collect the behaviors taking place-social, email, Web, events, CRM, etc.-and attribute all this data back to an individual person.”

Taking advantage of a commercial email intelligence service, Silverpop advises, is an excellent way to obtain the rich information needed to create buyer persona, segment and target more effectively, personalize messaging and maximize deliverability.

Learn more about how email intelligence can amplify your email marketing strategy in this free guide.

Photo Credit: Richard Matthews