Jan 22, 2016 By Salesforce

3 Email Strategies That Can Work Wonders

in Marketing Cloud

Rethink email and reap the rewards

Email is your golden ticket to enhanced customer engagement and sales. It’s an affordable and effective marketing tool, with much lower cost-per-acquisition than other channels. But only if you use it smartly.

Here, we look at how you can use email to more meaningfully connect with customers and improve open rates, click-through rates and forwards.

First, let’s look at the current state of email and why a new strategy matters. Put simply, email is everywhere. The typical email subscriber receives an average 413 emails per month.¹These people are often time-poor – they’re very selective about which emails they’ll open and engage with. It’s virtually guaranteed that they won’t open all 413 of them!

So how do you ensure that your email is one of those that your customers do open? How do you grab your recipients’ attention and get the outcomes you want from email?

Three email strategies that work wonders

To get the most from your email marketing program, you should focus on three key strategies: personalisation, real-time automation and predictive intelligence.

Many organisations tackle these strategies sequentially – you can start out with simple personalisation and gradually build on your approach until you’ve created a rich and rewarding email marketing program.

1. Personalisation

Ninety per cent of companies say they experience uplift in conversions when they personalise emails.² But before you turn your generic promotional emails into targeted and personalised messages, you need to get to know who your customers are.

Upscale department store Von Maur is a great example here. By collecting and using rich data about its customers, the company delivers more relevant content – and has experienced much higher email open rates as a result.

2. Real-time automation

Triggered emails drive engagement by sending the right message to the right person at the right time. These emails – which include shipping confirmations, password resets and abandoned cart emails – have the highest open and click-through rates of any emails, so it’s important to get them right.

Real-time automation lets you respond to individual customers’ specific needs at critical moments in your relationship. For example, 54 per cent of retail shoppers who are going to buy an abandoned item do so within 24 hours, compared to 10% within 48 hours.³ So you need to send that abandoned cart email pronto.

It clearly works. US-based travel and entertainment provider, Entertainment Benefits Group (EBG), has experienced year-on-year growth of open rates by 75%; orders have grown by 42%; and revenue has increased by a whopping 45%.

3. Predictive intelligence

This is where email gets interesting – and becomes one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. With predictive intelligence, you can infer preferences from customer behaviours and use sophisticated algorithms to work out the next best product, content or offer for that customer.

For example, US furniture retailer Room & Board uses predictive intelligence to deliver extraordinary customer experiences; and it has seen a significant shift in sales and customer satisfaction.

Read the full case study

The time to rethink email is now

As customers’ expectations around email grow, they will expect increasingly targeted and personalised emails to land in their inboxes. They’ll be looking for emails that inspire and delight; emails that really resonate with their needs, wants and desires.

Sending out a ‘blast’ promotional email simply doesn’t cut it anymore. As the strategies above show, it’s now possible to take customer engagement via email to a new level – with great results.

Find out more

Read the eBook Rethink Email: Earn a Place in Your Customer’s Inbox to deep-dive into the strategies and case studies outlined above.

Visit the Rethink Email website to discover what type of email marketer you are.