Email marketing drives the highest return on investment of any marketing channel. Brands with highly personalized campaigns drive the greatest results. Email marketers have been challenged to move from large batch sends to intelligent automated campaigns for several reasons, including limited resources and not having the right tools. Automating email campaigns and adding machine learning improves productivity, conversions, and ROI. Implementing automations and adding artificial intelligence into your email program takes some initial investment in time and resources, but that effort will lead to great results.

To illustrate how email marketers can drive results from a more sophisticated email program, we commissioned Forrester to conduct a study to ascertain the Total Economic Impact (TEI) of Marketing Cloud Email Studio. To determine TEI, Forrester interviewed Marketing Cloud customers in a variety of industries.

After implementing Email Studio, customers reported the quantified benefits:

A 50% improvement in email conversion rate, resulting in increased incremental revenue of over $761,000. In addition to increasing AOV, Email Studio helped customers drive an increase in their email conversion rate by deploying targeted campaigns, improving the timing of marketing efforts, delivering customized content, and being viewed as more relevant in the customers’ eyes overall.

A 40% improvement in resource productivity across marketing, creative, IT, and engineering full-time equivalents (FTEs). Interviewed customers also noted that automation and segmentation tools, integration of customer data, and reporting capabilities drove efficiencies and productivity gains for internal resources responsible for developing, tracking, and managing email marketing campaigns.

A 5% increase in average order value (AOV), resulting in increased incremental revenue of $2.0 million. Customers interviewed for this study noted an increase in the AOV per email conversion driven by having the ability to target customers through personalized dynamic messaging across their customer journey. This includes onboarding new customers, cross-selling and upselling customers, and connecting with customers who may have abandoned their shopping carts.

Trailblazers in email marketing use Email Studio to create 1-to-1 campaigns at scale by leveraging rich-first party data to create a single view, allowing them to connect users across the entire customer journey at every touchpoint.

In addition, the interviewed organization experienced additional unquantified benefits:

• Improved ability to leverage analytics to discover new opportunities and innovate faster
• Ability to leverage predictive content to deliver stronger and value-added messaging to customers
• Shortened length of developing and launching campaigns and offers
• Ability to effortlessly optimize emails across any device and channel for a consistent customer experience
• Improved reporting functions and dashboards that make insights available for faster business decisions

For a much deeper dive into the TEI of Email Studio, including detailed analyses of investment costs and the business value of the platform, download the full study.

Citation: “The Total Economic Impact™ of the Salesforce Email Studio,” a September 2017 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Salesforce.