When it comes to running a successful email marketing campaign, the smart brands are those that understand the combined core values of delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Optimising your email campaigns, protecting your brand, and predicting consumer trends and markets can’t be done without data – ultimately, it’s about having the flexibility to continuously learn from and adapt to the results of your campaigns both past and present.
From working with some of the world’s top brands, I’ve had the benefit of being able to apply this approach to my own endeavours – learning from what works and what doesn’t for clients communicating in a huge range of sectors. In recent years, one method – namely, triggered emails – has risen to particular prominence, based on the three core values outlined above.
Triggered emails (that is, emails sent in response to events or related or relevant to your intended recipient, their interests and actions) overwhelmingly generate more responses than those adopting a ‘spray and pray’ approach. In fact, Epsilon’s Q3 Email Trends & Benchmarks report found that open rates for triggered emails were 77% higher than BAU emails and that click rates were as much as 152% higher. It’s a growing trend too, no doubt on account of its healthy revenue figures: triggered emails this year accounted for 30% of email revenue – more than double the share produced in the previous year.
A triggered email can be anything from a simple message suggesting future purchases based on a past transaction, to reminders about an abandoned e-commerce shopping cart, extending rewards to loyal customers, or sending emails based on more complex recipient list segmentation clusters based on demographics, geography, brand affinity or product preferences.
There are plenty of ways to work this approach into existing campaigns, often beginning with the very first interaction you’ll have with a subscriber. Personalised welcome messages – it could be as simple as a “Thanks for subscribing” – are a great example: Return Path’s latest study into the practice found that those who read at least one welcome message went to on to read 40% of their messages from the sending brand during the following 180 days. And once you’ve made that initial contact, there are other regular occurrences to capitalise on; House of Fraser saw a 20% increase in read rates and a sharp decline in delete without reading scores for birthday messages compared to everyday mails, for instance, and Ocado’s read rates boosted 54% for emails sent to mark anniversaries (“it’s been a year since you first visited us,” for example).
The triggered approach can be further personalised too, responding to consumer behaviour. Browse abandonment is an oft-quoted example here, largely because it really works: Expedia’s ‘Final Call’ and ‘Best Fares’ emails, adapted to correspond to a potential customer’s browsing history, showed 52% and 75% increases in their respective read rates, compared to BAU messages. Similarly, responding to repeat purchases with gifted discounts on favoured products can help to further encourage that brand loyalty – Costa Coffee’s breakfast promotions saw just that happen, along with a comparative 22% in read rates.
Needless to say, campaigns such as these are equally dependent on a strong sense of timing: that breakfast promotion isn’t likely to be particularly effective if you’re sending it at lunchtime. However, in keeping with a personalised, data-driven approach, send times needn’t be as rigid as mealtimes or common commute hours. Rather, it’s possible to tailor send times to individuals, according to when they’re most likely to open and engage with brand emails. Dell experienced a clear lift from using individualised send-times, seeing 6.6% and 8.2% increases in unique opens and unique clicks respectively.
Of course, this sense of timing can be – once honed – applied opportunistically too: Uber’s automated emails to coincide with, and capitalise on, the Tube strikes that occurred in London over the summer are a great example of how email can be employed as an agile, disruptive marketing tool.
Perhaps most significant, though, is that in all of the examples quoted here there was a corresponding dip in the percentage of emails marked as spam by ISPs – actually reaching the inbox is, after all, the first and most important challenge to be overcome by any email marketer.
By Guy Hanson, Senior Director, Professional Services at Return Path.
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