reelevant—unique-customer-experience-email-marketing

Using email intelligence

MarketingSherpa study

When asked, “In which of the following ways, if any, would you prefer companies to communicate with you?”, 72% of consumers chose email according to a MarketingSherpa study.

Now this doesn’t mean we can nor should send batch and blast emails to our recipients, people want to receive emails, yes, but what they are looking for is relevant ones.

This is where email intelligence comes in. Email intelligence takes advantage of behavioral, contextual and external data to increase each subscriber’s engagement by adapting the content and the sending time of each email. Now let’s get concrete and see what email intelligence can allow you to do.

Content

With email intelligence technologies, your email’s content is updated in real-time based on each recipient’s contextual and external data. We’ll talk about context below, now using external data means that you can actually pull content from any web source (your website, your social networks, your CRM, an API, etc) directly into your emails to always display up-to-date content, no matter when your email is opened.

Using live content is not just a new and fancy way to send emails, it triggers the impulse buying and delivers real ROI. Indeed, personalized marketing leads to a 5.6% increase in overall sales and over $250 billion in revenue according to a Persio survey.

Example: Email intelligence technology could allow you to display your “New in” section directly into your email and will update it at each open of your email. It’s as if every time someone opens your email, the technology instantly takes a picture of your website to insert it into the email.

Behavior

Email intelligence technologies have developed algorithms that analyze your recipients behavior on your emails — such as opens and clicks. Using those would allow you not only to know your recipients on an individual basis, but also to see what their habits are.

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Context

In email marketing, context is what surrounds your recipients when they open your email, it‘s their environment at the moment-of-open. Hence location, weather conditions, device or even time of the day can be part of your opener’s context. Leveraging each opener’s contextual data and adapting your email content to it will allow you to send relevant emails.

Example: Let’s say you are a fashion retailer, with email intelligence technologies you could adapt your email’s content to the time of the day, displaying t-shirts if your email is opened between 9am and 6pm, and pyjamas if it’s opened between 6:01pm and 8:59am.

Moment

1-WS0Vux4XlceSrB_1CTmLygAs a marketer you’ve probably already asked yourself the question “When is the best time to send an email marketing campaign”, right? The answer is there isn’t. Each recipient is unique and has unique habits. One may check his emails all day long on his smartphone, while another one may do that only at lunch break or when at home.

Email intelligence technologies analyze your recipients behavior — as explained before — in order to identify unique engagement periods to, then, send your email campaigns at the best time, to each recipient.

This allows you to click ‘Send’ as you used to do but then, instead of delivering your campaign at the same specific time to all your list, email intelligence algorithms will deliver your emails one by one, and at a different time, to arrive right on time in each recipient’s inbox.

Originally posted on Medium