Email marketing is one of the oldest methods of digital marketing as well as one of the most proven ones for increasing sales. It generates $38 for every $1 spent, which means an ROI of 3800%.
There are different types of business emails that can be sent to subscribers. Batch and blast email are some of the primitive forms of email marketing. It collects a list of emails before sending the same to everybody in that list. Bulk email marketing services usually make use of such techniques.
On the other hand, there are targeted emails which are based on industry, user case, or role. These are known as “nurture emails,” and are offered differently to distinct subscribers based on his or her stage of buying.
One of the well-performing email campaigns are the “trigger email” campaigns. These are personalized emails triggered by intelligence outputs of built-in intelligence units. It is based on the behavior of the subscriber on specific occasions, such as visiting an e-commerce web store or a website. There are various email marketing platforms which can craft these emails. You need to have an email platforms list to engage with your customers with such emails.
The effectiveness of email marketing stems from the fact that 86% of business professionals prefer using emails for business communications, according to a 2018 email marketing stats report. Moreover, a large number of B2B marketers also say that email is their most effective channel for generating revenue. Yet, small businesses seem to be shy of email marketing. It is seen that only about 26% of small businesses use email marketing tools for sales, and even fewer use it for brand building.
Moreover, the advent of social media-driven digital marketing is changing the landscape of digital and internet marketing. Email had been losing its luster, but not anymore; technology is now revolutionizing email marketing in more ways than one.
1. Customer-Centric And Personalized Emails
Technology is helping marketers create customer-focused, personalized emails, often known as customer experience email marketing. It ensures that the needs of customers are addressed through helpful emails.
Artificial Intelligence is helping businesses in personalizing emails in the form of promotions, ‘welcome’ mails, ‘thank you’ mails or others. What AI does is creating personalized and real-time emails based on the behavior of a given customer.
A study by Marketo has shown that personalized emails based on consumer behavior are three times more efficient than batch emails. Artificial Intelligence is doing this in three ways – Detection, Deliberation, and Development:
- Detection. AI can discover attributes about customer behavior from a set of data.
- Deliberation. It can weigh the attributes and decide on the most predictive ones so that it can answer a question or make a recommendation.
- Develop. Machine learning can program and reprogram itself and also alter and evaluate all the data based.
2. Email Content With AI
Content is the fundamental element of any email marketing strategy, which is getting the right boost with Artificial Intelligence. Whether it is the subject line, the body, or the images in an email, AI can give it a complete makeover and impart a more personalized tone. Without the help of technology, marketers had to test the effectiveness of each combination for determining the most efficient combo. However, this process is prone to errors and is also time-consuming.
Users can ensure time-saving with AI as they learn about the perfect combination quickly. This can help them increase revenue since it does away with tiresome and time consuming A/B testing. They can also experiment with a larger variety of parameters and get on with the most effective content.
3. Timing Of Sending Emails
Marketers usually rely on a broad range of assumptions about the best time for sending marketing emails to potential customers. This may be effective for some email subscribers, but not for all. In fact, for some, such emails are an irritant, especially owing to the timing. The frequency of sending emails also plays a vital role in maximizing engagement. Frequency is closely related to the cadence of the emails being sent to subscribers.
Email marketing can boost sales, but customers have different attitudinal preferences for engaging with them. You must remember that each customer has a different preference for checking emails and engaging with the sender.
Today’s email marketing tools can determine the ideal send time of the day for individual subscribers based on their history of engaging with emails. It can analyze preferences with the help of analytics modeling and automate email marketing in real-time.
This is nearly impossible for humans to replicate. Machine Learning helps in enlisting individual preferences in a large list of subscribers.
Technology in the form of Big Data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence can learn and assimilate the engagement rate of individual customers and deal with them accordingly.
4. Promotions
Brands may miss out on opportunities to maximize ROI by sending the wrong promotional offer to subscribers with bulk email marketing services. There is a subtle difference in offers and deals that may convert different subscribers to customers.
While some subscribers may fall for lower offers, others may not be compelled to buy stuff for those. For some, a 25% discount is a compelling reason to buy a product, but for others, it maybe 40% or more.
In case of batch emails that don’t care for individual thresholds for conversion, a higher discount for a customer who would have converted for a lower discount is a drag on revenue. It is not possible to accurately design individual offers had there not been modern technology in the form of AI and others.
Email automation tools can collect historical data about consumer purchase behavior, and design individual offers based on attributes of each subscriber. Offers need not always be in the form of discounts; they may also be in the form of free shipping or cash vouchers. In some way or the other, technology can help businesses generate more revenue out of promotional campaigns.
5. Taking Care Of Privacy
Privacy is an important aspect of digital marketing these days. As a marketer, you are supposed to protect personal data while also using them to deliver emails to customers more accurately. Technology like cloud-based data protection, can help in this respect. This shows that technology plays a vital role in not only targeted delivery of various types of emails but also in taking care of the privacy of consumer data.
Email Marketing Is The Need Of Hour
Email marketing has been the harbinger of the digital marketing era. It had long been the only form of internet marketing for companies. However, the advent of social media marketing and SEO had taken the shine off email marketing. Nevertheless, new-age technologies like big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence have now enabled marketers to target and engage their email subscribers more accurately, timely, amicably, and reasonably, which has shown results. With that, email marketing has again become a dominant channel of marketing that you need to adopt for your own business.
