For years Email marketing has led the field with a stunning average Return on Investment (ROI) of $44 for each dollar spent. Today, thanks to technological development, eCommerce business have come to the fore with latest email marketing techniques.
The massive bang-for-buck profile of email marketing is likely what makes it something so close to the heart of many marketers. Yet times have changed and one of the reasons that you may be seeing slightly more diminished ROI from their campaigns may ironically be because of the success of this channel.
Compared to a few years ago, emails have exploded in volume and without effective new methods, you might not be able to succeed as well as you anticipated. Even if you’ve already chosen the best email marketing service for your business, why not take the chance to adopt latest email marketing techniques that work on new technology?
Enhancing Email Marketing Techniques with AI
There are many ways in which you can increase the effectiveness of your email marketing such as the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Based on this it’s possible to surpass what was once the domain of human analytics and build successful email marketing based on patterns, trends and other factors.
This means you can make your email marketing technique smarter and self-improving to increase your sales!
1. Be Mobile Friendly
Everyone is on the go nowadays and even major search engines like Google acknowledge this fact with their new mobile-first indexing policy. Make sure that any emails you’re planning to send you are mobile friendly since many of your customers are likely to be viewing them on mobile devices.
Caption: A poorly mobile-optimized marketing email like this is likely to do your campaign more harm than good
If you send an email that can’t be read on a mobile device, it is likely that it will at best be simply ignored, or at worst your subscribers will mark your email as spam. Where possible, try to use responsive email templates that can adjust themselves according to the devices they are viewed on.
2. Automate Content
If you’re thinking about automation as sending out emails on a schedule, yes you are right. To really supercharge your automated emails, you can make use of Big Data to anticipate customer needs and an AI engine can leverage on that.
Take for example if you have all the information about clients and can segregate that based on the needs you anticipate each has. By sending customized marketing emails to each segment, you’re increasing the likely effectiveness of each email blast.
In some context, AI can help not just choose the right content but even suggest ways in which you can optimize that content further. In fact, there are some AI-driven email marketing systems that can even help you build entire emails based on the data in your records.
3. Anticipate Timing
Working with a history of tracked opened emails, smart email engines can also calculate the optimal times for sending your email blasts. For example, if your emails have mostly been opened on weekends at specific times, then that’s what the system will suggest as a recommended time to send.
Also, remember that because you now have properly segregated customer segments, AI can anticipate right timings for each group of customers. In fact, users are already anticipating the next evolution of expected timings where an email marketing system will be good enough to even for-see the best timings for individual customers.
4. Customizing Promotions
Business owners know that having a sale often means a potential cut into earnings. By carefully customizing your sale offers you can market not only more effectively but reduce the chances of sending an offer to someone who won’t appreciate it as much as another.
Not all customers will wait for a sale to make a purchase, while others will never buy at anything less than X% off.
Take for example the following two customer profiles;
- Bob, who has usually only made purchases during sales and on items at least 50 percent off.
- Susan, who has made random purchases but is usually buying items that come with bulk discounts.
A smart email marketing system can track individual customer profiles and group them to offer you the best ways of making a sale work. With the sample two profiles above, you can make the right offer to both groups and increase your results significantly.
You can segment your customers and offer them promotions based on so many potential factors including demographic, psychographic, geographic or even simply history.
5. Make Things Personal
Over the past few years I’ve often heard that businesses are struggling to customize solutions to individual customers. As someone in SAP once told me, businesses today are mass producing for a customer segment of one.
Consumers are becoming increasingly demanding and that “dear sir/madam” email just won’t cut in anymore. So using personalised email marketing techniques are must.This will ensure that you are personalising your marketing emails by not only addressing individual customers correctly but offer them timely promotions.
Take for example the following email context;
“Dear Bob,
We notice that it’s been some time since you last ordered ink for your (insert printer name here). If your supplies are running low, you might be happy to know that we’re currently offering a two-for-one promotion specially on ink re-orders for this model.”
Would you, as Bob, run off to check if your printer ink is indeed running low?
The by-product of a system like this is that your email marketing system will also be able to tell if an email address is unrecoverable. This will enable it to keep your email lists clean and ensure that only effective emails will be kept.
6. Content Analysis
Because all your emails are being sent through the email marketing system, all the analytical data necessary is also there for it to help you suggest changes where it might be of help. Take for example if you’re using standard subject lines. Based on the success rate of your campaigns, the AI can propose what subject lines are optimal.
This doesn’t mean that the system simply picks out the best performing line and suggests that, but it can analyze the effectiveness of individual keywords as well and suggest you include some of them in updates.
The same is true for the main body of email and AI will be able to highlight what areas it thinks are of most use to your campaign. This AI content analysis also helps you limit the length of your content and stand a higher chance of keeping potential sales leads focused.
7. Recover Potentially Lost Sales
If you are finding that you’re losing out by having customers add things to their shopping carts and then leave before the sale is completed, analytical email marketing can help you out there as well.
Using predictive analytics, email marketing systems can help you generate hyper-personalized recovery emails. Some of the methods employed might be the offer of a discount to entice customers to come back and complete their purchase. The discount may eat into your potential profit, but it’s better than no sale at all for zero profit.
8. Choose the Perfect Call to Action
All these predictive analytics will enable AI to build the perfect hook for the customer – the Call to Action (CTA). The CTA is the pivot point at which the potential customer becomes the customer. The building of the perfect content matched with the right offers and timing can help in determining exactly what the CTA will be and where it will be placed.
The Role Big Data Plays
As you’ve probably realized by now, much of the premise attributed to possible success is based on Big Data. That massive furball of information that you collect from so many channels in the course of business is like a pot of gold.
For example, personalization, automation, anticipation – none of this would be possible without the data pool that’s needed to generate the actionable next steps. The great thing about technology today is that it has made choices available to all levels of businesses, not just the big boys.
By using your customer data effectively, you’re not just helping to increase your email marketing ROI but also avoiding potentially losing customer who get fed-up of an endless stream of emails from you which aren’t relevant to them.
Conclusion: Effectiveness is Key, Not Volume
The fact that automated systems can manage scale effectively is a given in today’s environment. Hopefully, I’ve given you some idea here on how they can leverage on scale to increase the efficiency of your email marketing techniques.
The entire precept of email marketing based on customer behavioral patterns can help you move your email marketing program into the next generation. You can benefit from not just better lead generation but also increase customer loyalty as you offer them more personalized and better-targeted offers that suit unique profile segments.
By working with a smart email marketing technique, you can;
- Increase customer value
- Maximize customer lifetime
- Build brand recognition
- Reduce list fatigue
And more!
