As our world becomes increasingly more digital and businesses race to keep up with the times, many marketers will find themselves shifting to digital marketing channels they’re comfortable with. Marketers will and are turning to good ol’ reliable and predictable email — except, a ton is changing in the world of email. Because most businesses have had to abandon their in-person marketing strategies, they’ve started sending more emails and doing most of their updates through that channel. It’s the most common form of communication nowadays and as a result, it’s become overloaded. That fact alone shouldn’t scare you away from email during these difficult times, it still sees some of the greatest ROI, but marketers do have to be more tactful when sending to stand out among rampant email overload.
How to Standout Among Rampant Inbox Overload
THE VALUE OF HIGH-QUALITY EMAILS AND WHAT TO AVOID
The payoff for a solid email strategy can be huge, in fact, email can have up to 3,800% ROI. And although it’s an “older” channel it’s still extremely popular with younger and mature audiences alike — basically you can’t go wrong with using email marketing as a baseline for messaging.
Plain old, one-off emails aren’t going to make a splash in a time when every brand a consumer has ever given their email to is messaging them. In fact, messaging low intent customers with standardized messaging can be very detrimental to your brand and to your sending reputation. If you’d like to learn more about maintaining a healthy sending reputation to ensure your hard work makes it to the inbox, check out this guide by our own Deliverability Expert, Kimberly Paxton.
More than 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI, so it’s important to invest in your email marketing. Brands that have leveled up their emails with AI-powered recommendations and predictive modeling have seen some fantastic results. Blueshift customer, Skillshare, has boosted their student enrollment by 89% using our personalization tools within emails. All these success stories are great, but we’re sure you’re wondering how exactly you should go about optimizing your email program — it all starts with data.
USING YOUR EXISTING DATA TO AUTONOMOUSLY POWER PERSONALIZATION
At Blueshift, we believe everything begins with data and the results show that data can unlock tons of ROI and increase revenue for your business. The Forrester Total Economic Impact Study of Blueshift found that our Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP) is responsible for 781% ROI and has a payback period of fewer than three months. What’s the cause of all these great outcomes? It’s the CDAP’s unique ability to take raw data from disparate sources and transform them into Single Customer Views. These 1:1 profiles can then be run against our AI-powered predictive intelligence to design and execute complex customer journeys.
So, we cannot stress enough that any steps you take to personalize and optimize your multi-channel, or even just email, programs must come after you’ve built a solid foundation of customer data.
DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME AND MONEY — ALWAYS TARGET YOUR BEST CUSTOMERS
As mentioned by our Deliverability Expert, Kimberly, it’s very important to focus on sending to your highly-engaged customers not only from a spam avoidance standpoint but also from a customer experience one as well. These are the group of folks who are most loyal and excited about your brand — and are most likely to convert. So, this is the group of people that you’ll see the most ROI from and are most likely to stand out in their inbox.
Rather than constantly pulling lists of email engagement and manually building segments from there, it’s essential that marketers have a tool, like Blueshift’s Predictive Segmentation, to help get the job done more swiftly and effectively. The patented AI within the segmentation engine sifts through behavioral, transactional, and other forms of data to predict which customers are most likely to engage and convert with your brand and in what time frame. This means you can tailor communications to only send to the users who will make an impact on your goals and increase ROI.
PERSONALIZED WITH REAL-TIME INFORMATION ACROSS YOUR EMAILS
Now that you’re set on which customers are the ones you should be messaging, you’ll need to tailor this messaging to make a splash in the inbox. The best way to do that is through thoughtful personalization and dynamic content. Let’s start at the subject line: it should always be compelling and provide a teaser of what’s to come in the email, but with Blueshift’s dynamic personalization blocks marketers can take their subject lines to the next level. Personalize the subject line to reflect each customer’s preferences and interests on a 1:1 level, along with testing them, and see open rates soar.
With our new Google AMP integration, it’s easier than ever for emails to change dynamically as new information comes to light. This is perfect for flash sales, items with low inventory, or for making appointments — and these blocks will get customers clicking through and interacting more and more with your brand.
If dynamic content is a little too advanced for your needs, plain 1:1 personalization still works wonders. Blueshift customer Suiteness has 170% growth using AI-powered personalization within their emails.
SEND AT THE RIGHT TIME FOR EACH CUSTOMER’S BUSY SCHEDULE
Lastly, predictive intelligence can also clue marketers into when they should send these amazing messages. Our Predictive Engage Time model can determine exactly when is the best time to send to each individual customer and when they’ll be most likely to engage and convert. This ensures your message isn’t being blasted out at 5 pm on the dot with a host of other emails but rather arrives when customers typically take a moment to read through their inbox and browse online
