Technology and Email Marketing with SendInBlue Review
Email marketing is and will remain the most relevant tool in the digital marketing mix. Not only does email marketing deliver the highest return on investment (ROI) of all digital marketing instruments but also scores with the critical success factors. They include personalization, measurability, automatability, and context-sensitivity. Sis only possible through advanced technology.
As a one-to-one instrument, it allows messages to be personalized down to the individual user level. Every factor in email marketing can be individualized:
Time and frequency: How often does the user want to be addressed? At what times is the most likely to respond to the address?
Texts: long or short? Formal or casual address? Reference to interests or previous contacts?
Graphics: What kind of images does the user react to? Many or few pictures?
The product offers: Which brands do users prefer? Are there suitable cross-sells for past purchases? Which products match the hobbies, interests, and attitudes of the user?
Prices: How much is the user willing to pay for a particular product? Is he more price-sensitive and looks for special offers?
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Email marketing scores with dynamic content, especially when it comes to personalizing product offers. With the right technologies, it is possible to play out content only when (trigger-controlled) dispatch or even at the moment of opening for the individual user in the email. However, what is often forgotten is that the more precisely email marketing content is to be personalized, the more content fragments are necessary. Here, personalization often comes up against a bottleneck.
Consistent measurability of all reactions
Like hardly any other digital marketing instrument, email marketing makes it possible to measure every user’s reaction and (assuming the necessary opt-in) to assign it to the individual user to create detailed user profiles. Many KPIs are available for this, from openings to clicks, reading time, and redirects to conversions and all forms of post-click actions in the shop or on the website. However, the challenge is not only to look at individual KPIs to evaluate the success of measures but also to use KPIs for targeted optimization. It is essential to develop an understanding of the entire chain of effects from dispatch to the “target KPI” (i.e., sales) and ideally even beyond the email channel (interactions with other media).
Automated response to triggers
Email marketing follows less and less the firmly scheduled sending of a rigid editorial/campaign plan. Instead, email marketing is increasingly controlled by motivations and contexts. It’s about delivering the right content at the right moment. To manage emails according to triggers, the technology used automatically must independently carry out the proper communication – in terms of content, channel and time – and dynamically control the subsequent course of the dialog according to the user’s reaction. Here, after the relevant triggers have been identified, rules for triggered communication must first be created, for example:
If a user leaves their shopping cart, wait a day
Check if the purchase was still completed
If not, check the customer’s sales
If last year’s turnover was over 200 dollars, send a reminder email with a discount. If not, without a discount
Wait a day
Check if the purchase has been completed
If not, send a reminder email with an urgency subject
Modern marketing automation solutions can create such dynamic sequences of communication (dialog sections) quickly in a graphical interface using drag & drop. Even the most complex dialogue routes can be mapped and controlled individually for each customer without human intervention using marketing automation. Triggers and dialog sections must be created once in the system and then run autonomously. Business intelligence mechanisms support decision-making and optimization.
Usage contexts are becoming more and more relevant.
In addition to “classic” triggers such as purchases, abandoned shopping carts, inactivity, registrations, or birthdays, contexts of use are also becoming increasingly important. For example, this includes the location, the weather, the time of day, the device used, or interactions in other digital channels. These can also be used as triggers. For example, the location context can motivate users who walk past a store to visit the store with a relevant email. Or users can be warned about this shortly before an approaching storm (“Today I prefer to shop from the couch”). Speed, activity, and the right context are often more effective than extensive personalization.
We’ve run out of space here to do a review, but you can find an excellent SendInBlue Review on ThirdPartyModules.