E-Mail Marketing Is Not Dead
When you add personalization, it remains a powerhouse.
Most of you have probably heard the following statement before.
E-mail marketing is basically spam and surely no-one worth it is reading your e-mail ads.
Yet, in the company I work for (e-commerce industry), it is still the biggest attributed driver of business. Let’s look into the different ways of why and how I still believe in e-mail marketing.
- It is personal. Someone shared their e-mail address with you, so a basic level of trust was present at that given moment in time. If you can build a message/offer that is personal and relatable to them, you have the opportunity to build upon that initial trust.
- It is yours. Some digital marketers seem to overvalue influencers and paid ads while overlooking the value of a direct connection with your community. Platforms own ‘your audience’ and will ultimately influence the ROI of your efforts and budget. Your nurtured email list is yours alone.
- E-mails are free from middle-man fees. Building great content and adding personalization is not free nor cheap. Once you can sculpt content with your own data that is relatable, run A/B tests, you can keep on growing ROI from that initial investment.
The cost of an e-mail won’t become more expensive during Black Friday weeks, nor when Facebook or Google launches new features/campaigns on which your competitors jumped.
Let me use a concrete example and share our approach.
What is our biggest business attributed driver by far?
The daily invitation e-mail. Depending on the country roughly 40% of the purchases are attributed to a click through the daily e-mail.
As we are an e-commerce store focused on flash-sales, we want to invite our users every day by informing them of the new deals we posted online.
This is not a best practice for every industry, so try to align your e-mail volume to your business model, but above all, to your community and its expectations!
Just for a single market like France, we are talking about 10 million e-mails every morning. All of them personalized for each customer.
The title, brand selection, and the order of the selection are different for everyone. Based on past purchases, recent visit behavior, and searches you did in the past. We also look into comparable clusters and personas to see what could interest you while applying negative scoring when you don’t interact with something we assumed you would.
We continuously update the algorithm that handles this personalization. We went from manual adjustments for personas to self-training algorithms (Machine Learning). What happened between version 10 and 11 last month?
Basically, we have increased the open rate through title customizations and boosted the click rate by optimizing how deals are sorted for each member.
For us, a daily invitation is not a new e-mail. It is not a new system, and the personalization is already reaching version 11. Yet every month, we learn something new and can improve upon it. Playing with different titles, adjusting the time of sending per country or even region within a bigger country, and adjusting the mails’ length based upon personas? All of it!
But e-mails are just collected in the spam or promotions folder!?
Do we experience sign-outs of the list? Of course. A stable rate of 2% of sign-ups will sign out of the e-mail monthly. We build member get member systems to grow our lists organically and improve our offer(products) to improve word of mouth advertising.
Do we experience drops in open rates with this daily volume? Of course. We auto-propose adjustments weekly or only for specific brands when we see the open or interaction drop over time.
Did the creation of the promotions folder in Gmail influence or results? Of course. Initially, we saw a drop in the opening rates. Then we adjusted our timing to make sure the single swipe in the morning of all your promotions didn’t include our e-mail by timing it appropriately for every customer.
Do we see differences in demographics? Of course. At the beginning of joining our community, the daily email is perceived differently between the different generations and even genders. We focus on different storytelling modes to explain our business model and our other options to stay up to date with our offer.
The younger generation opts for installing our native apps and react better to push notifications.
A (current) minority wants only a mobile web experience and reacts negatively to any notification or e-mail communication.
And that is fine; it triggers us to find optimizations in the customer journey without external triggers. The thing we notice is that these are the ones that also are expensive through Facebook/Google ads. They typically are hostile towards ads in general. For us here, the challenge becomes to deliver them an offer (in terms of products) and experience (in terms of the platform) that lives up to their standards and expectations rather than find ‘better’ ways of getting in front of them.
Let’s discuss it!
I am genuinely interested in your opinions on e-mail marketing’s viability within your own marketing mix, so let me know in the comments what you think!
