According to a recent Salesforce.com survey, 80% of marketers say that email is still the most used channel for lead generation and for conversion into sales.
That's quite a high percentage given that email has got beaten up a bit recently. Its gone through a lot of changes, especially with regards to respecting privacy laws, anti-SPAM legislation, opt-out rules, and the continuing downward quality spiral of using list rentals and their very low delivery and open rates.
So what's keeping email so mainstream?
The answer lies in the technology behind email marketing. Email software is getting smarter with the arrival of personalisation and predictive intelligence.
Email Personalization
The average business person receives about 121 emails every day. In fact, business people are swamped with newsletters, promotions, notifications, transactions and invitations, so at least 90% of these emails go directly into the spam folder, or trash without even being opened.
To really stand out from the crowd, emails need to hit the magic of context, content and timing, all key to your email marketing success.
It's no longer enough to only know the name of the email recipient. You need to go deeper. Real personalization means that you know exactly where, in the buyer journey, they are and you tailor the email content with an offer to match where they are in the journey. That's what we mean by the mix of context, timing and content.
The good news is ... this isn't as hard as it sounds. As there is some brilliant marketing automation software out there that can easily help you with your Inbound Marketing programs (The Brit Agency uses HubSpot for our email marketing programs).
In fact, Hubspot says that 51% of marketers claim that contact data quality is their most significant barrier to achieving email marketing success.
Having the right backgound data, and the right data collection process, can help you with the insight you need into your buyers behavior, based on their preferred medium, preferred time to be online, and their previous choices.
A deep dive data analysis can help you find out exactly when your prospect needs something – even before they do. This way, you can swoop in at the right moment and send the right email with the right context, content and timing.
Predictive Analysis For Email Success
Predictive analysis uses data from numerous sources to anticipate customers’ needs. CRM data, browsing habits, web page views, downloads and click through rates are all examples of people’s actions that can be used to predict who they are, where they are in the buying process and what information they would find helpful to have next.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say your customer just purchased a new computer. Predictive analytics can step in with recommendations for a compatible carrying case, cordless mouse, monitor, and other accessories that you could sell to them. You may recognize this as something Amazon does all the time with their emails and web pages. They serve you the content you want, with your specific context in mind, and they know exactly how to time it right.
Now this predictive scoring technology is available for businesses using smart marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot.
If you’re interested to learn more about taking your email marketing to the next level to leverage the maximum out of your data, contact us.
THE BRIT AGENCY is a B2B Inbound Marketing Agency providing Inbound Marketing, Inbound Website Design and Inbound Sales services to companies around the world. We're focused on growing website traffic, qualified leads and sales, using the Inbound lead generation and marketing automation process.
THE BRIT AGENCY is a certified Gold Tier Hubspot Partner, a HubSpot COS certified Inbound Website Design Agency, a Shopify eCommerce Partner, and a certified "Google Badged Agency Partner". We have offices in Toronto and Barrie, Canada, and Salisbury, UK.
