Good Monday morning marketers! Let’s get moving with a few recent items from the Interweb.
More email is not always better (but it can be)
Writing as the MediaPost “Email Insider,” George Bilbrey asks “can I send less email and drive more revenue?” His answer in a nutshell: “in some cases, sure.” He writes: “Some subscribers really, really love email. If you send them more mail, the total number of emails they read and purchases they make increase.” But with customers less fond of email, “although you may drive a few more opens, clicks, and conversions with more email over the short run, the longer-term increase in list churn more than overwhelms the short-term benefit.” He adds that it pays to vary the kind of email you send: “Triggered and contextual messages frequently drive over 10x the revenue per message that typical campaign-based mail provides.”
Who trumps the other candidates in email opens?
Curious about which candidate is “winning” the email battle? If you go by the size of their email lists, Bernie Sanders is the clear leader, with Hillary Clinton a relatively close second and Donald Trump lagging in a distant third place. But an analysis of open rates tells another story – the Donald is way out in front in that important metric. More good news for Bernie, though: he has the lowest “deleted without opening” rate. Ayaz Nanji takes a look at the data over at Marketing Profs.
Email personalization key to securing customer loyalty
Thanks in large part to advances in personalization, “email remains one of the most effective marketing tools for engaging with your fickle customers – when done right,” writes Len Shneyde at Retail Touchpoints. “Personalizing email is possible on a scale unachievable even a few years ago, thanks to the huge amount of data now available in real time. In fact, real-time data can be used for more than personalization — by taking a data-centric approach, retailers are able to modify email marketing tactics in response to real-time events and behaviors.” He bids farewell to the “days of relying on ‘batch-and-blast’ campaigns, saying that “personalization is the only way to ensure your customers remain loyal and engaged.”
You want to avoid sending these types of messages
We often hear suggestions about the types of emails we should be sending to customers, but less so about what not to send. Guy Hanson addresses that topic in a just-concluded two-part series on the Return Path blog, offering up ten types of messages that email marketers should be wary of sending. Read part one here and part two here.