Happy Tuesday, marketers! Ready to get back at it after the long Labor Day weekend? How about easing into the workweek with a quick look at some email marketing news? Here you go:
Personalization important to email marketing’s future
Personalization will continue to gain ground and be an integral part of email marketing’s future, according to Len Shneyder, writing at Marketing Land, in a piece predicting what email marketing look like in five years. “Personalization via Big Data is going to become the baseline standard for most marketers — not the domain of a select few forward-thinkers,” he writes. “Even today, if marketers haven’t yet adopted personalization and/or behaviorally triggered email, they’re very seriously preparing to do it.”
He also predicts the demise of “batch-and-blast” and broader integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning. “Email marketers will either adopt and adapt or see the competition make those moves and jump ahead,” he cautions. He also offers six steps to take to take immediately that will help you “take advantage of tomorrow’s email evolution.”
A new email marketing metric to consider
Writing on the Oracle Modern Marketing Blog, Ted Wham makes the case for a new email marketing metric he calls List Attrition Rate. “Similar to how email marketers typically calculate both a ‘Click-Through Rate’ and a ‘Unique Clicker Rate,’ the List Attrition Rate is designed to be a measure of unique customer behavior,” he writes. “However, unlike other unique metrics commonly used in our industry this one is not based solely on one campaign, but rather is calculated using all touches against the customer in a given week.”
He writes that List Attrition Rate is calculated by adding weekly unsubscribes and weekly spam complaints and dividing that figure by “weekly unique recipients pushed.” A healthy email program will have a low list attribution rate. “This metric is intended as the ‘Canary in the Coal Mine’ that can warn you of dangerous mailing practices,” he writes. “Not coincidentally this metric is explicitly intended to act as a restraining force against our natural impulses to over-mail our customers.”
Conversions seen rising with weekend emails
Jess Nelson, writing at Media Post’s Email Marketing Daily, looks at the results of a study that found that messages sent over the weekend tend to convert more successfully than those sent on weekdays. The study by Yesmail analyzed data from more than 7 billion emails sent in the second quarter of this year. It found that emails sent on Saturdays generate 60-percent higher-than-average conversion rates.
Sundays drove the second-highest conversion rate, generating 40-percent higher-than-average sales. Chad White, research director at Litmus, says in the article that it “makes sense” that conversions rise on the weekends “because consumers are less busy over the weekend, and tend to do an out-sized proportion of their shopping then.”
Using email marketing to generate repeat business
At Business 2 Community, Adam Baetu writes that while email marketers tend to focus on new-customer conversions, driving repeat business should also be a priority. “So many companies focus all of their energy on the first sale and end up neglecting customers they haven’t heard from in a while,” Baetu writes. “If if you blitz their inboxes with tempting new customer offers and then go silent once the sale has been made, this can easily cause them to forget about you.
He offers five tips for driving repeat business: keep the offers coming; use time-sensitive, urgent language; keep in regular, consistent contact; use previous purchase information to create more relevant content; and make subscribers feel like part of a club. “Keeping in regular contact assures the customer that they are valued and can cement a sense of loyalty,” he writes.