Email Marketing Best Practices

Garrison goes a step further, suggesting that personalization needs to be used in tandem with a real-time approach. She says that because both consumers and businesses are receiving tremendous amounts of email, marketers should strive to deliver their emails when they are needed or wanted, and personalize them to improve engagement. According to Garrison, focusing on personalization and real-time delivery will give marketers a “leg up,” and it might even “matter a little less whether or not they have the right image…or there’s a clear call to action.”

Marketers should also segment their emails as much as possible. The further they can take segmentation, the more they can personalize emails. Segmentation can include vital information about demographics, behaviors on a brand’s website, and overall personal preferences. Furthermore, marketers can also segment emails based on the device being used, delivering an even more relevant experience to customers and prospects by incorporating context into their communications.

According to Evans, many leading email marketers are using data science to make emails more relevant to consumers by automating recommendations. While having a clear call to action and incorporating eye-catching imagery are both essential, marketers need to harness customer data for all of their communications. “I would encourage marketers to [use] their data and predictive intelligence to…automate the process of the best recommendation for each user that opens their emails,” Evans says. Nick Godfrey, chief marketing officer at Customer Portfolios, agrees, saying, “We are huge proponents of understanding what customers have done, what they are most likely to do next, and then [determining]what is optimal for them at that time.”

One trap many marketers fall into is thinking of email as a silo. According to Garrison, successfully engaging with an always-on customer means not only being adaptive in marketing practices by mapping customer journeys and using predictive capabilities to determine the best email content, but also ensuring consistency between marketing emails, brand websites, and various social media channels. “It’s a little bit about orchestration, versus thinking about email in a silo,” she says. Marketers should be able to respond to changing preferences of customers and use different channels to engage with them, Garrison says, while paying attention to customer context and maintaining brand consistency.

Overall, including something of value to the recipient should be the number one priority when it comes to email marketing. While this may sound simple, it’s a goal many marketers grapple with, Godfrey says. “Even with our clients, more often than not, you’re struggling to put something of value in the email,” he says. “Many retailers who are leveraging the email are approaching it from a product-centric view. The approach is, more often than not, ‘I am hoping that I will put something in front of the customer that is going to be relevant and drive them to act.’” He suggests that marketers really make the effort to understand customers’ past behavior and use that knowledge to “speak to them in a relevant fashion.”

Looking ahead, marketers should be striving to incorporate video content into their emails, especially for Apple’s iOS ecosystem. According to Foster, if a video thumbnail is inserted into an email, it will open up into full screen on an iPhone when you tap it. He says that if marketers have a compelling video, they can drive 25 to 30 percent more video plays by taking advantage of this ease of use. Upward of 50 percent of people who open emails are doing so on mobile devices, he says, presenting a great opportunity for marketers to not only capture people’s attention but also to drive other metrics such as revenue and conversion.

Estrada agrees, saying via email that marketers should “think video going forward, and fall back to images or limited reading to get people’s attention.” He notes that there were more videos watched on the web than pages read last year. Video “is the way of the future and where the buyers are going—if you can say it faster than I can read it, I may be in the market to hear more.”

Assistant Editor Sam Del Rowe can be reached at sdelrowe@infotoday.com.

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