AI, hyper-personalization, and automation
The digital age of customer communications has evolved rapidly and grew at an exponential rate during the pandemic. With in-person experience limited, restaurants had to improve their digital communications to encourage at-home dining experiences and fashion retailers sought to engage their customers through a consistent, personalized buying journey.
But with more emails as a means of digital communications, did consumers feel inundated with sales messages from brands? According to Mailchimp statistics, almost all industries gained increased email engagement in 2020. Hubspot reported that 78 percent of marketers saw an increase in email engagement in the last 12 months. However, when analyzing businesses on an individual basis, many are not achieving the same level of success as their competitors.
So what are the contributing factors for businesses who are seeing quality engagement from email marketing and generating leads to meet KPIs?
Well, first let’s review – how effective is an email marketing campaign?
Delivering an effective email marketing campaign is no easy job in a highly competitive space. However, the continual development of predictive analytics through artificial intelligence and email marketing software capabilities has resulted in emails keeping the momentum as the most effective form of marketing. Litmus revealed that ‘’4 out of 5 marketers said they’d rather give up social media than email marketing’’ and 78 percent of marketers stated that email is important to their business’s continued success.
Apart from creating a compelling brand story coupled with highly engaging quality content, what should your business consider to ramp up the effectiveness of email engagement?
AI’s revolutionary customer experience in email marketing
Sell with Insight
The fundamentals of AI are machine learning, the art of collecting and processing information (input) to improve a current activity to achieve a better outcome (output).
Email marketing software such as Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Salesforce Pardotcombined with relationship management tools are at the forefront of data analysis. AI-powered analytics allows your business to generate data-driven insights. This insight enables your company to create an enhanced customer journey by anticipating consumer interests and habits in order to deliver hyper-personalized content at the right time. And 71 percent of marketing professionals surveyed have agreed that AI can be useful for optimizing email engagement through personalization.
If you could understand what your customer wants, how they want it and when – selling products and services relevant to them has never been so easy.
Retain through Automation
Why do businesses forget to take a birds-eye approach to their customer journey?
A new customer joins your subscriber list and is automatically enrolled in your content calendar – so far they have received a few emails about your brand story and friendly sales messages directly addressed to their salutation. But how coherent and personable has your approach been in order to drive better conversion opportunities for your new subscriber?
With the use of predictive analytics, building automation programs using email marketing automation software allows your business to deliver content that is highly relevant to the subscriber, at the right time.
‘‘Hyper personalized automated email messages produce over 70 percent higher open rates and 152 percent higher click-through rates’’ – Campaign Monitor
Let’s create a scenario for actionable purposes, hypothetically, if you emailed Sarah on 24th June about the new edition of handbags and she only decided to view the email on the 14th July, are you prepared to follow up with Sarah at the right time,offering an incentive or a reminder of what’s makes this handbag edition compelling to a potential buyer?
This is where automation and triggered emails come into play. If you are manually tracking each customer on the buying journey, congrats on a better customer experience but individual tracking can be time-consuming for companies looking to accelerate business growth through customer base and profitability.
Why not automate Sarah’s buying journey based on their interactions? Creating a simple set of steps based on the customer’s behaviors and being prepared for actions the customer may take can ramp up your business’s engagement and conversion quickly and effectively. Campaign Monitor found, ‘’marketers who use triggered emails report conversion rates of up to 50 percent’’.
To wrap up, when considering effective email marketing campaigns in 2021 for your business, AI-powered analytics, automation programs, and hyper-personalized content should be at the forefront of your priorities.
Luckily for you, most software providers like Hubspot can deliver a fully combined service to enhance your digital communications – it’s also a cost-effective option to consider when your marketing budget is limited.
ABOUT THE STYLISTA GROUP
Petia Abdur – Razzaaq is digital marketing strategist and principal of The Stylista Group.
Ms. Abdur – Razzaaq began her career at www.boston.com where she developed effective online marketing campaigns for major clients such as Dunkin Donuts and Fleet Bank.
As a former member of email marketing industry leader Constant Contact’s Authorized Local Expert team, she delivered best practice presentations on digital marketing in the NY Metro area for a number of years. Today she holds a similar role as a Trainer for the Grow with Google Program.
The Stylista Group is a digital marketing agency based in New York City ‘NYC’ specializing in online strategic campaigns for lifestyle and luxury brands. Growing consumer-to-consumer ‘C2C’ trends are central to the buyer journey for lifestyle brands.
We work in collaboration with you and your team to achieve measurable results for your campaigns to increase customer reach, build advocacy, and generate sales. Our core services are targeted email campaigns (including automation), social media (strategy, implementation, community management and ad), and micro-influencer collaborations.
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