Holistic Email Marketing‘s whitepaper explains why personalisation is not just about marketing.
Introduction
Personalisation is the fuel that drives better email marketing performance. It stands to reason: people will always pay more attention to any messages that speak to them as individuals.
Personalisation also pays off. Study after study demonstrate that personalised messages drive higher engagement and revenue than undifferentiated, “business as usual” emails. We can even quantify how much more revenue a brand can earn by sending personalised messages. (Keep reading to find out just how much!)
But personalisation’s benefits don’t stop with the email team – or even the marketing department as a whole. A robust email personalisation programme can help solve business challenges throughout the company. You’ll see in this report how personalised email messaging helped find solutions to 12 nagging problems, in and beyond the classic email marketing arena.
Part One: Making the case for personalisation
Personalisation has been a hot marketing topic for ages, but new research and new tools and platforms are turning up the heat:
- The Association of National Advertisers declared “personalisation” was its Word of the Year for 2020.
- Gartner roiled the waters when it predicted 80 per cent of marketers would abandon their personalisation efforts by 2025.
But research backing personalisation keeps rolling out:
- A 2019 report from The Relevancy Group found that advanced personalisation can add $20 of incremental revenue for every $1 invested in it.
- Personalisation increases open rates by 26 per cent according to Campaign Monitor.
- On average, 36 per cent of consumers have expressed an interest in purchasing personalised products or services (Econsultancy).
- Segmented, targeted, and personalised emails generate 58 per cent of all revenue (Instapage).
Personalisation puts the customer first
The one thing we’ve learned from all of this research is that personalisation works. It helps us create emails that are customer-centric – that focus on the customers’ needs as well as our own.
This is where the magic happens in email. When we help our customers achieve their needs and objectives, that helps us marketers achieve our needs and objectives!
It’s the greatest win-win of all. And, it’s becoming easier to achieve as we collect data more intelligently and as personalisation tools becomes easier to use.
Personalisation enhances the customer experience
That, in turn, increases customer engagement and customer lifetime value.
We learned this in a Liveclicker/Holistic Email Marketing study that analysed hundreds of emails to find the factors that affect the email engagement (opens, clicks, read time, time spent on the email).
We suspected that emails with helpful, personalised, and customer-focused content would deliver higher reader engagement. And, we were right.
Promotional emails that scored higher than average on these three factors saw engagement rates that were double- and even triple-digit percentages higher than lower-scoring promo emails.
Personalisation had a remarkable effect when marketers tested it against broadcast email, according to Holistic’s Email Marketing Personalisation Report.
Personalisation keeps customers on the journey
At Secret Escapes, we have close to 600 email campaigns sent every day across 21 different markets. With so much going on it’s not enough to know that a new test generated X per cent extra revenue if we can’t prove it’s incremental (not just stealing money from elsewhere).
The only way to do this is to start looking beyond campaign performance and to focus on reach and lifetime metrics to make your strategic decisions. Rachel Thomas, Head of CRM, SECRET ESCAPES
The time-honoured marketing funnel vastly oversimplifies customer behaviour. Instead of the straight line the funnel model suggests, the path to purchase is actually a journey. It has twists and turns, stops and starts.
Most important: its pathway is populated with key touchpoints and data signals, like jewels and coins scattered throughout a video game quest.
As customers move from one touchpoint to another, they trigger those data signals. But each journey is unique because it reflects each person’s needs, interests, questions, and problems to solve.
That’s why you need personalised messaging that uses data and automation to respond to signals with customised, intuitive emails. Standard broadcast email can’t do that.
One-to-everybody emails treat all customers as if they’re standing on the same point in the journey.
You need, instead, a holistic view of email marketing that views email as it encompasses the entire customer journey.
Holistic Email Marketing uses content, data, technology, and marketing automation to create one-to-one messaging that is infinitely more useful and valuable to customers.