The shocking truth about automatic email marketing, is that the future is already here! Another frenetic start to your week, sees you with a million-and-one things needing to be done, and there is only you to do it. Sound familiar?

So you could really do to off-load principal time consuming necessities like your email marketing. But when you Google “automatic email” marketing”, your get the current top search return, courtesy of SendGrid:

“Automated email, also referred to as triggered email or behaviour-driven email, is any message automatically sent from your email service provider (ESP) in direct response to an individual user’s specific actions made (or not made) on your website or web app.”

Not it isn’t!

It used to be, now you can install software that does it all for you, and we mean all! That’s absolutely everything, all the time, perpetually, ad infinitum. You would never need to touch it again, ever. No set-up, nothing.

We appreciate that it is a given that business has taught you to be extremely cautious, sceptical even, about nefarious claims, so let us explain what it is, how it works and what it delivers.

What is automatic email marketing software?

The automatic email software to which we refer is called predictive personalisation software (PPS). It uses a combination of AI and machine learning to understand, learn and ultimately appreciate the needs, wants and desires of every individual consumer you have on your database.

Your platform currently captures all the buying history for each individual, but not impressions, neither number of times they return to products, and certainly not how long they spend looking at them. PPS however, does.

It might not be immediately appreciated but this opens an massive opportunity, to use that information to predict what that individual is most likely to buy next.

Unlike the quote above, you don’t have to wait for them to trigger anything, like leave an item in their shopping basket, of click on an offer. Shoppers very often do those things even though they didn’t want them in the first place, boredom, or frustration of not finding what they wanted, they even make mistakes.

But sadly you rush off to celebrate another sale, only to find, a week later, it gets delivered back to you as yet another return.

We feel your pain. However the PPS solution watches each individuals preferences, taste, collections, style, habits etc, and works out what products they are most likely to buy next. It then selects exactly those aligned products, to fulfil that persons email content.

And you should note carefully at this point that you have done absolutely nothing. It is totally autonomous email software. It arranges each individual consumer’s top 17 products into an email, and sends it to them a couple of times each month.

Each email is unique and personal to the consumer receiving it.

What is the effect of this, for you and your customers?

Customers are not stupid, they know what they want from email marketing, personalisation!

Black Friday proves that that items increased a week before to make the saving look better is spotted. The long term effect of which is the disappearance of loyalty and increase in churn rates. PPS however, already knows what they’re going to buy, and only delivers those products with the highest buying propensity for that individual at exactly the right time.

It uses the effect of previous emails, and lack of anticipated responses is included to nurture the data analytics, on a personal level, and perpetually increases the learning curve for that individual.

You don’t treat them like cattle hoarding them into corrals, let’s call that “segments’. No you offer personalisation; you treat each one as if you are their favourite sales assistant, showing them exactly what they want, which might be across, brand, price, colour, and what it’s made from.

There are also selections which are not associated, or simply product related. Like someone who always buy a belt if they buy shoes, or those who always buy Bordeaux wine on the last Thursday of the month. These are catered for too.

If the algorithm dictates all the elements pertinent to that individual, and utilises it, the effect to you is bound to be higher than the guess-work of you lumping a bunch of people together, i.e. “all females who bought a cashmere top in the last 6 months’. This translates into a far greater ROI.

The fact is that each individual’s personal loyalty level grows, average shopping basket size increases – (AOV), the rate of return (RoR) drops away, and ultimately the customer lifetime value (CLV) goes through the roof.

Suddenly you are their blue-eyed provider of all their needs – not literally but you get the idea. Your offering to each individual is pertinent, perpetually fresh, on target and has the calculated highest level of achieving the desired effect – selling them what they want when they want it. And remember, you have had to do nothing!

Predictive personalisation software is verified by the big four research institutions: McKinsey, Bain, Forrester and Statista, to be the highest marketing phenomena for ROI currently. Delivering twenty times the return of standard email marketing, omni-channel marketing and influencer marketing combined.

So as well as many independent retailers, you have to ask yourself why so many of the top marketers are getting on board?

PPS works both as a stand-alone, and to run alongside existing email service provider software (ESPs). Meaning they can still send out offers and incentive promotional material, we all need that, and yet ensure their is a catch-all for all the low-hanging fruit that obvious keeps business lucrative – PPS.

SwiftERM are delighted to offer you PPS on a free trial – for a month, to establish viability. SwiftERM is a Microsoft partner company.