Personalised email automation offers huge returns. It’s no secret that the strongest relationships are built on personal connections. Without a personal connection, relationships are usually short-lived and unfruitful for both parties. The same is true in marketing. According to SmarterHQ, “72% of consumers say they only engage with personalised messaging.”

But how can you personalise at scale? Enter email marketing automation.Email marketing automation is not a series of triggers along the customer journey that will spontaneously send the customer a personalised email.Although those that sell this type of software want you to believe it.

They are right that each email is curated specifically for each touchpoint, organically moving the customer along in the sales funnel, but at no time are you gaining an insight to that individual other then when they hit a trigger.

Here at SwiftERM we know that totally automated predecitive personalised emails create 20x more revenue than any other type of email format. This is corroborated by reports by McKinsey and Statista to the same effect. What differentiates an automated email campaign from any other email marketing campaign is that it’s personalised to each individual consumer, rather than just trigger points or segmentation.

Consider this last point, to segment by its very nature suggests that if you drill down into the client base you have you’ll be able to fulfil demands for segments of that list. But take this to the nth degree and the answer will always be that if you address each individual as such, you can never have a more accurate definitions of the demands and desires of that person.

According to Accenture, consumers are over 90% more likely to shop with your brand when they have a personalised experience. So, if you’re wondering how you can use email automation to grow your business, you’re in the right place. Let’s dig in. By definition if you segment as far as you can, you will get down to the individual, but segmentation email software doesn’t allow this, and as we know segmentation is not personalisation.

Choosing an email marketing automation tool

The foundation for your email marketing automation is the tool you use, so it’s essential to choose one with features that will give you the greatest success. Not sure where to start? Here are the key features you should look for in an email marketing automation tool:

• Email automation capabilities — First, and probably most obvious, is the ability to automate emails based how much of the task is truly automatic. Many email platforms don’t have this essential capability, or they only have very basic automation that requires perpetual attention.
  
  If you’re lucky you can set it up to run (for a while) based on a set of parameters. Triggered options can be more permanent, but retailers quickly appreciate that consumers receive the same old same old and require changing unless the software you employ allows for change and improvement for itself without need for anyone to be involved.
  
  Only Microsoft partner, SwiftERM currently offers this solution Globally! 
  
• Personalisation — If the data above is any indication, the ability to personalise is the foundation to the biggest returns in ecommerce available ensuring your company growth in both turnover and market share. If you don’t appreciate the individual they will go somewhere where they are appreciated, just as you would in your life.
  
  Truly ideal solutions watch every KPI on your site, for each consumer when they visit, regardless of purchases or not. It then utilises this data to best predict what that individual is looking for – translates into what that individual is most likely to buy next.Then without the need of any human-being (staff) needing to be involved whatsoever, the totally automatic solution populates a stylesheet with those products and sends them at exactly the right time.
  
  From the consumer perspective they have received products they know have been chosen specifically and uniquely for them, and feel the care an attention this offers. So what does this achieve?Firstly the average order basket increases, not double or anything mind-blowing, but substantially by around 14% on average.
  
  Products chosen from those that are most likely to be purchased reduces the amount of products returned and the RoR falls again significantly. These elements, good independently, then permeate into a significant increase in the lifetime customer value of each consumer, and your churn drops through the floor. SwiftERM offers this technology.

•  Robust real-time analytics — How do you know if something is working? Look at the data! How do you know where your opportunities for growth are? Look at the data! Any process without a way to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) will be limited in its long-term impact. Email design that is most likely to achieve the maximum effect — Email marketing automation saves your team time that can be better used to connect to customers.
  
  But to save as much time as possible, you need to know that you’re not just wasting your time. When reviewing all you time and effort in the year against the results achieved, it is pointless wishing you’d done something differently if someone else could have waved a magic wand over it and instead shown you all the opportunities to achieve maximum effect.  
  
• Mobile optimisation — Considering nearly half of all individuals now check their email on their phones, according to Adobe, mobile optimisation should not be taken for granted in the user experience.The solution is predictive personalisation software (PPS). 
  
  SwiftERM, which use data captured from each individual consumer as they visit your site, including what they look at, return to most often, and what they purchase etc. It then aligns this with both that individual’s buying history and their perpetual purchases, to rank every SKU on your site by the greatest likelihood of imminent purchase.
  
  Instead of waiting to convince that person to buy a specific product, (this season’s stock for example) it uses a predictive analytics algorithm to work out what has been achieved already, and simply capitalise on it.Both Statista and McKinsey readily verify that this type of personalisation far and away out-performs static page personalisation on your site, and literally obliterates the generic email marketing that 99% of ecommerce merchants employ.
  
  This is not a clarion call to stop, but rather to be aware of what is needed to add to the mix to keep performing at the top of your game. It goes to your consumer, thereby often negating product price or indeed alternate supplier comparison. What’s more it goes significantly further out-performing, triggered personalisation, omni-channel marketing and promotional email marketing combined. Thereby delivering the greatest possible ROI in ecommerce today.