There is no denying the necessity of personalisation in email marketing. Personalisation increases open rates, and it shows your audience that you acknowledge and understand their wants and needs. It leads to more engaged readers driven toward action, and it’s pretty central to increasing revenue.
According to Epsilon’s research, 80% of consumers say that they’re more willing to make a purchase when they’re provided with a personalised experience. As for where and how that personalisation happens, half of marketing influencers cite predictive personalisation – individualised email messaging, as their most effective means to implement revenue growth management. If you’re not personalising your emails, you’re almost certainly losing customers to brands that do.
Personalisation will make all of the difference when it comes to the success of your email outreach.
Why is email personalisation so important?
Inboxes are busy places, and it’s not always easy to cut through the noise. If you want readers to open, read, and engage with your emails, you need to do something to stand out — and personalisation is one method of doing so, but make sure you understand the the distinction between that, the milder form, and the much more successful predictive personalisation alternative.
Marketers who employ personalisation in their emails report 27% higher unique click rates and 11% higher open rates than those who do not. Meanwhile, 52% of consumers say they’ll look elsewhere for their shopping needs if a brand sends an email that’s not personalised.
Email personalisation isn’t a guaranteed ticket to success. But on the flip side, a lack of it is a quick way to ensure less engagement with your message. If more opens, more clicks, and more conversions are the goal, then personalisation is an essential tool to make it all happen.
Predictive personalised email marketing
Totally autonomous predictive 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.
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.
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.
Deciding to adopt predictive email marketing automation
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.
Predictive personalisation remains totally autonomous for ever, perpetually freshening it’s product selection, based on perpetual new data from each individual consumer. - 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) whatsoever needing to be involved the 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. - 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.
Predictive personalisation software (PPS) saves your team time that can be better used to connect to customers. How much do your staff really cost?
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 uses 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, Bain, Forrester 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 promotional and marketing emails, but rather to a nudge todays an enlightened aspect of marketing already identified by the corporates. It is what you need to add to the mix to perform at the top level. 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.
SwiftERM is a Microsoft Partner company. A month’s free trial of PPS software is available to establish viability for you site.
