To understand the goal you need to know the rewards. Both McKinsey and Statista‘s research establishes that employing hyper-personalisation delivers as much as 20x (twenty times) the reward that promotional and marketing email delivers.

As high as 20x (twenty times) the collective totals of all other omnichannel marketing channels combined!  Suffice to say though, that the marketer who omits email hyper-personalisation from his considerations will soon find out when competitor sales soar and the disparity becomes obvious. Be assured, the professional ones are all over it, and yet there is evidence that subterfuge and obfuscation abound in the email software industry.

In a recent survey of over 432 companies surveyed, a figure in the high 98.7% of ESPs reviewed, were identified as not offering personalisation at all.

Some by the content of their website, are confusing “primary school examples” of personalisation as a right to promote the fact they offered this facility. Others offer segmentation instead, claiming this was the same thing, and do nothing of the sort whatsoever, despite protestations to the contrary. there are many distinctions between hyper-personalisation software vendors, you could do worse than know what they are.

As is readily available to the professionals who need to know, segmentation is not personalisation, indeed we covered this specifically in our article segmentation is marketing marginalisation. This article is not a manifesto for the abolition of using an ESP, but rather an insight into the distinction between what ESPs offer and as an advocate for change for adopting actual personalisation software that you can swap it for in small companies, but is designed to run alongside it.

Segmentation doesn’t offer maximum results for email personalisation

What do we mean by “primary school examples*”? Simply put we mean, they suggest you include the name of the recipient, location, date of birth etc. Thinking this through; means delivery of email content pertinent to where they physically are, to ensure they get an email on their birthday. Why, what’s that got to do with the customer’s most ardent desires?

It doesn’t offer choices pertinent to that individual at all! Thinking this through you come to an even bigger group of ESPs that does not include what people buy in their mix at all either, and this is where the subterfuge comes in, they use this information to recommend you segment consumers into groups, to be able to pick a product to target them with.

We suggest you flip this on its head, and instead of thinking in terms of what you’d like to sell a bunch (segment) of your customers, why not think in terms of what each consumer would most want to buy?

Now take this thinking further, and instead of wondering where to start to begin to capture this information, what if you already had it and simply needed a sophisticated algorithm to rank products (on an individual consumer basis) in the precise SKU order of what each individual is mostly likely to buy next, and then implement that into a provocation to make that purchase?

So with the goal of email personalisation, let us address the means to implement the mechanism to achieve it.  By its very nature, data processed through a predictive analytics algorithm is effectively done for you.

You may be interested to read our feature What makes SaaS so successful.

Hyper-personalisation software would be an enhancement to be able to capture more data than is just available through your typical attribution models. Then having done so, be able for that system to automatically rank every SKU you have into the greatest “likelihood to purchase” ranking for every consumer you have. And then deliver the top ones of those selected, by email, timely to that individual consumer.

The benefit of email hyper-personalisation is that when it arrives on the doormat of the recipient (figuratively), it is already well received. After all, these are consumers for whose loyalty to you is already established – i.e. they not only subscribe to your mailing list, are established customers, but have approved your right to the privilege of sending them emails to consider – obviously to purchase.

But loyalty is not guaranteed, as it is human nature to be fickle, and heaven helps you if you find yourself undersold, or slow on delivery etc, as detailed in our feature relevancy and autonomy are far more important. 

So what does hyper-personalisation deliver that ESPs can’t? The primary headline will undoubtedly be the exclusion of needing human beings and their frailties in the mix, such would undermine data accuracy in the process before you add in their cost inherent overhead to do so.

See our feature article: How much do your staff really cost.

Given then these are now deadly accurate, product offerings are always on-point, being strictly those the consumer wants to buy – exclusively known by their actions, both visiting, navigation around your site and purchases made. Picture them receiving an email and thinking “I was only looking at that yesterday”. Additional benefits include that it is what they want (not what you want to sell them), and the notorious volume of products returned goes through the floor.

See our feature article: the perfect solution for reducing your rate of return.

So what’s the catch? You have already established a viable stack of marketing tools that you’re happy with, and venturing into the fray again to review where to go from here comes with justified trepidation, because it has in the past caused nothing but misery from people professing to offer greater returns and only bring failure. Choose your provider wisely.