Find out what's making it possible for email marketing to finally deliver on its promise of relevant, one-to-one communications.
Email marketing has become one of the most valuable and best performing marketing channels today. Businesses are getting an incredible return on investment and consumers have benefited from industry best practices, technologies and their own online "street smarts" for managing their inboxes. Spam persists and pesters, but the war is being won as can be seen from a few recent studies that just scratch the surface of all the positive news about email marketing:
- 88 percent of 2,500 consumers surveyed said they feel mostly or completely in control of their inboxes -- up 9 points from 2004. Meanwhile, 58 percent surveyed believe email is a great way for companies to stay in touch with them, up from 45 percent in 2005 (Merkle, Inc.'s "View from the Inbox 2008" study).
- Online retailers rated email-to-house files as their No. 1 marketing tactic; 93 percent surveyed said they plan to give email even higher priority in 2008 (Shop.org's "State of Retailing Online 2008" report).
- For every dollar spent, commercial email has a return on investment of $48 (DMA 2008).
- Email campaign management is one of the top six investment areas for senior marketers in 2008 (CMO Council's "Marketing Outlook 2008").
Even more exciting than the state of email today is what is just now beginning to happen, and what is growing into a trend for the near future. Email marketing is evolving toward true relevance as the most savvy marketers move from one-to-many, or broadcast email tactics, to establishing one-to-one relationships with customers and prospects. This means that "less is more" will become the norm for email marketing -- soon there will be fewer, more targeted and more relevant email messages -- a growing trend that benefits marketers, businesses and consumers.
This trend is due in large part to the emergence of email automation.
Event- or action-triggered email campaigns and integrating email marketing with CRM data to automate the lead process are just two email automation approaches accessible to today's marketers that can have a tremendous impact on improving email marketing relevance.
Event- or action-triggered automation
Event- or action-triggered automation enables marketers to automatically send relevant emails to customers at exactly the right moment based on a specified time, date, event or action. Marketers today use email segmentation to target specific content at unique list segments. Deploying automated event- or action-triggered email campaigns enables marketers to take email marketing relevance even further by ensuring that every email is not only targeted but is also being delivered at the right time.
Marketers using trigger email automation solutions are able to map out each element of the campaign, including:
- The event, action or specified time that initiates the sending of an email
- Filters to include or exclude contacts
- Timer delays for scheduling and initiating message delivery
- Select customized email campaigns to send to specific contacts or contact segments
- Post-condition settings to assign value fields for tracking specific contacts once the campaign series has been executed
Let's check out how it works.