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Why Data is Pivotal to Email Marketingby@efratvu

Why Data is Pivotal to Email Marketing

by Efrat VulfsonsOctober 26th, 2021
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Big data enables you to discover overall patterns, trends, and connections between different variables. 25% of businesses do not use personalization at all whereas, 71% of customers feel frustrated when their experience is not personalized. A study reveals that 69% of email recipients report emails as spam after reading the subject lines, while 64% decide to open emails based on subject lines. The right data points and technology will enable you to create one-to-one experiences at scale. The essence is to have content that is suitable for every subscriber.
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Email marketing today thrives on personalization; you have all it takes to “hit the bull’s eye;” if, however, you are not relevant in the global market, you are simply not making use of the abundance of data at your reach. The problem you may be facing is how to handle the large volume of data, but with big data that helps you to analyze, systematically extract information from, and ultimately deal with data sets that you cannot ordinarily handle due to the complexity, your email marketing personalization efforts should be at the top gear. 

A major problem you may have to contend with while leveraging data for email marketing personalization is unstructured data, but big data handles both structured and unstructured data, you can easily use it to resolve processing power issues. Big data enables you to discover overall patterns, trends, and connections between different variables.

Personalization becomes easy and handling the abundance of data subscribers create every day, which ordinarily would have been a herculean task without big data, makes email marketing a very effective means of communicating with your subscribers. Unfortunately, businesses have not been quick in taking up personalization. 

According to a study, 25% of businesses do not use personalization at all whereas, 71% of customers feel frustrated when their experience is not personalized. The problem seems to stem from the large volume of data businesses have to handle.

Incidentally, the right data points and technology will enable you to create one-to-one experiences at scale. The essence is to have content that is suitable for every subscriber.  

Modern email marketing personalization works based on using templates that insert your subscribers’ names into their messages. It has evolved into sending different messages to different segments and micro-segments of your audience

And moving on to the most sophisticated personalization, you can leverage automation, real-time data, and dynamic content to come up with each subscriber’s on-the-spot need or pain. This ultimately enables you to create hyper-personalization in each email.

Deploying AI Into Email Personalization

Personalization makes a huge difference between a successful email marketing strategy and one that’s simply a waste of time. A study reveals that 69% of email recipients report emails as spam after reading the subject lines, while 64% decide to open emails based on subject lines.

Nobody expects “a dear business owner” sort of email any longer, in most cases, such emails end up in the trash can, since they are considered spammy. Though personalization is not an entirely new phenomenon in email marketing, however, AI has taken it to another dimension. 

By integrating predictive analytics, you can use machine learning, customer data, and complex algorithms to predict how customers will behave in the future with the hindsight of their past purchasing history, data trends, and general behavior. It has become commonplace for marketers to deploy AI to suggest and recommend products that customers will be interested in and include these products into email communications on a segmented or micro-segmented basis.

Generating subject lines that fit each subscriber can be a very difficult task, but it’s very essential. With AI algorithms and customers’ data, the work has become easy. Subject lines that are personalized and enhance higher click-through rates are generated. 

AI also analyzes the outcomes of each marketing campaign for the optimization and improvement of subject lines in real-time. 

AI-powered software can create emails that will attract high engagement rates by using older copies, images, ads, snippets from blog posts, curated content, links, and even machine-generated content. AI algorithms do not just determine the best combination of different types of content; by leveraging the automation, you ensure a huge reduction in the time and resources you need to effectively run your email campaigns.

Previously, the timing and frequency of email campaigns were more of guesswork. AI algorithms and the availability of data have made it possible for you to determine when and how often you send personalized emails to your subscribers to ensure they are opened and read. The data you have gives you the necessary insight to determine what time is odd for each subscriber to enhance the best click-through rate. 

AI enables the scalability of the process as well. You can email each subscriber differently based on the geographic location and demographics, which is a great departure from what used to obtain. 

AI has brought about the optimization of engagement. 

Why Must you Personalize Your Emails?

Studies have proved the effectiveness of personalized emails. One survey reveals that 75% of people prefer to receive personalized emails and offers from organizations, while another says that 72% of consumers will only want to engage with personalized content.  

Why wouldn’t you want to target high-value consumers who prefer personalization and can make 15 or more transactions per year with a brand, in comparison to consumers who are not interested in personalization? A survey has revealed that 80% of shoppers are more likely to shop with brands that personalize their experience.

Conclusion

Personalization with the deployment of AI and integration of data is of immense benefit to your brand. You have increased engagement and a better rate of conversions; ultimately, it translates to a boost in sales, faster and a more efficient process, and enhances ROI. 

Personalization ensures brand loyalty, and that is what any organization should crave to remain relevant in the global market where customers can resort to other options.