Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a very rich history, it wasn’t until the 20th century that the technology began to move forward at a significant pace.
In 1914, the first chess playing machine was created; and by 1997, AI was sufficiently developed to defeat Garry Kasparov, a chess grandmaster and widely considered one of the game’s greatest players.
Often when we think about email marketing we’re considering the proactive angle, such is email’s power as a direct marketing tool to drive sales.
But it’s equally powerful as a reactive channel. How it’s used for those who are buying, or thinking about buying, is a crucial part of the purchase journey. It can be the dividing line between whether customers buy from you again, or buy from you at all.
We recently purchased items from 40 of the top online retailers in the UK and the US, marking their performance for use of email throughout the purchase journey.
Here are a few of the things we learnt.
In a recent study, easyJet emerged as the third best email marketer of the UK’s top retailers while Ryanair finished among the lowest scorers of the benchmark.
easyJet has had a more interesting ‘marketing journey’ than most, it’s fair to say. The brand has come a long way since it first burst onto primetime television in 1999 as part of fly-on-the-wall documentary, Airline.
The growth of mobile has been a game changer for the world of email marketing.
Considering that smartphone usage tripled in 2011, it’s no surprise that email consumption via mobile devices has also seen a steep upturn.
Furthermore, we have seen some of our clients experience open rates of around 70% on mobile, proving just how vital it is when running campaigns.
Einstein may have pre-dated email marketing by many years but when he said “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted” he could have well been thinking about email marketing metrics.
Email marketing is rich in metrics; open rate, click rate, click to open, conversions, spam complaint rates, hard bounces, soft bounces, inbox placement rate, hurdle rates, unsubscribe rates, list growth rate, time spent reading, mobile opens and much more.
Unlike many marketing channels that are crying out for more meaningful metrics, the question for email is a little different.
Just which metrics to use?
I recently caught up with Tim Watson Founder of Zettasphere and Chair of the Legal & Best Practise hub at the DMA’s Email Marketing Council to find out more about the new email metrics and evaluation whitepaper he’s authored for the DMA.
Content marketing has become a major focus for any marketer and rightly so. With the declining effectiveness of push or ‘interruption’ marketing, engaging content is a sure fire way to get the attention of an audience.
In order to get this strategy right and make it effective, marketers need to think carefully about what a company says and where it says it; they need to think about the content itself but also how it is distributed.
Effective content marketing relies on the message, the format, and the communication channel used.
Being an email marketer, it’s funny how often you bump into something that makes you think of work! A little while ago after visiting the doctor, I received an email about ordering repeat prescriptions.
So far, so good you’d think. Some good targeting going on there.
But when I gave it a read, what struck me were all the missed opportunities. For example, the email ‘from address’ was totally unrecognisable, and there was litte in the way of clever personalisation that you often see in the private sector.
What’s more, it’s the only email (indeed, the only communication of all types) I’ve had from them in the last 18 months or so. It was an interesting message to kick off our e-relationship.
Why be a stranger?
It doesn’t take much to send a story viral on Twitter, but a
recent quirk in the URL system at The Independent saw a flurry of humorous web
links scattered across the Twittersphere.
Do you ever receive email in which the tone just doesn’t feel quite right for a professional communication, or was a bit ambiguous about the author’s intentions?
I’ve been reading recently about a free Outlook add-on called ToneCheck which provides a kind of emotional spell-check, performing sentiment analysis on your email to make sure it gives the reader the impression you intended.