The State of Email Marketing Personalization

Kristen: Hello, and thank you for taking the time today to join us for our webinar, “The State of Email Marketing Personalization in 2017.” My name is Kristen, and I’m on the marketing team here at Movable Ink, and I’ll be serving as your moderator today.
So, I’m very excited to introduce our two presenters. So today, we have, for Movable Ink, Alexandra Penberg, who is an Account Manager, and from Campaign Monitor, we have Jason Dent, who serves as Marketing Director.
So, I just wanted to give a quick summary of some of the content that we’ll cover today. So, in today’s webinar, Campaign Monitor will help you strategize the perfect personalization campaign including some industry trends that we should all be aware of. And then after that, Alexandra from Movable Ink will show you some exciting use cases for advanced email personalization including some behavioral marketing tactics.
Now before we begin, I’d just like to go over a few housekeeping items. First, we encourage you to submit questions at any time during the presentation. We’ll answer as many questions as we can during the Q&A portion of today’s webinar. You can also get a recording of today’s webinar, and we will email you that recording after the presentation is over. We also invite you to join the conversation on Twitter by tweeting @MovableInk or @CampaignMonitor. And with that, I’m going to turn this over to Jason, to kick us off.
Jason: Awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Looking forward to the webinar today and going over these strategies.
So, to start off, just gonna kinda level set the playing field here. As you, guys, all know, today’s consumers are bombarded with more marketing messages than ever before. And companies are trying to get our attention through any channels that they can, whether that’s Facebook, television, Instagram, prints, SMS. And I’m sure we’ve all experienced this in our own personal lives, but as marketers, we need to be hyper-aware of this is the everyday world that our consumer’s live in. And so, it’s getting harder and harder to reach these consumers.
But one thing that we hear from marketers across the board, and you can read studies about this, is that email continues to be the number one channel for them to drive sales, drive traffic back to their website, increase usage of their products and services. And so, email is still a very valid and important, if not the most important channel, for us, as marketers, to reach our consumer base.
And this is proven some stats here real quick. Email has a 4400% ROI. So for every dollar you spend on email, you’ll get $44 back. It’s also more effective than social media, up to 40 times more effective. And it’s also ubiquitous, which means, you know, everybody has an email address. A lot of us have multiple email addresses because we have that one that we use to sign up for everything that we just send spam to. But in reality, everybody has an email address. So, it’s not going away. You hear that all the time.
So this leads me to my next question. That is, did you ignore an email in your inbox this morning? You know, this isn’t necessarily a work email or a personal email from a loved one, but an email from a product or a business. And I’m willing to bet that that’s all of us. Every single person on this webinar, all of us here at Campaign Monitor, everybody at Movable Ink, we all received emails this morning that we didn’t read. And there’s a good reason for that.
This year, there will be 104 billion emails sent to consumers every day. That’s a ton of email. So let’s think about why we may have passed on those emails that we got this morning. One, maybe it’s from a brand or a company that you don’t know or that you don’t care about. You might be being offered something that you don’t want or need. Or you didn’t have time to complete the action that the email is asking you to take. Or maybe you just didn’t even open it because you’re in the middle of doing something else.
So, on the flip side of that, think about the emails that we do open. They’re sent from somebody that you recognize that’s selling you something or informing you of something that you actually care about. They’re sent at a time where you can read them and you can actually take action on them. And then you feel spoken to and somewhat known. They might use your first name or there’s something in the email that’s unique to you and that you identify with.
So, as we sit here as consumers ourselves who choose to engage or not to engage with an email, we’re realizing that our hands are being forced as marketers within the email space. And there’s this shift in email marketing from mass marketing to one-to-one marketing. So even though mass email marketing has been around for a while and it still delivers ROI, this consumer behavior combined with all the noise within the inbox is really forcing us to become more strategic with how we connect with prospects, with customers, with consumers.
So, mass email marketing or batch and blast strategies just don’t drive the results needed in a world of 104 billion daily emails because there’s just too much clutter. So, that strategy is not going to pay off long term. And so, we really need to get to this one-to-one personalized email marketing that’s more relevant and feels like emails are written just for me. And these will be the ones that’ll drive results. And so that’s where email marketing is going.
So, a few reasons, you know, why you should care about this, why you should think about making the investment in a personalization strategy. Maybe now, it doesn’t feel totally like the right time, maybe you’re still seeing results from your current email strategy, or you feel like this might be too much of a challenge, but there’s a couple of reasons why you really do need to consider this.
And first off, one is that getting new customers is expensive. So the cost to acquire new customers is dramatically more than keeping and nurturing your current customer base. So, it’s not that you don’t, you know, focus on getting new customers, but you have to think about the time and investment you’ve already made to get these people. And if you make a bad first impression or the person feels like you’re spamming them, you just flushed money down the toilet that you’ve spent trying to get this customer or consumer.
And secondly, if your email campaign, on the flipside, makes them feel special and known, you can cultivate that first encounter into a repeat customer and increase the lifetime value of that consumer base. So you’re trying to create this long-term relationship that will bring that person back over and over and over. And this is important because it’s been found that personalized email marketing has 18 times the revenue for companies that are using it compared to one-to-many or batch and blast type emails.
So, there is an effectiveness factor to it, but also something to consider is that this is becoming the norm in our society. So, 70% of digital natives, expect the personalized digital experience. And for some of us, that may feel intrusive or creepy, but this is just the reality of the times that we live in. People want experiences that cater to them, and it’s only gonna get more and more personalized and more and more in demand that way.
So, how do you get started? We’re gonna walk through the seven steps today that you will want to think about that are required to set up a personalized email marketing strategy. And at the end of that, we’re really gonna have Movable Ink talk about how you can have a behavioral-based content within those emails.
So the first step…well, it’s all related to technology. So, technology is at the heart of personalization. But 36% of marketers consider personalization a real challenge because of the technology. So, one of the first things that you’ll have to do to set this strategy is really analyze your current marketing technology stuff. And there’s a few ways that you’ll want to do this or I guess you could say a few questions you’re gonna want to ask as you look at the technology that you currently have.
One is, am I collecting the data that I need on my customers and is it accurate? As we’ll talk about in a bit, data is key to personalization. So, are you collecting that data? Two, do you have the functionality that you need in order to create personalized emails? And three, if you do have those, the data and the functionality, does the tool work for your team? Like, do you have the headcount? Do you have the right people in place in order to take advantage of that platform? Or is it too clunky? Is it too complicated? Maybe it just takes too long, you’re not nimble enough, or the platform’s not nimble enough for your team to take advantage of it.
So, once you look at your technology, you may decide that you’re lacking any of those or you have all those but it’s a complicated system that you have. As you might be contented to take a look at making a switch, whether that’s to a marketing cloud or some sort of best-agreed marketing technology stack, you’ll want to make sure you’re asking these questions from a marketing perspective and not just from an IT perspective. And that you’re looking at platforms that allow you to do what you do in that market and you’re not looking at systems that are driven by IT decisions.
Secondly, you’re gonna need analytics. As part of this, personalization requires a lot of AB testing, a lot of comparing how emails are performing, what images are performing well. So, you’ll need an analytics, whether that’s within your email platform or separate part of your marketing stack to see how your emails are performing both by the individual level, looking at things like open rates, click-through rates, kind of the normal, traditional email metrics.
But also, you need to look at the overall impact that your email campaign is having on revenue. Is your audience behaving the way you intended? Are you increasing the traffic? Are you increasing sales? Things like that.
So, we’ve already said that the email has a ROI of 4400% and you get $44 for every dollar that you put in, but if you don’t understand the impact that that’s having on your business, you’re not gonna know where to spend those $44…so, or the, excuse me, that $1. So that’s one thing to consider.
Lastly, personalization requires that you have customer master. And by that, I mean a centralized view of your customer base. So, it’s critical that you have one place where you keep all of your customer data, and it’s the source of truth around what they…you know, their behavior, all of their demographic data, everything that you’re collecting on them, you need to have these in one place. And so, this might be a CRM system, if you’re a B2B company. We keep everything on our CRM system here at Campaign Monitor. If you’re an online retailer, it might be your e-commerce platform. If you’re a nonprofit, this might be your donor database.
So, the point is, whatever your business model is, you need a place where you’re storing and capturing all this data and you are keeping it very, very clean and that the data is accurate. Because without clean data, you’re not gonna be as effective. So that basically covers it for the technology portion, but it’s really important because, like I said, without the proper technology in place, personalization becomes much, much more difficult, if not impossible.
Secondly, data. So, I mentioned this earlier, personalization requires collecting and using more customer data. So, think about all the places within your business that you might capture customer data and how useful that could be to leverage in emails. This might be demographic data, purchase history, website behavior. All of these are great data points that you can use to tailor emails that are more personal and resonate with your customers on an individual level.
And like we said, with all the noise in the inbox, this is becoming critical because 56% of people said they would unsubscribe from the email list if they felt like it was not relevant to them. So that’s over half. So, if you are doing a batch and blast type or a mass email marketing strategy, this could be leading to over half of your subscriber base no longer wanting to hear from you because your message has become irrelevant to them.
But it’s not just about knowing where the data is, you need access to that data to be able to pull it into your customer mass, to your source of truth. So, when you’re looking at this, you need to be thinking about, you know, are there pre-built integrations between my email platform and my CRM system or my e-commerce system that I can use to pull this data into leverage an email.
Or maybe if there is an API that you can use to capture or to pull this data in between, like a data warehouse where you’re storing these or wherever that might be within an app that you guys are leveraging. But you need to be able to access all of this data in order to leverage it in the email. And so, that’s one thing that you should take into account. And this feels like a big challenge, I’m sure. But one option for capturing more customer data is to simply do it within your email sign up forms themselves.
And so, one quick example of this is a company called Topshop. They’re an online retailer. And on their site, when you sign up for their newsletter, they basically ask you a couple additional questions. One of them is your birth date and the other one is whether or not you’re a student. And they’ll use this information to send you an email that gives you 20% off on your birthday, which is an awesome offer and makes the person feel special like they’re known. But that’s not the main point of this.
They’re actually trying to capture more customer data that they can leverage in segmenting their audience. So, now, they know this person’s age and they know whether or not they’re a student. So right there, they’re able to create two different segments later down the road to include this person in and create more personalized content. And we’ll get into segmentation here in a second. But that just shows you that you don’t necessarily have to be pulling this information from a bunch of different systems. If you want to just start simply, you can start asking questions within your sign-up form.
Thirdly, personalization will require a segmented email marketing strategy. So, the first step to setting up segments is really deciding what you want your audience to do. So, for B2B companies, this might be driving prospects down a purchase funnel or pushing them to get a demo. BSE companies are thinking more about customer lifecycle. So, how can I get this person back to my website to make a purchase or into my store while we’re having a sale? Those types of actions. A nonprofit is probably thinking how can I get them to the next fundraiser event or make another annual donation or, you know, make a donation because of an emergency, a natural disaster. And so, they have different goals for their email.
But once you decide what you want your prospects and customers to do, then you start looking at the data to divide it into segments where you can make email messages that are more relevant to that particular group within your audience. So you’re breaking your overall audience down into segments and having custom messaging for each one. And we’re gonna go over examples of this in a second.
But just some ways to think about segmenting are things like gender, geographic location, age, job title, company size, interests if you know that transactional data, so past purchase history, or what the customer planned there on, or behavioral data, you know, website visit, cart abandonment, things like that. All of those can be used to create specific segments where the message resonates.
You can create a message that resonates with that segment that is more…that’ll push them to take the action and increase the odds for them to take that action versus another group. So just for example, if you’re sending an email out to your audience, you’re probably gonna wanna use different language and different images if you’re trying to reach 65 and older females versus 18 to 25-year-old males, especially for online e-commerce.
You’re not gonna send them the same offers, you’re not gonna use the same product images, things like that. That’s just a simple example. But the more data you have, the more specific you can make that message that just increases your odds for them to click that call to action.
Almost as important as segmenting is being thoughtful about when and how you send your emails. So timing and delivery are just as essential to personalization as the content itself. So, just a quick example that’s just kinda common sense, if you wanted to call your mother or father to have a conversation, you’re not gonna call them at 3:00 in the morning. That’s not optimal time. Or if you wanted to have an intimate conversation with your best friend about how they’re doing after a tough break up, you’re not gonna have that conversation over a group text or via Snapchat. So, again, not the optimal way of having that. And the same thing goes for email.
So, you wanna be sure that you’re sending emails out at the time that it’s best for them to read it and in the manner that it’s best for them to consume it. So, this will take some analyzing of when people open your emails to make sure they’re getting them at the optimal time, but this is important because 23% of email opens occur within the first hour of receiving them, and then it drops by half in the second hour. So, that’s a really big difference in terms of open rate and engagement. So when you send that email is critical. If you send…again, if you send an email at 9:00 a.m., Pacific time, but I live in England, I may not open it because I’m not getting it in the time of the day that is optimal for me to read email.
So, there are couple of ways of understanding the best time to send email. You can just, through your ESP, you can do an analyzation or an analysis of when your open rates are at highest, then kind of do that manually. You can also look at things like time zone sending where your ESP will send the email out at the time that you prefer in each time zone. So, that might be at 6:00 a.m. in every time zone around the world.
And then there’s also what we call time zone or send time optimization, which basically does the analysis for you in open behavior. And will send the email to that person at the time when they’re most likely to open it. So, all of those are different ways to do that, but it’s just important to think about not just sending an email to your entire audience at one time around the globe. That’s not gonna be effective.
And then, also the manner or the way in which the email is consumed is important too. You know, 50% of the emails now are opened on a mobile device. And so, you need to be sending emails that are mobile optimized. And you need to have a platform that allows you or your team to create mobile-optimized emails quickly and efficiently so that you can get those out without having the, you know, you may not have a coder to do custom HTML code or you’re not searching for templates all the time to try and create a mobile version of your email. You really need to have a platform in place that allows you to create those mobile-friendly emails right away.
And then, finally, content. So, delivering targeted content to drive this ideal behavior. Once you’ve identified your different segments and you’re taking each one kinda down a different journey to the same end goal, this is where personalized content can really make a difference. So, with all that noise that’s in the inbox, when you send a message that really resonates with your prospects or with your customers, speaks to them on a personal level, you’re gonna have the upper hand in getting that click. And remember, this is becoming expected that they have this personalized content, this personalized feel to the email.
So, like I said, you’re not gonna send the same imagery or the same content to someone who is a retiree that you’re gonna send to a college student. You’re gonna want to have different imagery, different content that drives the behavior. And one simple way to do this, as we can see here, is just by gender. If you’re just stepping into this world of personalized content or what we call dynamic content, this is just the…especially in the retail space, this is just a real easy way to differentiate your audiences.
So, as you can see here, Adidas, they’re creating one email but they’re using dynamic content within the email to send one version to their female audience and one version to their male audience. Again, all this does is just increase the likelihood of that person opening that email and then taking the action to either go to the website or make a purchase. And so again, just starting off small can have a tremendous effect. But there are some more sophisticated ways that you can break down your audience and create some very specific content.
Here’s another example from Sephora. They’re looking at website behavior. So, they see that Allie has been on their website for the last 30 minutes and she’s been browsing eyeshadow, but she hasn’t made a purchase yet, and she abandons her browser, she doesn’t put anything in the cart, doesn’t make a purchase, leaves the site. But they sent her a personalized email that’s just to her because they have her email address, they have her, you know, she had a purchase history with them. And so, they used this to send a personalized email to her that is 20% off eyeshadow.
Similarly, John has been on the Converse website. He put a pair of Chuck Taylor All Star II into his shopping cart, but he didn’t complete the purchase. He started to fill out his purchase information, and then something else came up. He had to leave his computer or, you know, he was running into a meeting. So he wasn’t able to complete the purchase. So, he closes down his browser, he takes off.
Well, Converse, they see his behavior, they know John. So, they sent him a personalized email for 20% off of the exact product that he was about to buy. And this just encourages him to go back, log back in, make the purchase because now, he’s got a great deal.
So, these are just a couple of ways that you can create content that is very specific to the individual based on the data that you have that will increase the likelihood of them making a purchase or taking that call to action. And these are within the realm of creating the content themselves using that data, but I’m gonna pass it over to Alexandra who’s gonna talk about more ways to personalize the actual content within an email based upon behavioral data. So, take it away.
Alexandra: Thanks, Jason. This is Alexandra speaking, and I’m here to talk about some really exciting new use cases for advanced email personalization. But first, let’s talk about how Movable Ink looks at personalization in general.
In 2010, we invented the ability to change email content at the moment your customer opens an email. One of the earliest and best-known examples of this is just a simple countdown timer, like the one in this Dunkin Donuts email. But brands are evolving, customers have higher expectations in 2017, and it’s finally possible to create true one-to-one personalization in an email like a Dunkin Donuts email on the right. This email personalizes everything from the customer’s interactions with the brand to the weather at the moment of open.
And that was just one example of a brand using advanced personalization. Today, we have a client base of more than 400 brands creating amazing experiences with email. But here’s the thing, one-to-one email content is not easy. I repeat, it is not easy. It can actually be a bottleneck for email marketers. Typically, it means creating more segments. I’ve been there. But that doesn’t mean you can speak to each customer on an individual level. If you increase the volume of your emails, your customers may turn you out in the long run. And of course, you can create more triggers, but you still need compelling content for them.
If your content could automatically adjust to every person at the moment of open, you can create a true one-to-one experience, and that’s exactly what intelligent content is. Unless you generate amazing content automatically from any data in any business logic. At Movable Ink, we see more brands embracing intelligent content in 2017 than ever before. So before I show you some use cases, let’s take a look at an example of intelligent content.
Imagine that you are a travel brand. I’m sure there’s a few of you on the line today. And you’re promoting a vacation package. No two of your customers are the same, so why would you send them the same email content? Intelligent content lets you speak to each customer individually. So, if you have a young couple with no loyalty points, you can send them this message.
If your customers have children and some loyalty points, you can send them content based on their reward status. If the package has a limited time quantity, you can also include a live inventory call out to give people a heads up that it’s selling out fast. And we’ll get a little more info in inventory later.
So basically, intelligent content layers customer data that you have on file like name and birth date with contextual data that we can attack at the moment of open, like device or weather. Also, with behavioral data, like web behavior, all creating email experiences as unique as your customers. There are so many ways that you can use intelligent content to talk to your customers. So let’s take a look at some popular use cases from this year.
This first is leveraging behavioral marketing. So one way to do this is pulling in recently browsed products into one of your existing emails like a newsletter. It’s a great way to tap out behavioral marketing without changing your existing email campaign. In this example, the brand is simply adding a block of behavioral content to an existing newsletter. The behavioral content includes the most recent pair of sneakers that the customer viewed along with live inventory and live pricing. This is a really great strategy to use when you want to drive urgency around a promotion, especially if it’s a limited time deal.
So, speaking of limited time deals, travel marketers know all too well how fast prices and inventory for hotels and flights can change, and that’s where another type of intelligent content called search retargeting can help. With search retargeting, you can automatically pull your customer’s most recent search of your website right into the email and give them updated search results. you can also choose to only display deals that has specific price point, like this example does. To make booking a trip even easier, you can deep link the call to action button to your mobile app. The result is personalized customer-centric email that makes booking a breeze.
If your brand has a rewards program, there are a lot of ways you can use your customer data to create hyper-personalized email experiences. In this example, we’re displaying a live rewards point balance that updates automatically when the customer opens the email. We’re also showing products that they can redeem based on available rewards points. Additionally, we’re telling the customer exactly how many points away they are from reaching the next tier. Including all of these information creates an experience not only tailored to each individual, it also has served as a helpful reminder for all customers.
Transactional emails are great opportunities to provide personalized experiences. But in the past, they’ve been overlooked by many brands. Thankfully, more marketers are using transactional emails to offer helpful recommendations like we see in this email example. This is a transactional email that a customer sees after purchasing a smartwatch. This particular smartwatch has a variety of accessories that go with it, so here we’re automatically pulling in recommendations based on that smartwatch purchase. This is a really great way to upsell on your transactional emails while also providing a more personalized experience. Are you seeing the trend here?
So now, we’re going to look at some exceptional results from brands using personalized email content in 2017. This is an abandoned cart email from Scholastic. So, before we get into their incredible results, let’s look at a few facts about abandoned carts. First, nearly 68% of online shoppers abandon their shopping cart. There are a lot of reasons why this happens and not all of them are intentional. Things like slow load time, a complicated check out process, and their session and timing outs can result in them navigating away from your page.
With abandoned cart messaging, you can re-engage customers who left your website and recapture sales that you might have missed. Actually, over one-third of clicks back to your site could lead to a purchase. So, Scholastic here wanted to gently remind their customers about the items that they had left in their cart, and they also wanted to personalize the experience.
To do that, they pulled in images of items that customers left in their cart. The result is a great example of what happens when you mix personalization with great visual email content. We’re happy to say that Scholastic saw a 50% lift in engagement here.
So, I’ll hand it over to you, Jason.
Jason: Thanks. So, those of you…some of you might be familiar with this morning email from HuffPost but, they send out, every morning, they send out a collection of stories from the news that occurred either in late in the evening or early in the morning already in that day, and they send it to every subscriber in their time zone. And so, this morning email has to arrive, like I said, in the morning.
It’s important or else the news that they’re sending is outdated. And they also realized that most people in the morning are not sitting in front of their computer. They might be commuting in to work or they’re eating breakfast or just enjoying a cup of coffee. And so, all of these emails needed to be designed to be delivered onto the right device, most of which was mobile.
And so they really were considering when and how they were gonna get this email to their audience. And so, they started using time zone sending to make sure that this drops at 6:00 a.m. in every time zone, and they used Campaign Monitor to build these emails to be mobile friendly so that they look beautiful on the mobile device. They did numerous studies to AB Test, different images, headline link, snippet link, you know, the number of links they should have on that specific email if there was too many or too few.
So they got really scientific about this email, and because of that, they were able to increase the click-through rate on this morning email by 20%, so that’s 20% more traffic that’s going to the HuffPost site, which in turn just turns into ad revenue for them. And there are up to 20 million morning emails delivered every month. So their email send volume has tripled since they started using Campaign Monitor. And they’ve been able to increase their newsletter production from 11 newsletters to 16. And so, this is just an example of how focusing on the time and the way that you send the email can really have an impact.
Alexandra: I know I catch up on my emails during my morning commute, so if it was based on someone else’s time zone, I definitely miss out on all that content.
This example here is from Delta. they wanted to engage their SkyMiles Medallion members with a year-end review email that showcase each person’s travel activity. But complex, business logic, including multiple tiers and countless combinations of miles, rewards earned, and more sit in the way of [inaudible 00:37:32] campaign deployment.
So using Movable Ink’s intelligent content platforms, Delta was able to build a customed campaign that updated logic rules on the fly. This allowed the team to automatically pull each customer’s behavioral data from the SkyMiles Medallion program directly into the email.
Every email was hyper-personalized down to the smallest details. So for example, customers could see if they sat in an aisle seat for 26 times. Me personally, I’m a window seat person. Or they took advantage of the VIP entrance 19 times. So thanks to this personalized approach, Delta’s campaign was shared across social platforms by customers who are super eager to show off their personalized emails. And an even crushed a few of Delta’s benchmark goals with a 51% lift in open rates and 132% lift in click-throughs.
Jason: All right, keeping it on the travel trend, we’re gonna talk about Flight Centre. Flight Centre is an online travel booking company, and they’re using segmentation and automation to really personalize their offers that they’re sending to their customers. So, they have a very complex data collection process. So this is almost like the gold standard of personalization in my opinion, but they’re basically taking data from their booking system, from their email marketing system, and from their social channels, and they’re creating segments around the behaviors that these people are taking on all of those platforms to create personas.
And part of that persona, they will include…beyond just that behavioral data, they will include demographic data. So, age, location, and gender, and they’re able to create these personas that they now have a greater propensity to purchase when they create offers that specifically caters to that persona. And so, they’ve had a ton of success doing this, and as they develop their process, they just keep creating more and more personas.
This may not be the model for everyone, I’m not saying that everybody should go out and do this, because it can get very complex, but they have the team and the bandwidth, and they done the testing to show that the more personas that they can create and the more emails that they can send, it increases their revenue. And they’ve had a 57% increase in the click-through rates since implementing this segmentation strategy. And to them, that’s directly correlated to bookings.
So they have a number that they have created through their analysis that they know if they send X number of emails to these personas, they’ll make X number of dollars in revenue. So again, this is a very complex way of doing it but it just shows the power of segmenting your audience and creating an email that really speaks to them will just further increases the chance of them taking the action that you want them to take.
And I think that’s the last one here, so just to recap real quick. Like we’ve been saying, these one-to-one relationships are more important than ever in today’s world. So, you wanna make sure you get the right technology in place and start collecting and incorporating more customer data into your email strategy. Then, develop a segmented messaging strategy, thinking about when you’re sending your email and how you’re sending it.
And then, really deliver targeted content to those segments. You know, whether that’s using dynamic content in your email, you can drive conversions using images of things that have recently been browsed by your consumers, you can remind consumers to complete a purchase that maybe they abandoned, make it easy for them to redeem rewards with very personalized email experience that references their reward program.
Upsell them with transactional emails, with product recommendations similar to the things that they already purchased. And then, include relevant emails in your cart abandonment outreach, relevant images. So these are, again, just some important tips to consider when you’re creating your personalization strategy and some ways that you can get started and see some results that we really think will drive revenue and increase click-through rate behavior for you guys. So that is all that we have. We’re gonna open it up now to questions. So, Kristen, back to you.
Kristen: Thank you so much, Jason, and thank you, Alexandra, for sharing all that great content with us. So we do have time for a few questions, so I wanna get that started. So, we had a few people asking about behavioral marketing and how that works. So, Alexandra, could you tell us how product recommendations work within behavioral marketing in email?
Alexandra: Yeah. So, product recommendations using Movable Ink is based off of the aggregate behavior of the users on your site. So, if one user’s looking at a specific product, they’ve recently browsed this product, what do other people do after they browse this product? Are they most likely to look at these three products or convert on these three products? Using that information that your users are already giving to you to promote again in your email, is just a really effective tool to convert.
Kristen: Great. So, where is that behavioral data coming from exactly?
Alexandra: That’s a great question. So, it’s coming from your website. So we have a pixel that’s placed on all of your different landing pages that’s gathering data from your users.
Kristen: Awesome. Well, and I think they have a few questions for you, Jason. So, why is it so important to email people when they are expected to open those emails as opposed to sending an email overnight? Won’t they see your email first thing in the morning?
Jason: Yeah, that is a great question. And I think it really just goes back to the data about the, you know, people’s email behavior. You know, if you have a relationship with your audience, you know, they very well may open your email the first thing in the morning when, you know, after you send it, it just depends on, you know, your business model and your audience and your relationship with them. But you know, studies have shown that most emails, consumer emails, are opened within the first hour, and if they’re not, then open rate’s drop by half over the next hour.
So, when you send overnight, you increase the likelihood of that email getting pushed farther and farther down in their inbox, so they may not get it in the morning. And so, the likelihood of them reading it, more than likely it goes down, not saying they won’t get to it but this is just a pure numbers game. So, by sending it to them at the time when they’re most likely reading email or about to read email, you’re gonna increase the likelihood of them opening it.
And that’s really what it is when you’re talking about scalability and trying to, you know, really drive a large audience, you’re gonna try and take advantage of everything that you can to make sure that they open your email. And so, that’s really what it’s about. It’s not saying you can’t send emails overnight, but increasing the likelihood of opening and clicking is the name of the game with personalization.
Kristen: Great. So, another question concerning timing. So how do you AB test but still send emails at the right time, at the accurate time? Do you test the day before, a week before? How exactly should that work?
Jason: Yeah, another great question. So, AB testing actually takes place within the platform itself. So, it doesn’t affect when the emails go out. You don’t have to actually do the test, you know, before you send the email. So, within the platform, you can create two versions of the email, you know, with different images, different headlines, and you can send those out at the same time.
So then you can look at when you send that email out, which one had better results, which one had higher click-through rates, higher open rates, higher engagement rates. And then you can use that data to kinda make some conclusions about the next email that you’ll send out. Okay, now, we know this performs better.
So obviously, the more emails that you send or sending out, again, dependent on your business model, the more data you can capture while doing this AB test. But it’s not something you necessarily have to do before you send your email. Within the platform, you’re kinda setting those options so that half of your audience sees one and half of your audience sees the other.
Kristen: Great. So, we have a question about customer journey. So, can you discuss best practices in personalizing customer journeys? And do you recommend different funnels or multiple paths within the same journey? And can one offs that are personalized be just as effective as multiple funnels?
Alexandra: I can jump on that one, Jason. So, with the background in email marketing, I definitely had mandates from my merchandising team and product team that we need to promote something specific in our emails, and that’s fine if you have those journeys already set up. What I have found to be useful across all of my clients is including in personalized behavior in those customer journey.
So this is something that you are already sending out, a triggered message to them maybe in this journey, but why don’t you also include sort of that block of web behavior in their emails. So, you’ve also been recently browsing these products or I’ve also noticed that you’ve left these products in your cart, to sort of re-engage those users while you’re also putting them through this specific journey and funnel.
Kristen: Great. Anything to add to that?
Jason: Sure. I would just say what we’ve seen customers do, and this is actually what Flight Centre does and a lot of our publishing customers who are sending out newsletters every day and multiple emails every day with a bunch of different content, is they’ll create segments within their audience that are based on the data. So, let’s say you have five different segments, and those segments are just based on, you know, combination of behavioral data and demographic data that you have, and you’ve divided it up into five different personas.
You can create one nurture email that leverages dynamic content within the email so that if they’re in segment A, they will see this content. If they’re in segment B, they will see this content. But it’s just one email that you create within the actual platform itself, within the builder. It’s gonna look like one big long email with multiple sections. But when it sends to that segment, they just see the section that’s meant for them. So, it looks like a regular email with the content that is relevant to them.
So, when it comes to the customer journeys and setting up multiple emails, you can use dynamic content to walk people through that journey, you know, with different content that’s more personal to them, but it’s actually the same journey. So you just create one nurture, but the emails within that nurture are segmented within, have dynamic content so that they see that email that they need that speaks to them, but it’s still one journey. Hopefully, that made sense.
Kristen: Great. So we have time for one more question. We did have somebody ask more about what moment of open means, and we did touch a little bit on live pricing, live inventory. So maybe, Alexandra, you could talk a little bit more about how you could use real-time content in your email.
Alexandra: Yeah. So, Movable Ink is tying into your data wherever it’s being stored. In the case of live inventory and pricing, if we’re timed directly into your website, that’s how we would show the correct information at the moment of open. So, if anybody sends out an email, let’s say, with products in it, you don’t wanna have a sold out product, for example, in your email when the user opens it up later on.
So, if a product that’s selling out fast, if it’s no longer on your website, maybe you wanna take it out from your email, or maybe you wanna put a little sold out marker on that item to sort of create urgency for them to purchase the other items in the email. So that’s something that can change at the moment of open. First time user opens an email, maybe they see that product available. They opened it up later on and it’s sold out, why should they still see it there?
Kristen: Great. So I think that’s just about all the time we have for questions. And I just wanted to give a reminder that everyone who registered and attending the webinar today will receive an email with the recording of the webinar, so keep an eye on your inbox for that. And I just wanna thank Alexandra and Jason once again for your great presentations today. You gave us a lot of email inspiration and a lot to think about. So, thank you, guys, once again.
And I would like to thank our attendees today for attending. And like I said, keep an eye on your inbox. We will be sending you the presentation, and we will also be posting a recap of this presentation on the Movable Ink blog next week. So you will be able to find more information there. We will answer some of the questions that we weren’t able to get today in that blog post as well. So, thank you all once again for your time, and have a great rest of your day.