Why email marketing needs to be a top priority for 2018

Deciding where to focus your efforts in 2018 is important. It helps with budget and resource allocation, and it alerts you to areas where you might need to upskill your team

Reviewing the performance of each campaign, across every channel is a good place to start. Every business is different and every audience responds to different channels in different ways.

In ecommerce, however, we’d argue that whatever sector your business sits in—email marketing needs to be a top priority in 2018. Read on and we’ll tell you why.

Email delivers the best ROI

Why focus on email marketing and not the newer, shinier channels?

Well, despite the fact email might not be the sexiest channel, more often than not, it actually delivers the best ROI.

Some marketers may mistake maturity for irrelevance and fear that email won’t be able to cut through the noise. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Unlike social channels which are increasingly pay-to-play as organic reach decreases, email is a tried and tested channel.

You aren’t trying to fight for a consumer’s attention while they mindlessly scroll through an increasingly busy newsfeed. When you send email, it is to people who are open to your marketing messages—they signed up for them.

For those that open and read, the context is already set. They are intentionally opening a marketing message that they know is from your brand. They know you have something to offer them and they are open to seeing what that is.

Can we say the same of consumers when they are absent-mindedly browsing social channels? Or searching for information online?

Email delivers better ROI because it is wanted, expected, and welcome. It is part of a natural conversation the consumer started when they signed up. As a result, email often converts better than other channels.

Email is a behavioral marketing tool

For many businesses, email is an untapped resource.

It may be used in the most basic of ways to broadcast one simple message to a whole list. But the potential to use it as a behavioral marketing tool remains sadly unrealized.

Email is much more than just a means to broadcast. With the right technology in place, it is a powerful behavioral marketing tool.

It can change the nature of relationships a brand has with consumers—radically.

Segmentation, personalization, and behavior triggered automations are effective ways to deepen engagement and turn subscribers into loyal brand advocates.

Machine learning allows email to predict and shape behaviour

But, email in 2018 is about more than just responding to behavior and increasing engagement.

Developments in machine learning gives us the power to use email to predict—and influence—what the customer does next.

Done well, personalized recommendations can create a long-term buying pattern that may not have developed otherwise.

Email should be at the core of customer experience

In 2018, email should sit at the core of customer experience. It is central to customer lifecycle management and omnichannel personalization.

The highly personalized journeys we can create with behavioral marketing and personalization takes customer experience to the next level.

Email allows us to deepen the relationship between the brand and the customer. It

holds the customer’s hand every step of the way and guides them along to their journey to purchase.

And email is the rapport-builder that keeps them coming back for more.

Smart brands will use email to their advantage

In 2018, smart brands will be implementing:

• Intelligent personalization
• Sophisticated segmentation
• Better customer experiences.

And the technology to do this is more accessible than many imagine.

Behavioral marketing and personalization tools won’t leave a big dent in your budget.

They don’t take a team of developers to implement. They start working hard for you from day one.

Understand and improve your email maturity in 2018

So, how do you know whether your brand is ready to move on from broadcasting one simple message to predicting and shaping customer behavior?

We can help. The Pure360 email maturity model is an industry-leading framework of email sophistication that enables email marketers to pinpoint exactly how advanced their use of email is. It helps you to:

• Benchmark: Establish which stage of the maturity model you are and benchmark yourself compared to others within the industry.
• Create a structured journey: The maturity model offers a ready-made, highly-structured journey to help you grow your email marketing strategy and sophistication.
• Set goals: By using the individual strategies in each email maturity stage, you are able to set goals to help you advance into the next level of maturity.
• Identify missed opportunities: Use the elements in each maturity stage to identify gaps in your email marketing strategy and start putting relevant process in place early on to improve and grow.
• Improve results: As you reach your goals and move along the maturity journey you will see an improvement in your strategy, tactics and your overall email marketing results.

Learn where your email strategy sits on the maturity model and discover the steps to take it forward in 2018.

Find out how Pure360’s ecommerce solution can help you put personalization into practice.