Here are three ways brands can capitalise by taking their email marketing to the next level.
1) Focus on the mobile email experience
It’s common knowledge by now that mobile has superseded the desktop for email opens.
But what is surprising is that, according to Litmus’ analysis of over 17 billion emails is that mobile became more popular for opens than webmail and desktop in 2012 – and, in 2016, more opens happened on mobile than dekstop and webmail combined.
Encouragingly, our Email Census indicated that most respondents have responded accordingly. Nearly three in four (73%) of brand marketers indicate that they are optimising emails for mobile devices (62% in Asia-Pacific).
But when we asked about the extent of their strategy, nearly four in five (78%) said they only had a ‘moderate’ strategy at best for optimising email for different devices.
Delegates were encouraged to consider other best practices to improve their mobile strategy above the competition including:
- Shorter subject lines
- Responsive landing pages
- Easy-to-tap calls to action
- Pre-header text for the most important information
2) Use more sophisticated email marketing automation
According to our survey, two in three (66%) marketers globally believe that marketing automation is one of the most important attributes of an email technology provider (Asia-Pacific 69%).
When asked specifically what emails respondents were automating now, however, the most popular responses were the most basic email automations, including website subscription emails and automated responses to sign-ups.
To take it to the next level, attendees were encouraged to become familiar with more sophisticated marketing automation and to experiment with new automated workflows.
As an example, delegates were shown an email flowchart from Adestra which shows how a brand might retain a customer who had unsubscribed from their email list.
(Click to enlarge)
Simply becoming familiar with such workflows helps generate ideas which can dramatically improve email marketing performance.
3) Implement email personalisation (beyond just name)
A report by Oracle Eloqua confirmed, unsurprisingly, that personalising an email subject line with the receiver’s name results in more opens than one with no personalisation,
The report also found, though, that using a data point in addition to the receiver’s name virtually doubles the likelihood that they will open the email.
When asked whether they personalised email beyond just name, only one in three (33%) of marketers globally (21% in Asia-Pacific) indicated that they did so.
While disappointing on one hand, it also indicates that there is a significant opportunity here for brands to distinguish themselves with personalisation.
Some ideas presented to delegates of how brands could personalise email beyond just name included:
- Product recommendations based on a user profile
- Cart abandonment emails
- Recognition and special offers for key customers
- Birthday or other significant event emails
More encouragingly, the survey also indicated that marketers are keen to do more email content personalisation. When asked what they would like to do better with email marketing, two in three (66%) stated ‘better personalisation’ (76% in Asia-Pacific).
Additionally when asked to pick three areas of email marketing which they felt that they ‘really need to focus on in 2017’ the most popular answer (30%) was ‘personalisation’.
With enthusiasm at these levels, it’s unlikely that this opportunity to outdo the competition will be around for long!
A word of thanks
Econsultancy would like to thank all of the subject matter experts who contributed on the way as well as the delegates who took time out of their busy schedules to attend.
We hope to see you all at future Singapore Econsultancy events!
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