Add Personalization to Improve E-mail Sales
October 2006
By Daryl Gale
multipage
Sales lagging? E-mail marketing campaign petering out? The problem may not be the campaign itself, but your implementation. In a whitepaper commissioned by RightNow Technologies called Vital Marketing: Ten Core Tactics to Improve Marketing Campaign Effectiveness and Efficiency, Jupiter Research, a company that provides research and analysis on Internet and emerging consumer technologies, offers practical advice on optimizing the impact of your e-mail marketing campaign.
Despite the increasing volume of e-mail messages both at home and at work, e-mail marketing still is generally effective, according to Jupiter. Seventy percent of consumers say they have taken action on some e-mail ads, while admitting that they delete most ads without even looking at them. So what determines whether your ad is opened or deleted? Personalization is a key factor, say researchers.
Fewer than one-third of marketers alter content elements for the purpose of personalization, even though careful tailoring of marketing messages to appeal to different segments of the target audience has proven effective. Marketers that employ personalization in their e-mail campaigns are 40 percent more likely to enjoy conversion rates far above the average conversion rate of 1 percent. And because so few marketers bother to personalize, your personal message with relevant content gives you a huge competitive advantage over marketers who use a standard boilerplate e-mail for all customers.
Begin the personalization of your e-mails by segmenting your customers using all relevant database information. For instance, is the e-mail recipient a previous customer? Don’t send them the same e-mail you send to potential new customers. Was their order a year or two ago? You may want to offer special incentives for them to order again. Segmentation by order frequency, age, income, location or any other factors that allow you to customize the e-mail, could dramatically increase the campaign’s effectiveness.
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