Data Driven Marketing, Email

3 Keys to Data-Driven Email

I know I’m not the only person who’s been hearing “data-driven” in business conversations all over. So I ask myself, “What progress are we as a marketing community making toward data-driven email?” With email technology at your fingertips, there are tools and tactics you can use to make your campaigns more effective. The three tips I’m about to share are not all that innovative—in fact, most of these tactics have been around for several years.  If you take the time to implement them into your current email strategy, you’ll see improvement in your open rates, which can ultimately have a positive effect on your bottom line.

Send personalized emails

Before you send another email, make sure your message is personalized. Let’s look at a familiar example, Amazon.  When you get an email from Amazon, you don’t see the email start out with “Dear valued customer,” Instead, Amazon addresses you by name!

“Hello Michael, Thank you for shopping with us.”

Data shows that personalized emails perform better than generic emails. There are two places that you can personalize your message for the biggest impact:

  1. The subject line.
  2. The top of the email where you address the recipient.

Personalizing your emails is simple to do, and its one of the easiest ways to practice data-driven email. Most email service providers including MailChimp, AWeber, and Constant Contact have the capability and offer simple solutions. It can be as simple as entering the merge tag from your email client (i.e. *|FNAME|*). And of course, you can send customized email through ANS’s email solutions.

Make your email mobile friendly

This one seems like a no-brainer, but you would be shocked at how many companies are still missing this boat! Did you know that more than 56% of emails are opened on mobile? Desktop opens are down to 17%, and webmail opens are up 27%. Although more people are opening email on their mobile devices, there are still 23% of B2C brands that have not adopted mobile-friendly design. Even if you are a B2B business, it makes sense to incorporate responsive email design as about 32% of B2B emails are opened on a mobile device.

Mobile Open Rate Per Industry Type—Data-driven email

There is no reason to not create emails using responsive-aware or mobile-aware design. Make sure your creative team is using these formats for your next email. If you need help making this happen, our email experts at ANS can make it happen for you.

Segment your email list

Last, but certainly not least, you will have much better success with your open rates if you segment your email list. Using your CRM software, you should be able to easily segment your email to specific end users rather than blasting out the same message to your entire customer base. For example, if you are hosting an event for small business owners, you probably want to send your email to people who are small business owners within a 20-mile radius of your event location.

Another advantage of segmenting your email list is that you can easily set up a sales funnel.

Sales Cycle—data-driven email

We all know that it is much harder to make a sale to a prospect when you are pitching your product or service aggressively—especially when the prospect is in the early stage of the sales cycle. Instead, segment your list by first comers, early users, occasional users, frequent users, etc. That way you can send the right emails, at the right time, to the right group of people.

Conclusion

These data-driven email tactics are only a few tools that will help you improve your open rates. Applying these three tactics—personalizing your email, making your email mobile friendly, and segmenting your list will help you improve your email ROI. Not only that, but you will also be able to monitor how your email marketing is doing using these tools and make adjustments for continuous improvement.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to us at sales@a-names.com if you need help with your email campaigns. At ANS we can take your customer file and combine it with our vast database to help you reach your target market.  

Blog post by Michael Peterson, Social Media Marketer at ANS

 

 

2 thoughts on “3 Keys to Data-Driven Email

  1. This is great! Thanks, Michael!

    1. Thank you, Colby! Do use any of these tools as part of your email marketing strategy at Adroll?

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