Marketer + AI: Make email great again with meaningful customer journeys

Catch your reader’s eye with meaningful and timely AI-backed emails

Although there are numerous innovative marketing channels like web push notifications, in-app messages, and Instagram stories, email continues to be one of the core business communication channels for digital marketers. Most brands invest a lot of effort so their emails grab attention, engage and don’t fall into spam. Although email may be seen as an old-fashioned marketing channel, with the necessary technologies that incorporate online customer behaviour, it has become significantly more effective. Particularly, leveraging predictive segments in email marketing has been a game-changer in the way brands utilize emails.

According to the email statistics report by The RadiCati Group, a number of personal email accounts is expected to reach 4.9 billion by the end of 2017. email contact base of a brand is their most valuable audience, as they’re the relevant group of visitors who have opted in to receive branded emails. However, in the age of personalization technologies, email marketing has changed forever as well. We know well that mass emailing doesn’t work for everyone in an email list. Customers, who are accustomed to personalized details from web giants like Amazon and Booking.com expect the same level of relevancy in their inboxes as well. To deliver thoroughly personalized and engaging emails to customers, brands need to create full customer profiles that unify all customer data including biographical facts like age, gender, location and online behaviour across channels and devices. Yet, only 13% of all Insider clients incorporate online behaviour into their email marketing strategies.

Build Converting Workflows

Using an email solution that combines online behaviour, AI-backed predictive segments, and real-time email marketing technologies, marketers can basically build a unique journey for each and every visitor. Workflow, the journey builder within Insider’s all-in-one customer experience delivery platform, empowers marketers to create a journey based on specific events and actions. Workflow has a simple drag and drop function, enabling marketers to design experiences across channels to reach them through their preferred channel at their most optimal time. This way, marketers can reach customers who don’t open emails with web push notifications or simply deliver promo-codes in the form of 1:1 messages. Marketers can also take actions based on predictive segments. For instance, they can choose to reach out to visitors who are repeated customers in the lifecycle status or deliver energizing coupon codes to visitors who are predicted as “churn.”

The More You Personalize, The More You Interact

According to Statista, personalized emails have an average open rate of 18.8% as compared to 13.1% of mass emails without any personalization. Like all personalized experiences, emails are personalized through advanced segmentation technologies. When a brand’s contacts are divided into micro-segments based on their preferences and actions online, brands can deliver more relevant emails to specific groups of visitors. According to a research by The Direct Marketing Association, segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all e-mail revenue. Using an email solution that incorporates online behaviour provides customers with basic segments like location, IP address, purchase history and visit history. Using Insider’s customer experience delivery platform, brands can also target cart abandoners as well as browse abandoners.

The new era of Email

What takes email marketing strategies to the next level is leveraging predictive segments like customer lifecycle status, customer lifetime value and likelihood to convert. How? A visitor’s likelihood to convert (likelihood to make a purchase, likelihood to apply for a credit card, likelihood of reading an article etc.) is predicted by a machine-learning algorithm based on their online behaviour. For instance, knowing which customers are more or less inclined to buy an item on a given e-commerce site, visitors are grouped into ready-to-use segments. Using these segments within the email platform, marketers can easily prioritize who they would like to target with discount messages, 1:1 messages or advertisements.

360° Customer Experiences

Regardless of how micro each segment gets, each and every visitor is different, so are their online preferences. Within Insider’s email platform, marketers can leverage custom fields to create 360° customer profiles. Custom fields help marketers create personalized messages for each individual. Marketers can leverage basic fields such as age, name, or gender to call customers by their names and certain attributes. Advanced data collection technologies allow marketers to incorporate all traits like customer lifetime status, biographical facts, predictive segments and more.

E-mail was always here, is here, and will always be here

Even though e-mail open rates are not as high as like it was back in the 2000s, it is still being used as one of the most important channels to reach out to your customers. There is still a chance to re-reveal the potential of email marketing by leveraging AI and Machine Learning technologies. So, e-mail is still very much in the game as long as brands leverage it wisely.