The 30-second broadcast spot isn’t the biggest word in advertising anymore. Dilly dilly.
Digital is passing television to become the biggest ad category in 2018. But unlike television, which makes it difficult for smaller brands to reach consumers in an impactful way, the explosive growth of digital doesn’t give all the power to big advertisers. Personalization is still the best way to reach consumers in a meaningful way at any scale or budget – and a small brand that effectively tailors and targets messages to meet in-the-moment needs can actually run rings around a multinational.
Small is beautiful.
More than simply leveling the playing field, personalization may actually favor smaller brands. Larger organizations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to corral data and build a targeted strategy. And they’ve got too many cooks arguing with each other about the best way to do it. An Oracle Marketing Cloud/Liveclicker report found that 91% of retailers struggle with constraints or organizational silos in their personalization strategy.
Smaller organizations can win by being quicker and, frankly, less thick-headed about the most important stuff they already know about their customers. It’s those first-party insights about customer preferences, behavior, needs and demographics that make the best foundation for personalization anyway. Those insights can then be adapted into flexible, timely personalized messages delivered through arguably the most valuable first-party data of all: the personal email address.
We hear you, scoffing that email is an antique. Well, guess what? Email is timeless, because consumers control everything about the email experience, including when, where, and how they read it. In the past, that made things harder for marketers because highly personalized or time-sensitive messages might become stale and irrelevant if not opened promptly.
Today, it’s possible to personalize email messages around the location and context of the moment the email is opened, be that over morning coffee or during a commute home at the end of the day. And the email can be personalized with additional insights gleaned about the customer even since the campaign was originally launched, plus real-time guidance about pricing, availability, or other items the customer has browsed during the day. It is some kind of wizard-level magic to be able to send an email that changes depending on when and where you look at it, but that is the incredible world we live in.
Personalization practically predicts profits. Promise.
Even modest improvements in personalization can pay off significantly. When fashion retailer Chico’s committed to live personalization in every email, average campaign conversion rates doubled. And as cited in the Oracle/Liveclicker study, when Build.com started sending personalized emails triggered by shopper behavior, revenue per email went up 300%.
When brands use machine learning technology to optimize offers in their email newsletters, there’s a real opportunity to drive more conversions and revenue from their email marketing. Brands can serve specific ads consumers are most likely to engage with within their own newsletters and even extend personalized experiences into third-party publisher email newsletters via dynamic product ads. A leading fashion retailer was able to use interest expressed on their website to automatically personalize creatives to promote relevant products that site visitors had looked at, complete with image, product title, price, CTA, and logo, all within email. The campaign generated over 4000 conversions with an 8.56% conversion rate.
Personalization is an evolving discipline, and email has high-intensity interval trained itself to look half its age and twice as sexy as you remember. Put your unique, first-party insights to work and gain an advantage. Because in the inbox, everyone is equal until the moment the email is opened. It’s what you do with your message in that moment that makes the difference.
Learn how DailySale, a leading deals site, drove more conversions and revenue from their email marketing with a Unified Auction.
