Each month, we like to provide you with some insights from our own customer data to help inform your marketing strategy.
This month, we’re taking a look at some Y-O-Y trends, and highlighting several clients that are leveraging email to drive measurable behavior change with their customers. We’ll also take a look at some of the tools and strategies available to improve your own email marketing metrics and drive better engagement.
Email: The Foundation of Personalization
Email is not dead. As the foundational outbound channel of most marketing strategies, email continues to perform highly.
Though the other burgeoning channels get a lot of attention, email is still the number-one retention marketing tool available to businesses. For many companies, email is the lynchpin of their master database, and the key identifier that makes unified customer profiles possible.
Email has become the backbone of omnichannel marketing strategies that yield returns.
Open Rates Up, Bounce Rates Down
For April 2017, the median open rate across all Emarsys e-commerce clients was 17.2% for all marketing campaign types (excluding transactional messaging), but the top 25% of clients are seeing open rates of 22.8%.
We are also seeing bounce rates dropping across all clients, with a median bounce rate of 0.384%. In terms of customer engagement rates, the top 25% of clients see a bounce rate of only 0.2%. Conversion rates have a median of 0.395%, but the top 25% of Emarsys clients have an average of 2.59% across all campaign types.
If we look back at the same e-commerce clients in April 2016, we see the median and average for the top 25% clients’ open rates, click rates, and conversion rates were higher, while bounce rates were lower.
What the Top 25% Have in Common
Looking at median results for April 2017 data, we can see that there is a great degree of variability across different verticals.
However, there are three constants that the top 25% of Emarsys clients share:
Automation
Their Business as Usual (BAU) campaigns don’t necessarily perform higher than other clients, but the top 25% companies have an increased number of automated campaigns triggered by website visits, purchases, and other user behavior. Emarsys Automation Center users in the “Moderate” (5-30 active programs) and “Advanced” (>30 active programs) ranges saw their triggered campaigns lift their average results. For advice on how to improve your overall engagement and conversions through easy-to-introduce campaigns, see “5 Essential Marketing Automation Campaigns for 2017” and the Toys “R” Us case study.
Segmentation
Our own analysis of client results found that a “Moderate” user of segmentation has between 70 and 210 campaign segments, and an “Advanced” user has more than 210. However, Emarsys clients that use Smart Insight (our program that automatically creates segments using machine learning) have higher results than other clients, and they also spend less time in-platform than our clients who use the segmentation program alone. For more, see our ERFM whitepaper “ERFM: The New Science of Segmentation” to understand how segmentation can be employed successfully.
Personalization
With thousands of products and millions of customers out there, matching the right content to the right customer manually is simply too complex to scale, but using our recommendation engine, clients see up to four times more conversions than standard campaigns. For more on how easy-to-use artificial intelligence (AI) can improve your customer engagement and marketing ROI, see “4 Ways a Predictive Recommendation Engine Will Benefit Your Business.”
Engage with Emarsys
Our mission is to support all our clients in delivering on the promise of marketing, by enabling brands around the world to scale truly personalized interactions. In commitment to this goal, we continue our on-demand training and webinar program to cover the tactical approaches that marketers can implement across all campaigns and verticals.
In our next product release, we will roll out a range of tools to help marketing teams understand how successful their campaigns can be when measured against these benchmarks. We also offer to support teams in-platform, with advice on building better campaigns, extending reach across channels, and driving up marketing ROI through better customer engagement.
Stay tuned for updates via our regular newsletter and webinar programs!
