When hyper-personalized emails miss the mark, they aren’t just ineffective — they’re downright unsettling.

To assess the effectiveness of personalization, my company conducted a real-world experiment. We paid a couple thousand dollars for a couple hundred hyper-personalized emails and then measured their successes against a similar number of generic and relevant emails. As it turned out, those run-of-the-mill emails performed better than the personalized ones by a substantial margin. Why is that? Well, the truth is that most marketers believe that they know who their target audience is, so they integrate that knowledge into an approach that uses personalized emails that they feel is most effective. When these hyper-personalized emails miss the mark, they aren’t just ineffective, they’re downright unsettling. According to a RichRelevance study, despite mostly enjoying personalized experiences from brands, up to 75% of US consumers deemed most forms of personalized business communications…

When it comes to your email marketing channel, the key to realizing and implementing this sales approach is through prospect segmentation, the more specific, the better.

I see it way too often: companies going for the quick sale. They do it before they even get to know you. It’s like a salesperson at a retail store, immediately after you walk in, saying ‘Hi - I know just what you need, and it’s right over here!’ Big time turn off. Plus, you’ll probably never go back there again. Such ‘push’ selling is dead and has been replaced by personalized selling approaches. When it comes to your email marketing channel, the key to realizing and implementing this sales approach is through prospect segmentation, the more specific, the better. [si_blog_banner_cta] In case you’re still a doubter, here are some compelling statistics from email automation vendor Mailchimp: Opens for segmented email campaigns are 14.3%…

Whether you’re buying dedicated solo emails, newsletter sponsorships, or native email ads, email advertising is consistently the king of ROI for generating new leads and customers

Just how much bang for your buck can you expect to get out of email marketing campaigns? According to one study, each dollar invested in email campaigns yields $44 on average in return. Also, consider that 91% of users like getting emails from companies they do business with, and it’s clear why email is the largest source of new revenue for 59% of marketers. One of the most overlooked but best ways to acquire new leads and customers to market to via email is — surprise, surprise — email advertising. That’s because prospects who initially engage with your brand in the email medium tend to purchase at far higher rates in this same medium compared…

Sending emails has been an integral part of digital marketing for its direct approach and cost-effective methodology

You’ve probably had your first taste of artificial intelligence from science fiction films that depict robots gaining sentience through the wonders of the technology. This is still far from happening in the immediate future, but it wouldn’t be surprising if such advancements are actually achieved. But as far as we are from having sentient robots that might take over the world, artificial intelligence has already made it relatively far from the day it first came to be. There are emerging trends with the technology across various industries as it’s utilized to improve different processes. In the field of digital marketing, artificial intelligence plays a crucial role, particularly when it comes to email marketing. Sending emails has been an integral part of digital marketing for its direct approach and cost-effective methodology. With the help of artificial intelligence, …

Every day, we instinctively change our communication styles to fit our audience

That bawdy joke? You’re never going to tell it in the presence of your buttoned-up in-laws. Instead, you’ll wait until you’re surrounded by old friends. Why? It comes down to intuition. As children, we begin to understand that no two people communicate the same way. Yet by the time we hit adulthood, we seem to forget that fact, especially when it comes to corporate communications and marketing. Instead of lumping together all our prospects and customers, we would be much better off if we focused on connecting with them on the basis of their personalities. In other words, we should speak their language, not try to force them to learn ours. [si_guide_block id="44461" title="Download FREE Resource – Email trends 2017: A visual guide" description="Review your approach to email marketing by reviewing the latest trends."/] Authors Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram dived…

Learning from 6 layered targeting options used by online retailers that can be applied to any business

There are many different levels in sophistication of targeting for email marketing. In this post I'll run through some of the most common examples used by retailers since I think they can often be applied to companies who don't sell online like relationship-building or B2B companies. Here, I will outline what I see as the 6 most common segmentation approaches. More details are available in my book Total Email Marketing and my more recent 7 Steps to Email Marketing Success Ebook on Smart Insights.

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Chart of the Day: We all know we should send targeted email marketing - so why aren't we?

"Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that’s no reason not to give it." ― Agatha Christie From being young we are given good advice like, "don't eat mud", "fire is hot" or "don't eat too many sweets". I don't know about you, but I still ate mud, burnt my finger and binged on sherbert. Now we are adults, we are still given advice and email marketing is no different. We know that targeted marketing has a better Return on Investment (ROI) and engagement rate, but why don't we all do it? In the below chart, we see that a plurality of companies across almost all industries still have no targeting and everyone gets the same message. Publishing and media seem to be the worst, at 56%. Whereas Online Advertising Network has 28% using…

Chart of the Day: What challenges you when it comes to email marketing? Part 1 of 4.

For email marketers, there will always be aspects of email marketing that are a challenge. The below chart looks at the various areas that email marketers are struggling with. I will be doing a 4 part series of issues pertaining to email marketing. We will be looking at the following during the course of the series: Targeting & Segmenting Subscriber list growth Tracking results Main email marketing goal. There is no real surprise that "Targeting & Segmenting" comes up with the highest score of 40%. For most, the main issue will be the clients' data records. They will be inaccurate, out of date or incomplete. The more data you can obtain from your clients, that is relevant to your business, the more tailored you can make your emails. Segmented email campaigns have…

Chart of the Day:  Black Friday and Cyber Monday Cart Abandonment Rates Jump to 68%

Cart Abandonment is the scourge of e-commerce retailers everywhere, and this year it seems to be on the increase, particularly where there are promotions. New data emerging from the two busiest ecommerce days of 2016 (Black Friday and Cyber Monday) shows extremely high cart abandonment rates across the board. These are particularly high on mobile devices, where 78% of carts are abandoned. E-commerce retailers should be asking themselves, are 4 out of 5 people abandoning their carts because they're having second thoughts about purchasing, or is it because the checkout pages aren't properly optimized for mobile? If a customer has to use fiddly forms that are hard to complete on a Smartphone they are far more likely to abandon their cart. It's not all bad news though. Although the cart abandonment rates are huge, many of these customers can be nudged…

The latest research suggests many marketers are missing out on the benefits of automated Email marketing

The Email Marketing Industry Census 2015 from Econsultancy and Adestra shows a slight improvement in Email marketing automation and overall it seems that there are many enthusiastic adopters of Email Marketing Automation. 43% of email marketers agreed they have advanced marketing automated/email messaging functions and 2/3 of the respondents are using' subscription or sign-up to website' emails. But when you look at the type of automated emails used we see a different story. Although there are steady year-on-year improvements across most types, the rates of adoption are still surprisingly low. For example, one third aren't using 'onboarding' emails when someone signs up. Two thirds aren't using follow-ups based on content viewed on site suggesting their email systems and web content tracking aren't joined up or no rules are in place to trigger these emails. …