Four steps to make email marketing more effective

Customers are demanding more from their favourite brands. They want personal, authentic experiences delivered on a consistent basis.

That’s partly because they’re spending more time engaging with digital content – an average 7.8 hours each day, according to Adobe. So much more material is being created and viewed that it’s a challenge for today’s brands to achieve standout. With this in mind, the opportunities that email provides should not be undervalued. 

Many companies already have extensive experience of interacting with large numbers of customers by email, and the channel is also a large driver of revenue – UK retail sales value attributed to email marketing is £29bn, according to Econsultancy, and 74% of marketers who took part in the same research say that it’s the number one channel for ROI. 

The problem is that email has typically been used as a revenue-driving channel, satisfying short-term business needs rather than those of the customer. By taking a wider view and using this highly effective channel to deliver real value to customers there is far greater potential to increase lifetime value and brand advocacy. To this end, Merkle defines ‘performance email’ as “efficient activation of personalised and targeted email communications, to grow customer lifetime value as part of a holistic customer-first marketing strategy”. 

Manual business processes are preventing personalisation at scale. Typically, achieving this goal is not a technology concern, nor is the amount of data a problem. 

The big issue is that many companies have invested heavily in these areas but are often not realising the potential of their investment from an email perspective. The challenge centres on campaign production velocity – the ability to produce campaign variants at the pace required to deliver genuinely personal customer experiences. 

At Merkle we believe that there are four core capabilities required to deliver performance email at scale: content automation, campaign automation, effective production and approval workflows, and reporting integration.

Download Merkle’s performance email thought leadership paper which explore each of the four capabilities required to deliver performance email at scale and dive into the technical enablers and process enablers to support each capability.

By making data available and linking this to content, the potential to automate the build and execution of campaigns goes well beyond the obvious trigger executions. 

To help marketers harness the power of highly-effective email marketing, Merkle has launched our new performance email service – incorporating content, campaign and workflow automation with production MI built in. 

This is based on the benefits of automation through our Performance Email Production Hub, which is available to clients through an annual licence. 

The launch builds on our already excellent reputation in delivering email marketing automation and optimisation at scale for some of the world’s leading brands. In the US and EMEA these include L’Oréal, Samsung, IBM, Renault and News UK, and we have more than 250 people in Europe dedicated to targeting, planning, executing, reporting, analysing and optimising campaigns (both outbound and inbound).   

We have the largest and most experienced Adobe team in the UK, and we use that scale and experience to ‘turbocharge’ our clients’ transformation. 

To find out more about performance email, contact Merkle.