Most marketing strategies that we see today don’t rely on data. In fact only 5-10% of more advanced companies actually consult data ahead of sending their email marketing campaigns. However, it is becoming more important for email and marketing data to be used ahead of sending any email marketing campaign.
Email delivery platforms work by tracking and analysing delivery, open and click rates through data. They track all the meta-data in every email you send, including bounce back rates and unsubscribes. The most important data for email marketing campaigns is the open and click through data, which is gathered in two different ways:
1) When images are opened the pixel URL is tracked. Each URL can be made unique and so can be tracked when it is opened.
2) Once you click on a link through your email you are automatically redirected to the website. As you are being redirected the information is sent to your email delivery platform before you reach the retailer’s website. Customers don’t normally see this because it takes fractions of a second for that information to be sent.
Although email delivery platforms analyse data, it is important that marketers are analysing this data as well; as it is, we still have a long way to go before a ‘data-driven’ culture is baked into the marketing organisation. Marketers need to start weaving data insights into their marketing strategies. For example, if you’re a daily deal sender and a specific customer doesn’t engage with your email within 60 days, then it is best to remove them from your email lists to prevent being marked as spam. To do this automatically, you need to build a model to determine engagement frequency, which is one way to bake a data-driven culture into a marketing organisation.
Currently, the most enlightening result of data-driven marketing is being able to see the difference between the highest and lowest levels of engagement. It is often wrongly assumed that the most engaged recipients are just 2-3 times more engaged than less engaged recipients; an assumption which often leads to bad sending strategies. In fact, the top 10% of engaged recipients are 100 times more likely to engage with your email marketing campaign than the bottom 10%. By recognising this, marketers will see that sending strategies can’t be ‘one size fits all’, but rather, outliers and extremes are the norm, not the exception. In understanding this, data can have a huge impact.
One challenge being faced is how to determine the difference between a good and bad email marketing sender. Current email providers like Yahoo and Google use algorithms to track email engagement and determine if they are going to deliver the email to the inbox or the spam folder. Instead of fixing the problem by using data to enhance and add value to their email marketing campaigns, many marketers are trying to find loop holes in the algorithms which allow them to fake a good email; meaning, at the moment, it’s really an arm’s race.
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Nevertheless, there is still room for intuition and ‘gut-level’ decision making, but these decisions should be data driven. For example, when sending to recipients of different levels of engagement, different levels of frequency should be used, and this should be data driven. Email aesthetics such as colours and images should be left to the creative teams – assuming data is going to solve all your problems will lead you to miss things that creative teams can bring to the table. Whatever decision data leads you to make, be sure to hold it up against the light of human reason.
