There is no secret that email marketing is the go-to choice for marketers during the Festive Holiday Season. The effectiveness & affordability of email marketing renders it so. With so much riding on the annual Indian festival season, it’s more important than ever to consider a strategy on how your email campaigns can stand out and stay afloat in the sea of holiday messages.
Having said that, it has become extremely important to increase the use of targeted email campaigns and advanced tactics that can lead to higher effectiveness and engagement. In fact, a recent survey confirms that 78% of marketers rate their company’s competence in email marketing as either intermediate or progressive.
By taking a personalized & integrated approach, combining the right choice of Marketing Automation and using the right techniques; email marketing can help deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.
The New Wave in Email – Real-Time Personalisation (RTP)
The cutting-edge idea of ‘real-time personalization in email‘ – facilitates immediate reaction to customer behavior that increases engagement, helps customers know that marketers are listening to their needs and provides them with the products or information they were looking for.
Personalisation is everywhere, yet even with its rampant recognition and power only a handful of companies are putting it to great use.
Kenscio Digital takes you through the aspects of RTP and how marketers can use it to drive engagement in an email:
Countdown Timer & Progress Bar
The Festive Season from September to December is when Indians shop the most. This is the period when they also make big purchases such as cars, major electronic items, real estate etc. Email marketers can create a sense of urgency by using simple yet effective ‘Live Triggers’ such as countdown timers & progress bars. These tools when embedded in an emailer can showcase the time remaining on exclusive offers and limited stock items. These tools can create the excitement and urgency among customers by leveraging their fear of missing out (FOMO) and prompt them to make a purchase decision.
Geo-Targeting
Consumers are flooded with emails — and as inboxes grow heavy, clicks and engagement decline. This makes personalization more important than ever. With Geo-Targeting, marketers can automate the distribution of email campaigns with pre-determined triggers on a regional or local basis to showcase the best offers to customers based on their current GPS location.
Time-Based Offerings
Real time data can be used by marketers to offer hourly offers & deals so that the customer gets to view a deal that’s still valid. The offers dynamically change as per the time of opening the email, thereby ensuring that customers receive relevant offers and information every time. Embedding real-time scheduling in emails helps marketers create highly targeted and timely email content which is relevant to their target audiences.
Dynamic Image Ranking
Enables email marketers to rank products or offers based on the number of clicks they receive. The most clicked images are then, dynamically pushed ahead and shown to customers when they open their emails. This ensures that popular offers stay in demand.
Social Proofing
This RTP tool pulls in real-time conversations about the brand from social media platforms such as Twitter, Review and Rating Sites. It showcases online comments by customers – which could be about the brand, their newest offers, deals or events.
Live Customer Ranking
This tool lets customer rank the brand’s offerings in real-time. These insights can help email marketers continue or abandon a strategy so as to offer the best to their customers online.
Live Website Feed
The discounts and offers that are rocking on your website can be pulled in to email campaigns when your customers are opening them. This would excite your customers to get to the website and explore further and buy.
Real Time Recommendations
Gone are the days, when your emails are so static and contain stale recommendations. Hook up your Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning based Recommendation algorithms based on your customer, the time he opened the email, location of access, and type of device. Provide more personalized offers in real time based on all data available to the customers at the time, they are looking at the email.
When it comes to keeping customers engaged during the Festival Season, it’s important to consider the message, channel, and timing. Real-time email marketing allows you to extend a solution to your audience in the most effective manner. It helps boost customer engagement by using interactive, geographic and demographic customer data, where you can be ensured that your real-time marketing messages will generate favorable results immediately, resulting in successful email marketing campaigns.
