email marketing platforms can help brands to succeed

Email is still the most important form of online marketing, regardless of how excited digital marketers are about the latest shiny thing (I am looking at you AI). It’s the foundation of many companies’ marketing programs. Email marketing is not the same as it used to be. Marketers are embracing capabilities such as data-driven personalization and multi-channel campaigning, audience segmentation and testing, and more. Some of these are driven by AI and Machine Learning.

Email is growing because it consistently delivers impressive results. A Litmus survey conducted in 2020 of 2,000 email marketer found that for every dollar spent on email marketing they generated $36 in revenue.

Your company’s ROI may be higher depending on the industry in which you operate. For every dollar they spend, agencies in marketing, advertising, and PR see a $42 return. Businesses in retail, consumer goods, ecommerce, and ecommerce receive $45 for every dollar.

Data centrality and the need to update technology

The email space has been around since the beginning of the internet but it is not static. Email marketing, and the technology that enables it, have evolved to deal with challenges like spam and deliverability and also to take advantage of opportunities, such as the ever-increasing sophistication of data usage for hyper-personalization.

MarTech’s 2022 MarTech Replacement Survey surveyed marketers and found that technologies for email distribution (of which email is a major component) and marketing automation (of which email is a chief component) were among the four most popular software types replaced in the past 18 months.

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In 2022, 23% of respondents said they had replaced marketing automation, compared to 24% in the year 2021. Email distribution technologies have been replaced by 21% in 2022 compared to just 24% in the 2021 survey.

The majority of respondents who changed email distribution systems did so because they wanted to use a commercial solution, whether it was from another vendor or their own home-grown solution. The main reason was to benefit from newer and better features.

Email technology has evolved to a new level.

Maturity can be an obstacle when it comes to technology. Software development is more advanced for new businesses, whereas older firms are often burdened by legacy technologies.

Technology players are always introducing new features, some more quickly than others. It can be difficult to maintain an old infrastructure and keep things running for existing customers while doing so.

Even though the COVID-19 Pandemic may be responsible for driving communications between businesses and customers towards digital channels such as email, this preference appears to persist even now that it is diminishing. Salesforce’s report on the State of the Connected Customer shows that 57% of customers prefer to communicate with businesses by email in 2022. This is down from 65% of customers in 2020.

In spite of this, many emails end up in the inbox without being opened, let alone read, or clicked. In the first three-quarters of 2021 recipients read brand emails for an average time of 10 seconds, according to a Litmus study of 8 billion email openings. This was down from 11.8 second in 2020 and 13:4 seconds in 2018.

These statistics show why email marketing platforms and marketers are working together to develop more engaging, personalized and relevant messages. This will increase the chances of the content being read.

Personalization is a must amid the data-driven pressures

Other developments have changed the data landscape and made it difficult to collect statistics such as these regarding users’ email interactions. Tech companies have made it more difficult for marketers to collect information about users because they are trying to protect their privacy.

Apple and Google have reduced the use of mobile ads identifiers to protect customer privacy. Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), a feature in iOS, Mac OS, and Watch OS, which can hide IP addresses and open rates, and limit data that marketers have access to.

Hide My Email is another Apple feature that lets users create unique email addresses which are forwarded to their inboxes. A person can use a different email address to communicate with each business they are in contact with. This will foil technologies that try to combine data from multiple sources to create a comprehensive view of the customer’s needs and interests.

This change has led to a shift in digital marketing to focus on first-party data. The open rate, as an email marketing metric is no longer meaningful, because MPP hides the fact that emails have been opened or not by using cache.

The shift in data landscape and the increasing emphasis on data-driven personalized marketing have prompted vendors of email platforms to enhance the data within their platform and to change the focus to metrics other than the open rate.

Email marketing platform capabilities

Email Marketing Platforms typically offer features for creating and sending emails, but consolidation and integrated have added more than one might expect. These platforms offer a variety of capabilities.

• Design and creation of messages
• Automating workflows and collaborating
• Previewing Messages
• Email sending
• Deliverability Management
• Data management
• Ecommerce capabilities
• Reporting and analytics
• Third-party integration
• Automating landing pages

Some providers offer advanced capabilities such as:

• Customer Data Platform with more features
• Platform leveraging artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities through various parts

Email marketing: Benefits and advantages

Adopting an enterprise email solution can offer many benefits. Even though most businesses have some form of email in place, it is still a vital part of business. These include:

• Data unification across channels. Email marketing platforms can include customer data platforms. Even if they do not, customer databases linked to these systems are a source of truth for an entire organization. This unification allows businesses to have a comprehensive view of their clients, allowing them to use data for marketing, product development, and customer service. Platforms can help businesses comply with CANSPAM regulations and other privacy laws.
• An overall more unified stack of technology. The majority of email marketing platforms have extensive integrations with business technology, which allows companies to work more efficiently across silos.
• Ability of identifying more profitable audiences and segmentation strategy. By connecting additional data sources, the unified data vault allows marketers to better understand their customers and identify audiences that are similar. Artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities can uncover useful insights that marketers might not be aware of.
• Improved workflows. Each email intended for a specific audience or segment is reviewed and approved internally. Email marketing platforms can be used to obtain approvals and collaborate within the platform. This is particularly useful for large, distributed organizations or those working in highly regulated industries. Multi-location businesses and franchises benefit from more complex systems that allow them to share assets, establish guidelines and also add customization.
• A more personal and efficient way to communicate with customers. Combining template design with data insights and segmentation allows businesses to send more relevant, timely and personalized messages. Automated messaging and triggered messages can also increase efficiency. Businesses can extend communication to mobile devices and SMS by integrating SMS or mobile notifications into their systems.
• Design and deliverability of emails are improved. Email marketing platforms’ deliverability systems – both technological and relationship-oriented – can help businesses ensure their messages make it to the inbox. The design and preview tools allow marketers to control how their messages look, regardless of where they’re viewed.
• Access more advanced coding and interactivity. Email marketing platforms make it easier to access interactive capabilities, such as AMP for emails or CSS. This allows businesses to create engaging messages that have a better return.
• Improved ability to measure ROI (return on investment) and more. Data and reporting tools can be used to link email messages with specific business goals. This allows marketers to optimize their content and target audience to achieve the best results.

The article How email marketing platforms can help brands succeed first appeared on MarTech.