Communicating with customers is essential for building relationships and driving business outcomes, with email being arguably the best channel for personalized communication at scale. It's no surprise that various departments within your organization want to leverage email to boost their results. Merchandising teams aim to highlight specific products, while marketing focuses on driving total sales and margin. However, a critical question remains: how does the customer influence the messaging and content they receive?
Internal Stakeholders and Their Email Goals
Merchandising teams
Merchandising teams tend to focus on increasing impressions for their products. To drive product awareness, they may propose newsletters or dedicated email streams centered on the products or categories they manage, targeting a broad audience. For instance, newsletters might highlight the newest or top-selling items within a single category. While this approach can work well for specific customer segments, scaling it up often leads to customer disengagement. When customers receive content that feels too generic or irrelevant, they quickly lose interest, reducing email deliverability and harming the brand’s reputation and customer loyalty.
Marketing teams
Marketing teams, on the other hand, focus on driving sales through promotions and raising awareness of products and services. Within marketing organizations, efforts are typically divided by marketing channels, with each channel concentrating on its own performance metrics, often overlooking the impact on customer lifetime value (CLTV). Given the emphasis on channel performance, marketers frequently need to push back against over-mailing, as organizations seek quick wins through incremental messaging. However, an overabundance of promotional emails can lead to email fatigue, where customers start ignoring or unsubscribing from communications altogether. This significantly diminishes the overall effectiveness of email marketing as a communication channel and can negatively affect customer retention.
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The Customer's Perspective - Relevance and Preference
From the customer perspective, relevancy is paramount, whether driven by products or promotions. A 2018 study by Accenture found that 83% of customers are willing to share their data in exchange for a personalized experience, and 91% are more willing to shop with brands that offer relevant recommendations and personalized offers. When executed well, personalized emails help establish long-term relationships and trust with customers. How important is that trust? Consider that Apple created Hide My Email to protect customers from abusive or unwanted email practices. Customers welcome trusted brands into their inbox, but avoidance tactics or quiet unsubscribes can result in nearly 80% of customers ignoring emails at some point.
Customers today are bombarded with marketing messages across multiple channels and are more selective about which communications they engage with. If an email does not provide immediate value or relevance, it will be ignored, or worse, marked as spam. This is why understanding customer preferences and tailoring email content is critical. It’s about creating a positive, engaging experience that fosters loyalty and drives long-term customer value.
Achieving Customer Relevance with Marketing Technology
Achieving relevance in email marketing has become easier with the availability of more sophisticated tools and data, leaving little excuse for not providing tailored experiences or messages. Key factors include Customer Browsing Behavior (Pages, categories, and items viewed are high-value leading indicators of future purchases), and Engagement Activity, which indicates how often and when customers are most receptive to campaigns.
These activities can be read by Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), which play a crucial role, adding value with:
- Automated Customization: CDPs automate customized messaging frequency and content based on a customer’s interactivity, optimizing the message mix based on when and in which channel the customer is most receptive.
- 3rd Party and Coop Data: CDPs connected to external data sources add value by allowing you to target based on customers' shopping activity outside your own properties.
With the right data feeding into your CDP, you can leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance personalization with strategies and tactics such as:
- Predictive Analytics: AI can proactively predict customer interest for customization.
- Micro-Segmentation: AI creates micro-segments to identify slight variations, increasing targeting capabilities by unifying data from multiple sources, quickly learning the impact of new sources, clustering and building predictive models, and updating segments in real-time as data and weights change.
- Identity Resolution: Ties anonymous data to known customers, improving the experience through better segmentation and personalization.
Previously, marketers relied on data analytics teams to build propensity models using conditional statements, which often missed the complexities of data relationships and were slow to react to changes.
When considering the tools needed for effective email governance, you might wonder if your existing Email Service Providers (ESPs) can manage, or if you need a more specialized tool like Master Data Management (MDM).
- Governance Features: ESPs offer a range of governance features, from “not at all” to capping messages based on message type (e.g., no more than 3 triggered emails in a 5-day period per email address).
- Complementary Tools: MDM can house identity and permissions, while ESP (or CDP) manages customer contacts. Collaboration between email operations and MDM teams enhances customer ID to email relationships and accuracy in mailing lists.
Having worked closely with both ESPs and MDMs teams, we find that they can complement each other, with identity and permissions housed within MDM, and managing the customer contacts within the ESP (or CDP). Both teams benefit from working together, as insights and input from the email operations team provided feedback for better customer ID to email relationships, and the email team received a list of the most accurate matches for mailing.
A CDP can collect and unify customer data from multiple sources, creating a single, comprehensive customer profile. This includes data from website interactions, email engagement, prior purchase history, and offline behavior. By leveraging this unified data set, marketers can gain a holistic view of each customer, allowing for highly personalized and relevant communications. For example, if a customer frequently browses a particular category on the website but only purchases in-store, a tailored email offering a store discount on those products might be the nudge they need to convert.
CDPs also enable real-time personalization. As customer behaviors and preferences change, the CDP continuously updates their profiles, ensuring that the messaging remains relevant. This dynamic approach to email marketing means that brands can react quickly to changes in customer behavior, delivering timely and contextually relevant messages that drive engagement and conversions.
Best Practices for Deciding Organizational Ownership of Customer Email
Centralization has been a prominent topic in organizations I have been a part of, uniting messaging ownership under a single team. Building goals around customer value allows these teams to focus on the customer relationship, considering:
- Recency of transactional and marketing emails
- Behavior of the most recent and most active customers
- Preference center data
- Predictive analytics
- Channel overlap
A centralized team is better equipped to manage customer identity, including customers with multiple email addresses or anonymous customers. Implementing a CDP can unify this data, reducing anonymous customers via identity resolution. This is particularly helpful if operating multiple brands, or ensuring known customers are not being served an email sign-up lightbox upon re-entering the website.
This centralized team is also in the best position to determine which channel is best suited for customer messaging. This could be based on message intent or the type of property the message is driving towards. Identity resolution powered by a CDP will improve the customer experience. More customers are shopping with a multichannel approach. Even a few years ago, over 56% of customers surveyed were using their smartphones to research and locate products in stores, and that number has only increased. What percentage of these shoppers receive cart or browse abandon messages despite purchasing in-store?
Many organizations optimize spend based on marketing attribution, but a perfect model is yet to be seen. The customer perspective seeks a meaningful, personalized, seamless experience across channels and is not concerned with channel prioritization or where credit is given. Rather than optimizing messages based on attribution, a CDP can learn the customer activity and preferences by channel, providing the right message at the right time, in the right location.
A centralized approach also helps maintain consistency in messaging. A centralized team, supported by a CDP, ensures that the overall email strategy aligns with the brand’s objectives and customer needs, reducing the risk of over-communication and ensuring that each email adds value to the customer’s journey.
The Customer Owns the Email - Maximize their Experience with Valuable and Relevant Content
Who's in the best position to determine what's right for each customer? There is no better option than the customers themselves, but this requires tools and technology, and a centralized team to operate the program. It’s our job as marketers to provide what the customer is seeking, and a CDP can help tailor our communications to match the individual customer, whether this is delivering less or more email, or using other addressable media (especially for customers not opted in to email), driving long-term relationships.
By leveraging the capabilities of a CDP, organizations can ensure that their email marketing strategies are not just driven by internal goals but are also finely tuned to meet the needs and preferences of their customers. This approach not only enhances the relevance and effectiveness of marketing communications but also fosters a deeper sense of trust and loyalty between the brand and its customers.
