AI is undoubtedly one of the biggest marketing buzzwords today and, combined with dynamic content, it’s helping one longtime brand asset – email – become even more effective.
Just like digital out-of-home is helping billboards remain relevant and brands like Ikea are using AR to reinvent the humble catalog, marketers can now tap into a myriad of data sources to cater messages to subscribers at the precise time and location of open.
That’s in part because the majority of consumers use smartphones as their primary device for checking email. Adobe’s 2016 Real-Time marketing Insights Study also found 77 percent of respondents were planning to use real-time technologies that can help improve personalization efforts with more relevant data. (The 2017 study found smartphones remain the most commonly used device to check email.)
According to email marketing firm Adestra, for example, 72.5 percent of consumers pick email as their preferred communication channel with businesses.
What’s more, a blog post from email experience platform Movable Ink said email is successful with consumers of all ages.
And, according to data from research-based marketing firm Ascend2, more than half of marketers rank email as an effective marketing channel – behind only brand websites.
This is surely, at least in part, because email has a median ROI of 122 percent, which is four times higher than other channels, according to email marketing platform GetResponse. The GetResponse study also noted email makes it easy for subscribers to share marketing messages and for brands to track engagement and conversions, as well as to test and optimize campaigns.
And yet, according to email marketing company MailChimp, the average open rate for emails in nearly 50 industries is 21.8 percent, and respondents to Adobe’s 2016 study found less than 25 percent of brand offers via email are interesting enough to open.
And that’s why dynamic email, in particular, offers promise – it takes personalization one step further by not only targeting specific messages to specific consumers but by also waiting until the precise moment of open to pull in other relevant data points to determine what content is served.
Research from email and cross-channel marketing firm Yes Lifecycle Marketing found personalized subject lines generate a 50 percent higher open rate, but only 2 percent of email subject lines employ personalization. And only 1.2 percent of all emails sent in Q2 2017 were personalized based on other factors, such as loyalty program status, browse behavior or purchase history.
But the possibilities for email personalization go far beyond subject lines.
“When an email is being sent to a consumer, what is being sent is the HTML codes that describe the text of the email and the layout of what it looks like, but…when it gets to [the email client], only then [does Apple Mail or Gmail] ask the server what image to show to the consumer,” said Liad Agmon, CEO of personalization technology stack Dynamic Yield. “If companies like us or Movable Ink can intercept that request, we know it came from you because we know your email address and location and every contextual data [point] that we need in real time to generate an image or set of images that are being sent back to the email program. That’s how the technology works. This is what enables us to do dynamic email.”
And that, for example, means LaFourchette, which Bridgette Darling, product marketing manager of personalization management tool Adobe Campaign, described as sort of like the French version of restaurant reservation tool OpenTable, can use the time of open to determine which restaurants still have availability and present those options to recipients while they can still get a table.
However, these dynamic email players are able to tap into much more than just time of open.
