How to master email personalization and relevance with a unified customer view

No matter how saturated the world gets with new engagement channels and social media networks, tried-and-true email marketing remains the tactic at the core of many marketing teams’ success. And for good reason.

Lots of brands today see success with paid ad campaigns on social networking platforms, but what many don’t know is that the opportunity in email marketing is arguably still bigger — and it’s more low-cost to execute on. Per the latest data from CDP Institute, there are currently 3x more email accounts to market to than there are Facebook and Twitter accounts combined.

And when done right, email marketing is both effective and cost-effective.

On average, the return on investment for every dollar spent is an impressive $36. And it’s not news to any marketer today that personalized emails typically have higher open rates, tend to get better customer engagement scores, and can impact customers’ sentiment and loyalty toward a brand.

But unfortunately, a vast majority of marketers don’t get email marketing right. And for a lot of them, the issue starts with a unified customer view (or a lack thereof).

Why are brands still getting email marketing wrong?

Gartner estimates that 87% of companies today suffer from low data intelligence, which prevents them from getting the most out of customer data. While this issue poses a challenge for all departments within an organization, for marketers in particular, this often means running the risk of frustrating potential customers with ineffective, irrelevant, or unwanted communication.

For some time now, organizations have speculated (or rather, assumed) that a centralized or single view of the customer would help them get over this hurdle. Having a single view of all activities and interactions with a customer enables brands to get a complete understanding of their customers: offering context from which they can create deeply personalized experiences across online and offline channels.

But as we explored in a previous blog, somewhere along the way, the idea of having a 360-degree view of your customers ended up going in circles. Many brands mistakenly started to believe that, once they had consolidated their customer data into one place, a complete, prescriptive, view of their customers would magically appear.

What they found was that this wasn’t the case at all — and that they still were stuck with questions:

• How do I make sense of the customer behavior taking place across channels?
• When looking at multiple interactions or touchpoints across channels, how do I know if I’m assessing the behavior of a single customer or many?
• Then, once I understand the 360-degree view of my customer, how do I use that information effectively to grow my business and delight my customers?

Having a deep understanding of who your customers are, what they want, and how they behave is crucial to being able to not just serve, but ultimately predict their needs to make even more targeted recommendations. When it comes to email marketing efficacy, it’s even more essential.

Why personalization and unified customer views drive email marketing excellence

Personalized email marketing has been proven to increase revenue by up to 760%. And while that’s an impressive number, revenue acceleration isn’t the only advantage at play.

Effective personalization is also a strategic business tool for many organizations — especially when it’s backed by a 360-degree customer view.

• 98% of marketing professionals believe personalization advances customer relationships.
• 84% of senior decision-makers say the potential of personalization hasn’t been fully realized yet.
• 70% of businesses feel personalization is the top use case for a single or unified customer view, followed by customer insights (65%) and measuring engagement across channels (51%).

And why does this matter so much?

Because email marketing is a funny thing. You could have creative messaging and craft all sorts of variations of copy, but if the targeting is wrong or content isn’t relevant, the email will fail. No amount of A/B testing can help you woo an unengaged email audience. And because if you have a unified customer view, but aren’t getting value out of it, you may as well not have one.

Why Lytics for an elevated email strategy powered by customer data?

The Lytics CDP isn’t concerned with the majority of your data. Our focus is on the 10% of data that captures customer behavior and intent — and on using that data to bring deep, unified customer insights (that span all engagement channels) to the surface.

For example, Lytics uses first-party data to collect the email addresses of your site’s most engaged visitors, to rate them with a custom “engagement quality score,” and to grow your emailable audience. By targeting only your most engaged users, you keep your email list populated with active and interested potential buyers and can target more buyers at a fraction of the cost.

• Use lookalikes to save spend and grow your subscriber base
• Fully optimize your email audiences to reduce spend
• And retain existing customers and cut down on churn with smarter segmentation

A unified customer view and better email marketing: How to have both

With Lytics, you can simplify and personalize your email marketing campaigns and nurture flows, all at scale. Lytics’ first-party user data allows brands to build more meaningfully segmented audiences and to hypertarget email audiences based on behavioral and intent-based data on their unique interests.

Try Lytics Decision Engine free today to learn how to make your email marketing predictive, not just proactive.