Digital Marketing Brief

Effective Email Marketing – A Powerful Targeting Tool

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Email marketing has been proven to be an effective marketing strategy for reaching out to target customers and prospects – and increase conversion rates. Targeting with action-based relevance is especially effective, and while this practice is most often associated with b2c email programs directed to consumers, b2b email marketing is equally as effective for reaching out to businesses.

Two recent surveys from digital marketing services provider Lyris revealed insights on the use of segmentation and the role of automation in driving targeted email communications to engage subscribers and increase conversions.

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About Lyris Inc:

Lyris (@Lyris ) is a leading global provider of digital marketing solutions that help companies engage with customers in more meaningful ways. Lyris products and services empower marketers to design, automate, and optimize data- driven interactive marketing campaigns that facilitate superior engagement, increase conversions, and deliver measurable business value. Lyris’ high-performance, secure, and flexible digital marketing platforms improve marketing efficiency by providing automated digital message delivery, robust segmentation, and real-time digital channel analytics. The Lyris solutions portfolio is comprised of both in-the-cloud and on-premises offerings – Lyris HQ and Lyris LM – combined with customer-focused services and support. More than 5,000 companies worldwide partner with Lyris to manage and execute sophisticated digital marketing campaigns across email, social, Web, and mobile channels. Learn more at www.lyris.com.

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The Lyris Digital Optimizer customer survey conducted in late 2012 indicated that list segmentation/targeting is used “very often” or “sometimes” by over 80 percent of respondents. List segmentation by demographics was revealed to be way ahead of other segmentation means, used by 39 percent, even if others – such as type of purchase (used by only 20 percent), website activity (used by only 11 percent), and amount of purchase (used by only 10 percent) – are more effective list strategies because they are behavioral in nature.

These findings go hand-in-hand with the results of an additional survey sponsored by Lyris and conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in July of this year. The EIU Mind the Marketing Gap survey found that 45 percent of marketing executives now view marketers’ limited competency in analyzing data, such as that provided through email marketing analytics , as a major obstacle to implementing more effective digital marketing strategies, second only to inadequate budgets for digital marketing and database management.

This raises the question, do digital marketers have the email marketing tools and expertise to effectively segment lists using data that is dynamic and changing based on consumer behavior?

Delivering Action-based Relevance

Email campaigns– such as triggered emails based on a customer’s behavior and welcome programs initiated after opt-ins – deliver highly-relevant engagement with customers when they expect it. Also, messages sent to customers that are based on their actions, such as after a purchase or after shopping cart abandonment, are proven to be much more relevant than “batch-and-blast” emails.

Accordingly, the types of email automation that are found to be most effective are those that leverage timeliness and relevance to the email recipient. Other types of automated messaging, such as transactional emails and drip campaigns, require more involvement of the email recipients – they have to do something to initiate engagement from the marketer. But the bottom line is this: turning data into business value is a huge opportunity for digital marketers, and challenges them to re-examine what they think they know about their customers and re-evaluate how best to engage with them.

Download our guide, 2012 Lyris Digital Optimizer Report, to learn more about targeting with action-based relevance.

Summary