Join us for this live webinar — How to navigate the email marketing landscape — on Tuesday, June 30 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free.
In VB’s recent report on email marketing, we found that nearly 80 percent of email marketers struggle with the basics of maintaining or growing subscribers using email marketing. More than 50 percent are dissatisfied with their current email marketing provider. So what’s the problem?
In this upcoming webinar, we’ll share not only the findings of our investigation into nearly 708 email marketing vendors, but our panel of experts will open up about their successes, challenges, and how to make email marketing one of the most reliable growth channels.
For Jake Mass, EVP of Business Operations for the experience marketplace LivingSocial (and one of our expert panelists), it can be boiled down to one word: relevancy. “We’ve built email into our core product experience and a lot of what we do is optimize around making that channel really hyper-relevant,” says Mass. “And that involves taking a balanced approach which is part art and part science.”
The science part involves continually leveraging data to learn more about LivingSocial’s consumers. Their data science team analyzes regularly how customers are interacting with the service, as well as third-party data, in order to serve up personalized email content that anticipates customers’ unique needs and desires. But on the other hand, relying too much on historical behavioral data can work against you.
“One of the problems I think a lot of folks face is how do you make an experience personalized that doesn’t kick you down a path that ultimately can lead to a stale user experience,” says Mass. “Just because you know one of your users loves sushi restaurants doesn’t mean that we should serve up sushi restaurants every single day to that person. That may be the right way to optimize the experience for that person in the short term, but over the long run, that strategy will fall short and lead to an engagement experience that’s not very interesting to those users.”
For LivingSocial, the solution has been to create an algorithm that couples rich historical data with a sampling method. “It’s hard to always predict through data models and testing that someone might wake up one morning and decide that they want to jump out of an airplane with a skydiving deal.” The goal is to provide that serendiptious moment of happiness that can surprise and delight among the expected personalized content that customers demand.
And while email has been a staple of maintaining customer engagement for Mass, he believes it’s vital not to treat it as a silo — which is a danger many marketers face. “You don’t have two customers — one who engages you through email and one who engages you through mobile,” says Mass. “Oftentimes you have one customer who’s going to engage with you through both those channels and so you really need a singular consumer view across all channels.”
In fact, for LivingSocial, learnings from both their mobile and email channels improve the other. “We’re always looking at how to leverage our learnings in email to make the app experience more relevant as well as vice versa — and how can those compliment each other.” It quickly becomes evident how a singular view of the customer is vital to optimizing all channels. And with email not going away anytime soon (if at all), it’s time for marketers to get it right.
Join us and learn what over 1,000 email marketers across a range of company sizes said worked best for them — and the providers they relied on as well as what vendors are best for what type of organizations. And learn some secrets from our guest panelists about unlocking the potential of email marketing, no matter what size your company.
Don’t miss out!
What you’ll learn:
- The tools best suited for your needs
- Email marketing ROI and how to apply these principles to your business
- Strategies and core competencies for going from good to great with your email program
- What technology is available to help grow and maintain your list, and develop new methods for email subscriber acquisition
- Where the industry is headed, and how you need to prepare
Speakers:
Jon Cifuentes Industry Analyst, VentureBeat Insight
Jake Maas EVP, Business Operations, LivingSocial
Bobby Uhlenbrock CTO, EverythingButTheHouse
This webinar is made possible in part by the support of Message Systems. All research was conducted in advance and entirely independent.