Despite the massive potential of email, thousands of marketers are seeing deflating email campaign rates — but that shouldn’t be the case in 2016. Join our upcoming webinar and learn how today’s customer behavioral data will blow your current email results out of the water.
No marketing strategy does better than email, done right. According to VB Insight’s research, your email marketing campaigns could be garnering you $38 for every $1 spent.
The secret is personalization. “Not just reaching users but having things that are incredibly relevant to them,” says Brian Witlin, COO of Yummly and guest panelist at our upcoming webinar. “Relevant to the actual individual and also timely.”
That means going beyond dynamic field insertion — because consumers just aren’t impressed that you know their name anymore. They want to feel that you really know them — their preferences, their interests, their situation, and their lives. Personalization becomes more than demonstrating you have some data about them. It’s about what you do with that data, and how you anticipate their needs, click with their wants, and deliver the right message at the right time, every time.
Personalization done right means engagement, the invaluable currency of loyalty — and that translates to increased spending.
Yummly is a food discovery platform that relies heavily on personalization to deliver recipes and other food content that users want and didn’t know they needed. With more than 15 million monthly unique users, and that total growing by 1 million registered users every month, Yummly knows what works when it comes to personalization.
Witlin says it starts from the instant your customer signs up. “We have a very extensive onboarding process, so when people come to Yummly, they know it’s all about personalization,” he says. “On day one, we get as much info as we can.” And the list is long: age and gender, household size, how many kids, how many adults, experience level in cooking, preferences, and dietary needs.
But don’t forget the importance of implicit data, delivered by capturing the user experience in your app. In Yummly, if a user clicks the Yum button appended to each recipe Yummly serves, it sends hundreds of signals that are folded into a customer’s profile, from a preference to spicy foods to a dislike of mayo, to a user’s tendency to prep for their week on Wednesdays.
“We know a ton about each customer and emails perform incredibly well and draw people back into the service,” Witlin says. “We take into account a lot of factors in the messages we send users, and that’s why we see a lot of success with our integrations.”
Backed by all this data, Yummly’s email template is the same week to week, but no two emails are the same — each user gets a completely unique email. It’s relevant, important content that users appreciate and even send thank you notes for — not just easily-deleted clutter.
When someone opens an email from Yummly, Witlin says, “it feels like this curated collection of recipes that have been hand-picked for them — and it’s triggered by a combination of all those things coming together at once.”
And it becomes a perpetual motion machine of engagement. “Users interact with the email, go to the app, we gather more data, and the next email is even more personalized,” he says. “The more they use it, the better it gets,” with even more personalized, and even more engaging content.
Most importantly, he says, “We’re able to do segmentation and targeting to different audiences. We can get down to the individual, or we can actually cluster people into different groups, which allows us to then measure those campaigns.”
And that is arguably the most essential piece of the puzzle. “We’re constantly testing and iterating to see what draws people back into the service,” Witlin says.
To gather the best data, it’s essential to not only work with best-in-class services, but become best-in-class users. “Instead of building the tools ourselves,” he says, “we’ve become experts of the technology that [our partners] provide for us.”
Join our panel of experts for our free webinar, “Building your email personalization powerhouse,” to learn more about what it takes to harness the power of users’ data to engage customers like never before.
Don’t miss out!
In this webinar you’ll:
- Learn how to increase your email open rate and click-through rates
- Create email campaigns that incorporate cross-channel behavioral data
- Understand the role of email in a holistic omnichannel experience with push, in-app, and more
- Hear about the latest technologies that ease email personalization pain points – without hurting your wallet (or relationship with the CFO)
- Figure out the best partners for your business, depending on specific requirements, vertical, existing solutions, and company size
- Learn how intelligent communication plays a crucial part in each customer’s individual journey
Speakers:
Brian Witlin, COO, Yummly
Doug Roberge, Strategic Services Consultant, Kahuna
Moderator:
Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat
This webinar is sponsored by Kahuna.