If you’re overlooking or underspending on email marketing, you’re missing the channel with the biggest ROI by far. This VB Live event brings together a crack panel to investigate the how, the why, and the wow of the least expensive, most lucrative marketing tool you’ve got in your arsenal.

Access this VB Live event on demand right here.


Two and a half years ago, in the first State of Marketing Technology report, email emerged as the one channel that was producing the highest return on investment of all, says Stewart Rogers, director of marketing technology at VentureBeat. And despite all the pundits declaring ding dong, email is dead, it’s clear that email has only gotten better as segmentation, personalization, and measurement tools have gotten more sophisticated.

“Email definitely isn’t dead,” agrees Traci Inglis, CMO of multibillion dollar global fashion retailer Just Fab. “It’s interesting — when people say email is dead, I always ask them, are you sure you’re measuring it correctly? For us, it drives around fifty percent of our order revenue, so it’s very much alive.”

Tommy Lamb, director of loyalty and retention at online flower retail giant Teleflora, says that while the incredibly low cost of email shoots it to the top of the strategy list, email marketing is how they stay on top of and react to customer and sales trends.

“Email allows us to be a lot more nimble and flexible with the changing needs of our customers,” Lamb says. “The biggest benefit os being able to test in real time and react to that on a day-to-day basis.”

At  private jet charter company JetSuite, says Senior Marketing Manager Chris Bernarbe, it’s the lightning-fast turnaround of email that makes it valuable. “The timeliness is key for us,” Benarbe says. “That really moves the needle not only in terms of revenue but in getting [customers] to engage with us and start a conversation.”

By being able to follow up on everything from first transactions to website engagement and flight patterns, they’ve realized a substantial 50+ percent open rate — but personalization plays a key part too.

In fact, Inglis calls the ability to personalize email marketing their greatest tool, when it comes to customer engagement and boosting revenue — making sure every email they send is relevant to the recipient. And their testing bears out the enormous benefit, she adds.

“We all know promos move the needle,” says Inglis. But in a recent test of three messaging tactics to a specific customer segment — their best, but lapsed, buyers—they found adding in messaging that was relevant resulted in a huge leap in revenue. “Just by saying hey, you’re a best customer—we saw 71 percent lift in revenue over just the promo messaging,” she says.

“And then when we say we miss you on top of that, it was actually a 103 percent lift over just the promo alone.”

And the beauty of the strategy is that email is much easier to personalize than direct mail, or even the onsite web experience or social.

“We do personalization on all those other components as well,” Ingliss says, “but for email, we can personalize every single piece of it, including when it’s sent to the customer, what the content is, what the imagery is, what the offer is, and what products are included.”

“For us it’s just such a powerful channel,” she adds.

And personalization by segmentation is key.

“Our clients become more educated with our brand and private jet charter over time, so we don’t want to be the same across the board,” Bernarbe says. “It’s about ensuring we’re not giving the same content to someone who just came into our database yesterday and someone who’s been in our database for five years —and ensuring that it’s very very customized and personalized across each segment.”

It’s what continues to move the needle over time for your longer-term customers, and what allows you to take the learnings from those older customers and apply them to your new customers or prospects, he adds.

Personalization tactics can run the gamut from something as simple and novice level as a personalized greeting and subject lines, onboarding and welcome campaigns and A/B testing, all the way to deeply sophisticated attribute-based clustering and real-time cross-channel behavioral triggers. But just the bare minimum returns astonishing results, Rogers says.

“When we look at the results of something really simple, something really novice such as just putting someone’s name in the subject line,” he explains, “across all industries we see a 29.3 percent increase in unique open rates.”

And if you’re in travel or consumer products and services, a personalized subject line nets you an over 40 percent increase.

“So we don’t have to get into the scary, advanced expert-level email marketing to start getting towards the 300 percent returns that we’re talking about in this particular webinar today,” he adds. “The vast majority of people are getting great results even from basic personalization. It’s something that anyone can get into very very quickly.”

For some great real-world examples of basic personalization that get real results, the challenges you’ll face as you invest in an email strategy — and how to overcome them — and more, catch up on this VB Live event!


Don’t miss out.

Access this VB Live event on demand right here.


In this VB Live event you’ll learn to:

  • Personalize email marketing without making huge errors.
  • Avoid common marketing errors (wrong names and/or interests)
  • Increase open rate
  • Leverage data to target email personalization
  • Speakers:

Speakers:

  • Tommy Lamb, Director of Loyalty and Retention, Teleflora
  • Traci Inglis, CMO, Just Fab
  • Chris Bernarbe, Sr. Marketing Manager, JetSuite
  • Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology, VentureBeat

Moderator:

  • Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat