Email Marketing: Using analytics and data to foster conversations with customers

"A piece of data by itself has no value, it is value neutral," Matt Bailey, President and Founder, SiteLogic, said during his presentation at Email Summit 2013.

Numbers that don't answer a question have no meaning. They only have meaning when a question is asked that allows them to work together and form meaningful analytics. "Analytics," Bailey explained, "changed how I did business, it changed everything."

In this full video replay from Email Summit 2013, see how using analytics to understand your customer through email is a powerful way to direct your campaigns. It determines where your visitors are coming from and how they reacted once they read your message or arrived at your landing page.

Equally important, however, is writing effective emails and generating positive results. Bailey found in the companies he consults, email is the "highest profit per dollar activity." But, in order to have an effective send, emails must be personal, timely and relevant for the customer. This requires knowing and analyzing customer behavior and making a decision on what to send on a segmented basis.

Addressing an email "dear valued customer," is a mistake, Bailey said. "When you send the same message to everyone it doesn’t work," he went on, "you're not having a valued conversation, you’re having a one-way announcement." Getting a customer to click through the email is letting him continue the conversation with you.

But, why do customers click? As Bailey explained, "the 'why' changes everything." Understanding what kinds of customers that you have and why they are coming to your site is important in your email campaigns and using analytics to understand successful messages is key.

Trigger-based emails are a way to continue the conversation with the customer and "lets people know that 'we are listening to you,'" Bailey added.

As you analyze you customer and identify his behavior, triggering emails according to his needs, he will begin to initiate conversation with your website. Bailey said, "we can have as much conversation as the user initiates, and they will not grow tired," because he wants that information and the emails are sent in response to what the customer indicated that he wanted.

Download the slides to this presentation
 

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