The Biggest Challenge Facing Email Marketers Today: BAU vs Automation

As a marketer, I want to communicate to consumers. I want them to be interested in what I’m saying, and click through on an email, ad or post to find out more. I want my brand to stay top of mind, so even if my message isn’t relevant at that time, the next time the consumer wants a new piece of jewellery/pair of shoes/to solve a beauty problem, they think of my brand.

Not only that, I want the consumer to think of my brand in a positive light. I want them to feel I’m providing them with a service; be it information, guidance, expertise, solutions to problems, or a physical product they either need or want.All of my plans and actions are with the consumer in mind:

• What are they going to find interesting about this email?

• Why am I sending it to them?

• Are they going to understand the information in it?

• Are they going to convert when they get to the landing page?

This is my job as a marketer and also what I find most engaging about my work - putting the customer at the heart of everything I do.

However, Ometria's Consumer Consensus 2019 reports “37% of consumers think that the number of marketing emails they receive negatively contribute to their overall stress levels, happiness and wellbeing.” Almost everybody would say they are time poor these days, and many of us are actively trying to spend less time staring at our screens. So the last thing consumers want is irrelevant emails cluttering up their inbox, and irrelevant ads appearing in their Instagram feed.

If I, as a marketer, want to send relevant emails, but the consumer feels that the emails they receive rarely excite them or provide them with a positive experience, where’s the disconnect?

In my experience, even when retailers have access to the customer data and the tools required to utilise this data to segment, target, personalise and automate their emails in a meaningful way, there is still a hurdle to overcome. That hurdle is the weekly email revenue targets the CRM team have to hit. Email is a low cost, high conversion channel, and it is often the one turned to when sales are challenging and marketing budgets are stretched. The CRM team get called on by C-level executives to ‘just send more emails, to more people’, and suddenly the plans for segmentation and relevance go out the window, as does the customer experience.

Emarsys’ Salome Imedashvili is keen to help CRM teams challenge this.

More emails to more people’ is a reactive approach which doesn’t guarantee higher revenue at the end of the month. We've been encouraging and empowering brands to go from Reactive to Proactive marketing in order to boost conversion and increase the customer lifetime value. AI is today’s hottest marketing technology because it allows marketing organisations to get in front of customers by intelligently automating nearly every activity and predicting who needs what when.

Artificial intelligence marketing can completely reshape how marketers and executives run their businesses, but only 37% of organisations are actually investigating potential use cases for AI. For brands on the leading edge, AI is helping anticipate how customer behaviour will impact the business, and make decisions on what to do about it in advance. Companies like Brand Alley have chosen a proactive approach and saw immediate increase in email open rates, average basket value and revenue. Proactive marketing actually works!

Whilst we, as marketers, can show that targeted emails get much higher open, click through and conversion rates, often we aren’t given the time and space for this to make up for the gap in reducing the Business As Usual (BAU) sends. And because BAU sends take more time to plan, create and send, that is time we aren’t allowed to dedicate to optimising the automated programs.I’m not saying we should be sending just automated emails or just BAU emails. I think we need both. I also strongly believe, as a marketer and a consumer, that marketing emails should be more relevant and less frequent. However, to date, I haven’t seen this approach really be allowed to come to fruition, and the majority of my peers in retail (both luxury and high street) are echoing this experience.

Do you have any more questions around email marketing? Please get in touch with me today.