Getting email right matters. In fact, nearly 400 marketing leaders ranked email as the number one channel in their toolkits for moving customers through the funnel from consideration to conversion and driving loyalty and advocacy for their brands. Exceptional email programs drive exceptional returns, with nearly 80% of marketers reporting email has the highest ROI of any channel and Litmus research showing the email channel returns about $36 for every $1 spent.
Unfortunately, many marketers feel they’ve hit a wall with their email programs. Email teams often remain siloed from other customer engagement channels such as web and mobile, resulting in a disjointed customer experience. Additionally, email marketers are often pushed to “send more” to squeeze value out of the channel. As a result, consumers are inundated with too many messages that don’t genuinely connect. In a recent Adobe research report, we found that consumers are averaging 70 emails and 139 omnichannel messages per week from brands and that nearly 60% of messages are deleted or ignored without reading. Consumers are overwhelmed and tuning out.
So how can you evolve your email program beyond “good enough”? This blog will explore how Adobe Journey Optimizer empowers you to create an exceptional email program that resonates with your customers and streamlines your workflows. It’s time for richly contextualized, personalized, and dynamic email programs that truly engage your customers in their unique contexts.
Go beyond your email calendar to in-the-moment engagement
What if you could take your existing email marketing calendar and layer on real-time, one-to-one emails targeted for each customer based on their behaviors and interactions with your brand?
Most companies today send brand-initiated emails — pushing out campaigns, announcements, newsletters, deals, and other communications from their marketing, brand, and service teams. These emails are generally pre-planned and audience based. Unfortunately, customer journeys and engagements with your brand don’t follow your pre-determined email calendar. Instead, customer journeys are much more fluid and individual. Customers onboard, engage, abandon, explore, and communicate across channels. These interactions create opportunities for you to respond with authentic emails that cater to each customer’s unique context.
That’s why, in Journey Optimizer, we’ve introduced the ability to orchestrate one-to-one email journeys based on a person’s actions. Email journeys are multi-step, going beyond transactional emails like order confirmation and password reset. They actively listen for signals from your customers or business, sending personalized updates in real time.
Making the shift
First, make sure your data foundation is strong. Contextualized email engagement requires lots of data, and more specifically, actionable unified customer profiles. Journey Optimizer is built on Adobe Experience Platform, equipping you with customer profiles that unify data from across sources to give you a complete, up-to-date dataset for each customer.
Next, brainstorm the experiences you want to create for your customers and identify opportunities to engage in the context of a customers' journey. For example:
- When a customer explores more than three products in a category and then leaves your site, re-engage them with an offer for that category and related ones to encourage exploration, conversion, and cross-sell.
- When a customer visits one of your locations, send an email encouraging them to download your app for upcoming events in their area.
- When there are changes to products, services, inventory, or other business details that may be of interest to a customer, share this information to keep them in the loop.
Finally, start slowly and ramp up. The most successful brands continue to optimize a foundation of campaign-oriented emails while layering on one or two journey-centric email use cases. They test, learn, and expand to more use cases as they experience how contextualized, real-time email engagement works for their organization.
Create dynamic, hyper-personalized emails that break through the noise
Personalization within emails isn’t new. For years now, marketers have understood that personalization boosts receptivity and the likelihood of their customers engaging. In fact, our research shows that 50% of customers are more likely to visit a brand’s website when message content is personalized.
Source: Reimagining customer journey management
But sending emails to each customer based on their unique context relies on operationalizing personalization at scale, which can seem like a daunting task. Fortunately, Journey Optimizer was built to help you achieve this. Beyond the basics of personalization, like including a name or loyalty status, you can customize every aspect of the email to each individual customer:
- Content. Tailor email content, including subject lines, pre-header, header, body copy, imagery, layouts, and languages, based on each customer’s information and context.
- Offers. Use built-in intelligent decisioning to determine the next-best offers for each customer. Embed relevant offers into emails, which you can access directly in your email workflows.
- Send time. Use machine learning to predict the best time to send an email to each customer based on when they are most likely to engage.
- Frequency. Set business rules to cap the frequency of email sends for different customer segments based on their willingness to engage.
To extend personalization beyond audience-based campaigns, marketers must create content and variations that resonate with specific customers. This is where generative AI can help. AI Assistant for content generation in Journey Optimizer empowers you to create message content and variations fast. Generate everything from distinct email components— such as subject lines, pre-headers, email copy, and images— individually or within preselected templates. Expand to generate full on-brand email ideas that incorporate your context, content, and brand guidelines. Then, run experiments to determine the best email variants to maximize your business goals and scale up winning variants without interrupting your current email programs.
By bringing together generative AI, personalization, and experimentation capabilities, Journey Optimizer empowers you to create emails that feel like they were written and delivered from your brand to each customer — just for them.
Allow your marketing tools to handle the complexity so you can focus on strategy
Marketing practitioners know that email workflows are incredibly complex. In fact, we’ve often seen companies shouldering time-intensive processes of 8 to 12 weeks or more just to get a single email campaign out the door.
This is because many email tools are built without considering the broader picture in which email specialists and other marketing practitioners operate. Unfortunately, this leads to a web of poorly integrated authoring tools, multiple email service providers (ESPs), and other systems that create work rather than boost efficiency. To handle this, we provide powerful new authoring and delivery workflows within Journey Optimizer to support marketers.
- Work with your existing email ecosystem tools
Journey Optimizer’s expansive partner ecosystem, integrations with third-party solutions (such as Movable Ink, Stensul, and Litmus), and custom APIs help you to get started quickly without disrupting your existing workflows. Let’s look at two of our powerful integrations.
