Releasing Data Trapped in CRM for Email Marketing

Want higher email marketing response rates? Personalize! Sounds straightforward, until you realize that the data you need is trapped in your CRM system or segmentation engine, and you don’t have it accessible to your email delivery solution. Do not despair — integrate!

It’s really a no-brainer. Yet, even though personalized emails deliver a six-times higher transaction rates than non-personalized emails, a startling 70 percent of brands fail to take advantage of the opportunity, according to research from Experian Marketing Services. Why not?

Most marketers collect customer data and have it in-house. It also certainly seems to be conclusive from this study and others — and from experience with my clients — that personalization makes a huge difference in response rates and subscriber satisfaction. In fact, Experian found that personalized promotional mailings had 29 percent higher unique open rates and 41 percent higher unique click rates. For triggered email campaigns, personalization resulted in double the transaction rates compared to non-personalized triggered emails.

Those kinds of results are definitely appealing, especially with overall contribution from email marketing programs under increased scrutiny. With even a few attributes from data accessible, brands can use personalization as a real differentiator:

• Offering discounts in bulk emails which only certain, high-value subscribers can see;
• Personalizing the content of a birthday email, based on the year that the subscriber was born;
• Showing products based on the subscriber’s brand and size preference. Sephora does a nice job of personalizing offers based on the “Beauty Profile” collected on the site.
• Aggregating data from mobile apps for end-of-week/month/year summary emails. For example, Fitbit’s weekly summary email is a great example of this.
• Personalizing the subject line — which Experian research showed delivered 26 percent higher unique open rates overall, with travel companies experiencing the “biggest boost” from personalized subject lines.

If personalization works so well, then why aren’t all marketers doing it? Perhaps it’s because although data is resident inside the company, the marketer doesn’t have access to it at the point of email delivery. Integration of systems and getting data accessible to the “right moment” of messaging is a real challenge for many brands. While most email delivery vendors have mature APIs and common integration points to e-commerce, CRM, marketing data warehouse and campaign management solutions, the integration can seem like a very daunting task.

Get more recipes on http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/

Kirkwood Direct is largest service provider that offers comprehensive and effective end-to-end direct marketing communications solutions to their clients. It offers various services like Data Management/ Data Acquisition, Commercial Printing, Mailing Services, E-marketing and many more. Call (978) 642-0300 or visit site.