The SaaS-ification of
Email Marketing
Written by Rob Lane.
1. Overview
The email industry has changed quite a bit in the last 15 years. This is not news, but yet it’s worth discussing because of all the recent talk about an email revival. While we don’t think email was ever dead, it was overshadowed during the emergence of social. In actual fact, email has kept up with the times quite nicely, and it continues to outpace other marketing channels in terms of engagement and return.
“On average, companies are attributing 23% of their total sales to the email marketing channel, compared to 18% in 2013. This equates to a proportionate rise of 28% in just one year.”
Email has found its way back to legitimacy, in part due to the realization that unlike social, email is a direct line to your customers. It’s not a message passing by in a news feed, it’s your one-on-one with your customer. Another contributing factor is the evolution of email technology into a legitimate SaaS play, making it much easier for ecommerce businesses to send quality email to their customers.
2. Email Services Level The Playing Field
Email as a service is much more than a platform for sending email with some targeting and automation built in. It’s now about making email more personal, by leveraging relevant data and introducing predictive algorithms to dynamically insert personalized, relevant content. The ability to easily integrate with ecommerce platforms, move data from one product to another, and work well with other ecommerce tools creates a very rich experience.
Email design has also been simplified though technology. HTML skills are no longer required to build a great email. The drag-and-drop UI allows everyone the opportunity to create and send beautiful email.
3. Scaling Through Automation
While technology makes it much easier to create email, it’s advances in automation that makes it scalable. Event triggered email means the sender does not have to constantly check to see who’s just made a second purchase, or who’s about to churn. Important customer events never go unnoticed.
Quick design and personalized content is great, but without the ability to scale through automation, it would still require a lot of effort by the sender. Smart, event triggered automation makes sending smart, personalized email possible.
The icing on the cake is the availability of robust mailout performance data. When presented in a way that makes next actions clear, it becomes much easier to make intelligent decisions and further your chances of success.
All of this translates into a very powerful email experience for ecommerce stores without having to invest in any infrastructure or development time. You can very quickly have the ability to send highly targeted email campaigns with a tailored the message that has the personal touch of a handwritten note. Rare customers can be sending email within minutes of their customer data being imported.
4. Email Recipients Have Evolved Too!
For your customers, these changes mean a more personalized email experience than ever before, which creates a more pleasant inbox experience. This is an important point, because as much as email has changed, recipients of email have also changed. They are more knowledgeable, and have higher expectations about what constitutes a “read-worthy” email.
“Email generates fantastic results for those who are making the time to adapt their marketing practice to the changing expectations of their customers”
With laws like CASL and CAN-SPAM, and recipients being more sensitive to the email experience, the bar has been set ever higher. This means your email has to establish trust very quickly. These days it only takes a finger swipe to delete an email, so get it right the first time!
5. Benefits for Senders and Recipients
At Rare we realize that we can’t develop for the sender without considering the receiver. In other words, we can’t offer features for our customers if they don’t make the email experience better for their customers. We have been very careful to address all of the points discussed in this post to create the best end-to-end email experience possible.
Whether it’s identifying new audiences to email with our visual segment builder, creating email with our drag and drop builder, or using our automation to schedule post-purchase follow ups that include highly personalized recommendations, we make sure the end result is a great experience for both our customers and their customers.
6. Conclusion
If you’re an ecommerce merchant and don’t have automated email marketing campaigns setup for your store, you’re losing money. Right now.
Rare.io makes it easy to start using automated email campaigns for common challenges like: Welcome Series, Abandoned Carts, Order Follow-up emails and more! You can learn more about our powerful email marketing automation features here or go ahead and get started right away by using Rare.io for FREE.
And if you’re one of the thousands of merchants who are already using Rare’s Smart Email Marketing software and want to see how our Customer Success Team can work with your brand to grow your revenue – feel free to book a call at your convenience here.
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