With more than 300 billion marketing emails delivered every day, brands around the world are upping the ante to achieve the desired cut-through they require from their digital communications.
And while it’s becoming increasingly difficult for marketing departments to get that conversion-based content in an overwhelming context of online “noise,” the statistics show just how important email marketing is.
There is no question that this form of communication ranks high in a marketer’s toolkit. After all, a carefully crafted and highly engaging email allows savvy professionals to engage in an initial, and often all-important, conversation with a potential customer or client.
However, when a recipient requires an average of six touch points before making a purchase, content that is sent blindly, and without relevance, can be a complete waste of time for both the marketer and the consumer who was not interested in receiving the message.
As customer needs evolve in a world where digital comes first, their demands helped on how marketers need to be more sophisticated with their campaigns, and that means getting rid of bland ‘batch and blast’ emails that are sent to a large audience, who don’t feel heard or understood by the brand.
Instead, marketers need to be more inclined to invest in what their customers want and nurture them from initial introduction through to conversion. This is where industry professionals need to understand the difference between spam and email cadence.
In its simplest form, spam refers to sending unsolicited emails to individuals. It is not about recipients receiving solicited emails that are sent at an unexpected time, which is a common mistake. For example, if a brand offers digital communications on a day when a potential customer wants to buy a product or service, it is likely to be welcome rather than unwarranted and therefore not classified as spam.
In contrast, cadence refers to the order and timing of emails that are sent strategically to reflect a person’s level of engagement and their location in the purchase funnel. As another example, if a travel brand sends an email to a customer every day before their vacation, that’s not spam, that’s optimal cadence.
So the difference comes down to how engaged each individual is. And for consumers who are highly engaged, it’s up to a marketer to take advantage of these opportunities and nurture each recipient accordingly. Striking the right balance can be tricky, and that’s where marketing automation can be critical.
As companies continue to send billions of emails every day, a marketing strategy should not be based on the notion of sending an email on a Thursday because “that’s what they always did.” It has to be more sophisticated than that, and be driven by critical ROI data that is gleaned from intuitive tools.
Automation allows marketers to gather streams of vital metrics, in real time, as well as eliminate any tasks so they can focus on those all-important customer communications and how to engage recipients on a deeper level. Connecting a platform capable of providing greater insight into the recipient’s in-the-moment interests, which can segment people on a more granular level, helps organizations deliver email marketing content that readers want to consume.
And with automation, marketers can harness the powers of lead scoring. Simply put, this is the measure of each individual’s engagement with a brand. This vital information provides marketing and sales teams with details on the hottest and coldest leads at any given time, and highlights who to contact, when, and through which preferred channels.
With such intelligence at a marketing department’s fingertips, this creates a more robust idea of the optimal email cadence, by persona and by category. When this is established, such data provides mail servers with additional information on whether the recipient received previous emails, which helps a brand’s messages avoid the spam folder in the process.
The easiest way to understand this further is to think of mail servers as assigning a “credibility score” to brands. Similar to a lead score, the higher the number, and the more engaged the recipient, the higher the integrity of the company’s email marketing.
However, marketers who fail to deliver an email cadence commensurate with audience engagement risk not only damaging the credibility of the servicer, but also customer loyalty and brand reputation. And now is not the time for companies to fall behind other organizations that embrace marketing automation and understand their customers on a more granular level.