New Research Links Email Engagement to Customer-Experience Email Marketing

LONDON, September 26, 2018 (Newswire.com) -  "Customer Experience Email Marketing: Getting Ahead of the Consumer," a new report from Liveclicker and Holistic Email Marketing, answers this crucial question: "What's the state of Customer Experience Email Marketing in today’s inboxes and how are marketers balancing their business goals with their customers’ needs, wants and objectives?"

Why this research now: Although email is a strong channel for retail and other ecommerce marketing, many marketers are seeing customers tune out. It's easy to see why: Message after message in the inbox asks, "What can we sell you today?" Not “How can we help you today?”

"By being helpful, personalised and customer- focused, we meet our customer's needs and objectives. Because we help them in this way, which is better than competing brands, they engage with us and, by doing so, help us achieve our goals."

Kath Pay, CEO, Holistic Email Marketing

This essential customer-service question sums up the three pillars of Customer Experience Email Marketing (CX Email Marketing): helpfulness, personalisation and customer-focus. CX Email Marketing finds the balance between customer and company goals. Brands achieve their goals and objectives by helping customers achieve theirs, not just selling to them.

Goals of the research: The study, which involved studying emails in three categories of non-transactional emails sent by 82 travel and retail brands to UK recipients, aimed to establish how well brands are putting the principles of CX Email Marketing to work now.

Equally important, the research aimed to correlate reader engagement with a CX Email Marketing approach with this hypothesis: "Putting the three pillars of CX Email Marketing to work in an email campaign will deliver higher engagement results."

3 top findings

1. Overall, brands have a long way to go. Brand emails scored highest on helpfulness and lowest on personalisation, although each score was well below average for each CX pillar.

2. Emails that scored above average earned higher reader engagement for the brand than emails scoring below average. Also, those higher read rates tended to be significantly higher, often more than double.

3. Brand performance on the three CX pillars often was inconsistent. Some emails scored high on one or two of the three CX pillars but low on others. Often, these weren’t consistent throughout their campaigns.

3 key takeaways

• You don’t have to tear everything down and start over. Instead, you can build on what you have accomplished already when you want to move up to CX Email Marketing.
• Making your emails truly customer and service-focused will require some investment of time, but the rewards will repay your efforts. Turn the question around and ask it of yourself: “What’s in it for me to evolve my programme to CX Email Marketing?
•  CX Email Marketing has a “halo” effect that makes all your other emails more attractive to open and act on. One example from the research: One brand scored well on helpfulness and personalisation but poorly on customer-centricity. Despite that, the brand achieved a high overall ranking in the study.

Methodology for Customer Experience Email Marketing: Getting Ahead of the Consumer

Researchers for the two agencies studied three categories of non-transactional campaigns sent to UK residents by 82 travel and retail brands, including promotional and lifecycle campaigns.

They scored each email on each of the three CX pillars (helpfulness, personalisation and customer focus) and calculated an average of all scores to determine the overall CX Email Marketing score for that brand’s email programme.

To measure reader engagement, researchers used eDataSource’s engagement scores: the percentage of recipients who either read the email, read and deleted it or deleted it without reading.

Get your own copy of the report: Visit the download link here

About Holistic Email Marketing

Holistic Email Marketing, an email marketing consultancy, takes the Holistic Approach to email marketing and puts the customer, their journey and the information they provide through their actions at the centre of its ethos. Enabling you to benefit from email marketing strategies and email marketing programmes that achieve the 1:1 personalisation your customers desire.

Unlike traditional multi-channel marketing that starts with the channel, the Holistic Approach starts with your customer and their journey to define the channel strategy. And through the art of persuasion, marketing automation and cross-channel learnings, we craft a journey that converts.

So, your customers meet their goals, and you meet yours.

For more information, visit www.holisticemailmarketing.com, phone +44 (0) 203 015 0747 or email  [email protected]

About Liveclicker

Founded in 2008, Liveclicker is a global provider of real-time email personalisation solutions for B2C marketers. Since the release of its VideoEmail platform in 2009, marketers have used Liveclicker to captivate consumers and drive program performance. Today, top brands such as M&S, Eurostar, Vauxhall, Arsenal, William Hill, ITV, O2, Verizon Wireless, 1-800-FLOWERS, Discover, Hertz, and Lowe’s, rely on the company’s market-leading RealTime Email solution to deliver engaging, personalised messages, simply and at scale.

CONTACT:

Kath Pay, Founder/CEO, Holistic Email Marketing
Telephone:+44 (0) 203 015 0747
Email: [email protected]

Source: Holistic Email Marketing