Passionate in Marketing caught up with Mr. Samarth Saxena, Chief Business Officer at Sinch India to discuss email marketing
How is email still the most effective marketing tool?
With over 4 billion email subscribers worldwide, email marketing offers greater options to connect and engage at scale. With an average return of $44 for every $1 spent, email marketing has one of the greatest ROIs of any marketing channel.
Email has been around for over four decades; it has evolved by introducing interactive features like Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP, launched in 2015. AMP emails can include transactional features like booking appointments, purchasing, or completing other actions without leaving the email environment. With AMP emails, recipients don’t need to switch between different apps or platforms to complete activities, providing a seamless and convenient user experience.
What is the role of AI and ML in email marketing?
Data-driven decisions can help your marketing efforts. One of the most popular solutions today is Send Time Optimization. Consider sending a business email to a prospect at the most opportune time – when they are most engaged. This ensures that your email gets delivered to the appropriate person at the right time, thanks to AI.
AI and ML are getting used in various areas, including subject line refinement, list cleaning, predictive analytics, and the development of high-performing automated workflows.
Overall, AI plays a huge role in increasing the success of email marketing initiatives. Marketers may use AI to develop more tailored, targeted, and relevant messages, which are more likely to be opened and read.
How can BIMI and Zero Party data deliver a better customer experience?
The Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) standard allows firms to show their logos in email inboxes. BIMI is intended to increase email delivery while also protecting against phishing assaults. By making emails more aesthetically appealing and engaging, BIMI can help to improve the customer experience. Recipients are more likely to have a favourable experience with an email when they see a BIMI-enabled logo.
The information that users willingly and deliberately share with businesses is called zero-party data. This data is valuable for tailored marketing, and email marketing is a popular approach to leverage it efficiently. Directly collecting users’ preferences, interests, and intentions can assist in adapting email content and offers, resulting in more relevant and engaging campaigns. Users benefit from more tailored content, while businesses benefit from closer customer ties.
What are the best practices for effective inboxing ?
Effective inboxing relies on a highly engaged audience and a high-quality email database. Effective segmentation allows you to divide subscribers into groups based on their hobbies, demographics, or purchase history, allowing you to send highly relevant emails.
Email authentication, which may be accomplished through SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, is critical. Email authentication helps ensure that your emails are delivered to the recipient’s inbox by validating that the email is from a legitimate sender. This can assist in lowering the percentage of your emails that are flagged as spam, which can lead to improved relationships with your email service provider (ESP).
Having a dedicated IP address helps with better inboxing as it means you are alone accountable for its reputation. This is significant because the reputation of the IP address sending the email is a critical component in determining whether emails appear in the inbox without being blocked or filtered.
The use of Chatbots and virtual assistants in email marketing
Increasing the size of the email list through the use of chatbots is quite effective. Consider email a form of precious currency; its owners guard its use. You’ll need to specify the conditions under which your chatbot will ask for an email address. For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that you are interested in gathering email addresses from people who have previously shown interest in your brand.
A chatbot can be programmed to respond when certain events occur, such as when a returning customer views a new product. The next step would be to inquire whether the site visitor is interested in learning more about that product.
In addition to keeping customers from leaving items in their carts, you may also capture their email addresses. Suppose a chatbot detects that a user has abandoned a transaction in progress. In that case, it can be instructed to offer a discount, ebook, infographic, webinar, unique guide, or even a free trial membership in exchange for the customer’s email address.