Making your email marketing truly automatic — SwiftERM

Making your email marketing truly automatic. When new ecommerce retailers come to address the issue of email marketing it is an infuriating truth that when they want an automatic system, what they see are lots of people stretching the truth about what they offer so they get included in Google searches.

I guess it would be fair therefore to first define automatic. The obvious parallel is a car, which in fairness you still have to stear, indicate, accelerate and brake to drive. So it’s reasonable to assume therefore that when it comes to email marketing you assume likewise that you still have to do 80% additional work too. But what if you didn’t? What if you could install something that did everything?

While researching for this article we just Googled “automatic email marketing”. Top of the heap is a “triggered” option. It might be reasonable to consider it fair that if a consumer does something on your site, say - leaves with items still in the cart, that it would be great to have your system trigger an email to remind them of that selection, just in case they really wanted it, but got distracted by 101 other constraints on their attention. It would therefore be fair to say that triggered email solutions are somewhere higher up on the ROI chain, but the reality is that they are nowhere close to where the real money is.

If you want the greatest returns from anything in ecommerce it has to include the word “personalisation”. While a triggered option might deliver a sale by reminding a proportion of those who abandon baskets, the real return is in ensuring that what is offered to the consumer in the first place has the greatest chance of being wanted and therefore bought in the first place. Considering our above analogy, if the products were abandoned because they didn’t get enough ticks in the first place, it doesn’t matter how many times you remind them, they aren’t going to buy them. And there’s both time (setting it up) and money (the cost of the software to run it), that you won’t get back.

What if you could combine both of these disciplines into a single solution, that not only kept an astute data set for all of your individual consumers, both tastes and interests? What if it perpetually ran this data through a predictive analytics algorithm to ensure it knew which of all the products you sell, had the greatest propensity to be bought by that individual and when? Better still, what if it then populated a stylesheet with those exact products and sent that individual an email a couple of times each month, to offer them their own unique selection? How do you think it would compare to what you’re doing? Would it do better? You betcha!

No surprise to learn that both McKinsey and Statista agree that personalisation delivers the higher ROI in ecommerce marketing today. Together with the long established fact that email marketing delivers the highest previous ROI, it should begin to suggest that the two working together are unbeatable. Indeed the stats reveal that personalised email marketing can deliver 20x the return of promotional emails and omnichannel marketing combined.

Predictive personalisation software (PPS) is available as a standalone to compete against the likes of Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Active Campaign, MailerLite, Moorland etc, indeed all ESPs. SwiftERM is a PPS solution that once installed never needs a human-being to operate it whatsoever. This highly profitable plugin first of all gathers and analyses all the data on your platform, and thereafter begins to add additional information, used in it’s process both to refine and perpetuate the success of intimately knowing each individual consumer that shops with you.

The PPS option is not the exclusive domain of start-ups, Enterprise companies too, the ones we all know the names of, can run it alongside highly professional mailing solutions to deliver additional profits and market-share and get other benefits too, which we shall come to later.

Intriguingly the wider benefits of personalisation also kick-in. By its adoption, the rate of return you are used to diminishes, after all, offering products that people what — instead of this seasons latest fashions or flavours, has a greater chance of being wanted. Likewise offering multiple products that people actually want increases basket size and you see you average order value escalate too. But by far the greatest benefit comes back to that definition of automatic. The real automatic in a car is equivalent to a chauffeur, something that does it for you. Except with data it doesn’t include human beings with all their inherent frailties to make mistakes, need time off, needs holidays, go sick, want pay-rises and enjoy a chat at the water dispenser.

Predictive personalisation software never stops, it runs perpetually 24/7 and 365 days a year. It has to, as any one of your consumers might shop at any time and it is needed there to capture that data and use it to your best advantage. But by far the greatest advantage is its ability to never need to be touched. Do you know to true value of employing a team to run your email marketing? Agreed it is great to run promotions and offers and promote new and exciting products, but better still have the returns from many more sales from having offered the right thing at the right time.

Originally published at https://www.swifterm.com on July 4, 2022.