Sunday 21 June 2015

Big Data Strategies for Email Marketing

Leveraging  data is nothing new – it’s core to the practice of marketing. What the  big data initiative means for email marketers is access to the data they  have wanted for years. The goal is to be smarter marketers,  providing a more relevant and meaningful experience to the subscriber. Big data can enhance  your capabilities with a newfound wealth of information.

Targeted, meaningful interactions

It is the data, not the intuition, that makes marketing programmes  successful. Being relevant is something we have discussed as an industry  since its inception. We prefer not to batch and blast; instead, we  strive to create unique and optimal engagements with the customer to  drive desirable behaviors. And it is the ability to leverage data in  order to make informed decisions and drive relevant offers that helps to  achieve that reality.


Find the offers that drive ROI

Email marketers have been running tests, comparing results and measuring  lift and incremental behaviour since before email marketing was a  channel. This is a practice which direct mailers really perfected –  largely because of the increasing costs to print and mail offers, but  whatever the reason it drove significant relevance. With the flexibility  of email, these tests are easier and more effective


Keep striving for greater gains

We’ve come a long way from the days when marketers could say “I waste  half my advertising dollars, I just don’t know which half.” Advances in  cross-channel tracking and reporting enable email marketers to build  detailed reports for follow-up. Still, most of these reports have been  limited: either in detail or timescale. For example, a detailed report  is given about a specific mailing or programme, but only aggregate-level  data is available over a quarter or entire year. This has long been a  reality of data storage limitations associated with system performance,  and that is one big challenge which the big data effort is addressing.  The ability to store, process and analyse mounds of information is  making many reporting geeks extremely happy.