Post GDPR: How can identification boost your email channel?
Email marketing has undergone seismic change in recent months following the introduction of GDPR, with marketeers forced to cull consumer email addresses from their databases unless they’ve gained explicit consumer permission to use them.
Some commentators claim the GDPR cull has triggered the demise of email marketing, but reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
This article, on behalf of BounceX EMEA explains how GDPR actually offers marketers a golden opportunity, if they’re willing to take it.
GDPR levels the playing field for retailers who want to reset their email marketing, providing them with an incentive to focus instead on those prospects that are already ripe for conversion.
Identifying high-intent prospects
What’s the best way for marketers to identify and pursue the most profitable, very high-intent prospects? This segment of retail website traffic is commonly known as the digital goldmine. The actions they take while viewing an ecommerce site show that they are engaged and clearly interested in the goods and services on offer. Retailers need to identify the individuals from this cohort if they are going to be successful, and the key to doing this is convincing potential customers to share their email address.
The best way of achieving this varies from prospect to prospect. It may be asking a prospect if they would like to be notified when a product comes back into stock or if they would like access to exclusive content. Or it could be offering a slight discounts when a customer looks like they might abandon. In each of these scenarios, a message can be sent with a request for an email address and explicit permission for it to be used for marketing.
Unlocking sales with email identifiers
Armed with an email address, which is cross referenced with associated device IDs, it is possible to identify an individual no matter what channel or device they use. Retailers can then build up a profile for each customer, showing how they interact with your business, their digital body language (the actions they take on your website) and the way they engage with your emails and ads (opens, clicks, click-throughs and conversions).
This is when triggered personalised email can start in earnest. Rather than sending medium- to high-intent prospect random triggered emails, the retailer can start to build a meaningful ongoing relationship with them, nurturing the prospect to conversion after conversion with incentives such as product information, content and discounts based on their digital body language.
Email with increased ROI
Retailers will not only grow their email lists using this approach; they will also increase the ROI of their email programs by targeting prospects with the highest propensity to convert and lowering list attrition in the process.
Email is the key to cross-channel customer identification, but it is just the start of effectively targeting the digital goldmine of medium- to high-intent prospects. Today, conventional marketing strategies and teams take a siloed approach to channels such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and email. But triggered email is about the full experience a prospect receives across all of these touchpoints and how they build consistency and relevancy between that individual consumer and their relationship with your business.