• by Jess Nelson , November 6, 2017

Retail sales in November and December are expected to increase by as much as 4% to $682 billion, according to the National Retail Federation’s annual holiday forecast, and Adobe estimates that online sales could surpass $100 billion this holiday season.

It’s imperative for email marketers to get personalization right, or they could miss out on a huge revenue-driving opportunity -- considering how email drove a fifth of online sales last winter, according to Adobe.

Personalized recommendations in email messages can substantially drive revenue and engagement. Almost half of 1,006 American consumers polled by customer data platform Segment responded that they had purchased a product in the last three months that they would not have bought otherwise because of a convincing recommendation by a brand. Millennials were more likely to make impulse purchases, with 63% admitting to making a recent impulsive purchase.

Recommendations during the online checkout experience were most likely to drive an impulse purchase, according to the Segment report, but 16% of consumers asserted that an email message had driven them to make an impulse purchase in the last 90 days.

When compared to purchases made across channels, respondents were also most likely to be satisfied with their email-driven purchases. Nine-out-of-ten respondents were satisfied with making an impulse purchase via email, followed by brick-and-mortar, online checkout, ad, and push notifications.

Email personalization can also lead to repeat purchases according to the Segment study, with 44% of consumers admitting they would likely become a repeat shopper after a personalized experience and 39% saying they would be likely to tell their friends or family. 

It’s important to note that personalization doesn’t just increase their sales – it also limits customer loss. Three-out-of-four respondents expressed some level of frustration when their experience was impersonal according to the Segment study, and a quarter responded that they would unsubscribe from a brand’s emails if the brand got their data incorrect. 

Correct data is critical for email personalization, but that is easier said than done.

“Getting accurate, dependable and complete customer data is very hard,” says Diana Smith, director of product marketing at Segment. “Often marketers are working from 10 or more marketing tools and have to reconcile 10 or more data sets. This is, more often than not, what leads to customers receiving messages that are impersonal or, worse, just wrong.”

Smith recommends that marketers create a single view of every customer, including behavioral data from across all channels, in order to get personalization correct and add more dynamic segmentation to email marketing campaigns. 

Smith provided three basic steps she follows before Segment sends any email messages. She advises marketers to develop a tracking plan for which pieces of cross-channel data they need to include in email campaigns, work closely with IT to get those data points tracked and flowing into an email tool, and then test to ensure the data is showing up in the email marketing tool correctly.

Segment published the study in conjunction with the release of Personas, a new data product that acts as a central record for a brand’s relationship with a customer across all touchpoints.