• by Brian McKenna , March 16, 2023

As companies warily eye their budgets and marketing mix in 2023, brands are mistakenly undervaluing email because they send individual campaign emails to their entire database, instead of using automation or flow emails.

The latter demonstrate higher open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and revenue per recipient than campaign emails.

A recent analysis of how one company’s email marketing performed compared campaign sends (batch and blast emails to large segments, such as a weekly newsletter) to automated sends (emails triggered to individual users based on an action that user took, such as opening/clicking on a previous email or abandoning a cart on their site).

The automated sends outperformed on the basis of opens, clicks, and conversions across the board. Opens and clicks were 2.5x and higher across all categories on automated emails, but the biggest improvement came in the almighty conversion rates. In the electronics category, for example, automated emails drove over a 1,700% increase in conversion rates from blast emails.

Here’s what you need to do to maximize your email strategy in 2023.

Identify the elements of your brand communication that would be enhanced with a more personalized campaign. Review live campaigns and reassess plans for upcoming campaigns to see which ones would benefit from increasing triggers and personalization. Even if it is a campaign that’s built in some baseline layer of automation, it still would likely benefit from committing to a more intelligent personalization strategy.

Optimize all existing automations and journeys to include more personalization. Build in personalization by looking at what sends you have scheduled to see where you can add automation.

Leverage existing content wells to fuel the development of new emails needed for new campaign automations. Your social media posts, blogs, brochures/whitepapers, and information pages are all great sources of content to include in email automation.

Get your technical infrastructure buttoned up, so your site is fully integrated with your ESP to trigger new automations.  Once you have identified how you want your automations to work, you need to connect those triggers with your ESP, so emails are dispatched automatically when an action occurs. That way, the email arrives almost automatically in visitors’ inboxes.

Maximize every relevant moment of onsite activity to trigger new automations. For instance, you could trigger a coupon for purchase at a participating retailer, or send an article (like a recipe from a food company) to further entice visitors to purchase your product when at a location where it’s for sale.

This year is the perfect time to reboot intelligent email. Email done correctly continues to be among the most inexpensive, efficient, and effective market channels. By leaning into automation and segmentation, you will attract a wider audience, drive actions, and demonstrate ROI.