Maropost: the secret to email personalization at scale

ClickZ spoke with Marc Gaudett, Senior Account Executive at Maropost on the importance of email marketing in a post-pandemic world and how businesses can best utilize personalization at scale to drive marketing objectives.

Q. What should companies be thinking about in their digital marketing strategies?

It begins with understanding how the digital marketing strategies fit in with the overall company objectives, what resources you need to allocate towards the strategy, and knowing your audience. Some questions you should be asking includes:

• Where does my audience spend most of their time?
• What tools and technologies do they use to engage with my brand?
• How can I provide the best customer experience?

Q. How does B2C email frequency compare to B2B email frequency?

There are many factors that contribute to different email frequency between B2C and B2B including purchasing behavior, content, length of buying cycle, timing, and frequency.

Given the transactional nature of B2C emails, the frequency is much higher to help trigger emotion-based purchases and catch the subscriber at the right time and this is when deliverability becomes very important.

Check out these Deliverability Hacks for 2021 which go over 10 ways to improve your email deliverability and improve your customer engagement through personalization.

Q. How does personalization affect customer engagement?

In a big way – the more personal the email the higher the engagement will be resulting in better open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. A higher engagement rate also acts as a positive feedback loop that trains the Mailbox providers by letting them know people want to receive your emails and continually boosts your email deliverability.

Q. How does email personalization differ between B2B and B2C businesses?

When it comes to B2B email marketing, we need to consider the firmographic and demographic information. We can personalize based on the company’s industry, size, and challenges they may face as well as the individual’s behavior such as which content they are engaging with, forms they filled out, and responsibilities based on their title.

For B2C businesses, personalization focuses more on the individual’s demographic which includes past behavior, interests, age, ethnicity, gender, income, education, employment, and location. One thing to remember is that whether you’re marketing to businesses or consumers, they are all people so making sure to create engaging content that resonates with the individual is key.

Q. How can businesses best utilize personalization technology to differentiate themselves from the competition?

It’s going back to understanding the customer journey and what channels we want to leverage to help guide them. The business would need to audit their technology provider to see if they have the features and functionality in place to scale their personalization efforts.

If brands really want to stand out from the competition, then each department and technology they’re using can help to provide that 360-degree view of the customer. When different departments and tools speak together, it allows you to personalize your message to your customers and provide them with a seamless experience.

Q. What advice would you give to companies looking to maximize click-throughs?

Starting with multivariate split tests to see how your audience, or segments of your audience, are responding to different content messages that you share with them. The ones that you see that resonate the most, you can leverage going forward. Another thing to test is having dynamic content appear in an email based on the different segments to further enhance the customer experience.

Q. How important is automation in supporting omnichannel marketing strategies?

Omnichannel marketing strategies would be impossible without automation. To manually target, message, and acquire customers across email, website, and social media would get challenging as the customer and subscriber base increases. Companies can leverage marketing automation tools that can engage with the same customer across multiple channels to provide a consistent message and brand perception.

Q. How has the pandemic affected email marketing?

The pandemic has created a lot of opportunities! Companies that weren’t leveraging email marketing to its fullest are now focusing on it as it is one of the most profitable marketing channels. With traditional marketing channels becoming less effective as people stay at home and more content is consumed online, email is becoming a great channel to build loyalty and drive sales.

Q. What lessons can businesses learn about email marketing in a post-pandemic world?

Communicating online with your customer is now more important than ever. You need to have multiple channels because you can no longer rely on them coming to you and that means more companies competing for the email inbox today. To stand out, the need for personalization and improve your email marketing campaigns is more important than ever. The same effort that you were putting into your offline efforts is going to need to be transitioned into your online efforts if you want to be able to compete going forward.

Q. Social marketing has sort of taken a life of its own in recent years, how can immersive technologies help email marketing and retain its position?

Social media marketing is going to complement and support email marketing by helping companies grow their list faster, increase their following and brand presence. Immersive technologies such as virtual reality or augmented reality can help brands create a new and unique experience for the individual. To drive traffic to these platforms, email can be a great distribution channel given the reach and engagement levels. This omnichannel approach will become ever more important as consumers expect a personalized approach across every channel they engage with.

Maropost is a cloud marketing automation platform that helps Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies acquire, engage and convert prospects and customers across multiple channels (for example, email, social, web, mobile). Marketers can quickly create customer journeys, send targeted emails and SMS, and dynamically optimize their campaigns.