A nicely designed email campaign with a compelling message is not enough to entice today’s increasingly more sophisticated online buyer to purchase.
Why, because I am afraid it may not be sufficiently targeted. Technology such as Prophet that gives the vendor knowledge of the browsing behaviour of its potential customers is becoming more necessary especially with the growth of comparison websites where visitors can switch between vendors with one click.
Yet still, few marketers rank relevance as a top-three email marketing goal, even though it drives the majority of consumers who make immediate e-mail purchases. [‘The ROI of Email Relevance’, JupiterResearch, May 2005]. And Only 34% of email marketers use behavioural data for segmentation and targeting, whereas 66% use "old" media demographic information to position their offers and newsletters. [eROI, May 2006] This is interesting from a number of perspectives not least that 60% of consumers who make immediate purchases from e-mail messages did so because the messages contained products they were already considering because they had seen them on the vendors website.
Marketers should be looking to integrate email campaigns with website behavioural clickstream data as an email targeting tactic. This strategy is expected to double in the next 12 months to 24 months, with 41% of promotional email marketers planning to deploy it.
