[WATCH] Eliminating outdated email campaign creation – AGS Europe

In an AGS Europe 2021 panel which was held in Malta, the moderator Dieter Brockmeyer, Co-Founder & Director Innovation & TIME of Diplomatic World Institute, Faruk Aydin, Head of Growth at Growth, and Yanna-Torry Aspraki, Head of Deliverability at Harlem Next discuss email marketing, what tactics to use, and the use of AI.

Dieter Brockmeyer

Brockmeyer starts the panel by saying that 10 years ago he learnt that “email is dead”; however, emails are still here and they are going strong. Aydin and Aspraki both agree that email marketing is definitely not dead. Aydin adds that the email is “the common denominator”; to sign up for any social media or any app, you need to have an email address. He adds that “more than 85% of email subscribers” register to receive personal emails.

There is a lot of strength in tailored emails, because they incite the users to read more about the products that they are interested in. Aydin points out that during the pandemic, peoples’ attention was directed to emails and social media and as a result the emails grew even stronger. Brockmeyer partly agrees with him; however, he mentions the fact that a lot of emails get caught in spam filters.

Yanna-Torry Aspraki

Aspraki says that the way we do emails is “dead” and that we need to change the tactics because we have been sending the same email to a lot of recipients and hoping for a reply for too long. She adds that deliverability is not enough; it is important for the recipients to interact with the email. When the recipients interact with the email, the spam filters learn that the email is wanted. When buying email lists, it is very possible that others also buy the same list and this is recognized by the spam filters and so the emails are blocked. She says that than we will turn to people like her or Aydin to fix the issue but it will take months.

Faruk Aydin

Aydin gives a couple of suggestions of how not to make people hate our emails. He suggests to start preparing earlier than the actual dates. As an example, he mentions Black Friday and Cyber Monday saying that is the time of year that brings the highest revenue and that subscribers expect the special offers “even like 40 days before”, therefore, “it is good to focus on them and start them a little bit earlier”. He mentions the “holiday gift anxiety”, when we don’t really know what to buy. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to send emails with suggestions and categorized according to prices, age groups, interests, etc. He agrees with Aspraki that user engagement is important and to increase it, testing is important; always try putting one different thing from the last.

Brockmeyer puts forward the question of how-to bring emails and artificial intelligence together. Aydin says that there are many uses of AI in emails. He mentions that it can start “from the moment that you acquire subscribers, all the way to the end of the funnel”. He adds that scoring systems using AI can be added to web forms for new subscribers which will allow you to rate the quality of that lead activity. Based on this information, various targeted personalized emails can be created which will increase the engagement rate. Today, AI-powered content creation is available. Throughout the customer journey, a lot of data is collected. AI can help turn this data into digestible pieces. The customers’ journey can be optimized, and customers can be individually targeted.

Follow the whole panel discussion here:

Brockmeyer adds that email marketing must be part of the entire marketing metrics and it needs to be in line with other measurements taken, especially social media. Aspraki adds that the “email is not for everybody” and it is not good for all different points of contact with the customers. If you want the customers to buy something, then the right email at the right time would be great; however, if you want the client to reply back to you maybe you should use WhatsApp. She says that “what you really, really want is to ensure that the engagement is really high”.

Aspraki mentions another important aspect of emails which is the open rate and she says that open rates are not real and that “they’re becoming less real”; in fact, for technical reasons, they “haven’t been real for a very, very long time”. This “means that you have open rates that you’re not calculating”. She says that what Aspraki mentioned is amazing, because it enables us to predict what the users want and thus target the email content which increases interaction; interaction is the signal that spam filters need to have. One of the easiest things to do is to ask the recipient to reply back to the email no matter what your business is.

Aydin says that before the panel he was speaking to some marketers who told him that they don’t really use emails and they prefer to use social media. Aydin noticed that they did not “really have a holistic approach, a holistic strategy for their entire marketing program”. They do social ads but they do not get the data from all the platforms they use and as a result they do not combine them in a single profile. Ideally, both emails and social media platforms are used and data/intelligence is gathered which can later be used to target campaigns.

Brockmeyer mentions the snail mail and says that it is good that it is back and that he thinks that is “a really interesting approach”. Brockmeyer says that “the marketing tools have become more and more complex, but also more and more diversified”. He adds that this is when AI comes in as it helps us use these tools in a more appropriate and effective way.

Aspraki says that people now want campaigns tailored for them. People are not interested in offers that are not catered for them. She gives an example of a mattress store where the client buys a mattress and keeps on receiving mattresses offers. When someone buys a mattress, the probability is that he or she won’t buy another one soon. Therefore, emailing about mattresses is useless. Try offering something related to cleaning the mattress, pillows, pillowcases, anything related to the mattress but not another mattress. It all goes down to data and the importance of how to track it and use it.

Close to the end of the panel, Brockmeyer insists that from his end he “will keep having [his] marketing mails in the spam filter and deleted”.

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