Relevant content key to success of e-mail marketing

Industry experts at IAMAI's 3rd Email Marketing Summit stress on creating a truly personalised e-mail experience to be relevant to the consumers

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Delhi | March 13, 2015

Content is king, or in the case of e-mail marketing, relevant content is the key to its success. If content relevance is one aspect for a successful campaign, the other aspect is customer engagement.

Speakers, across sessions at the Internet and Mobile Association's (IAMAI) third Email Marketing Summit, spoke about growing content relevance for reaching out to consumers. The Summit was held in Delhi on March 12, 2015.

According to Anand Dubey, VP & Senior Marketing Partner, IndusInd Bank, said, “A friendly aspect needs to be included in e-mails. An e-mail needs to be relevant to the consumer. Randomly sending e-mails to consumers without knowing their interest will only disengage them. We, as marketers, need to fight for subject lines. It's the most important part and should never be misleading. At the end of the day, engaging customers should be the priority and sales will happen eventually.”

Adding to Anand Dubey's views, Sumit Dave, Global Marketing Leader, Genpact LLC, said, “Customer's expectations have changed in the B2C segment as they have become much more active. They are interacting a lot on social media and getting the information that they require. We have to be constantly relevant to the customers with the help of e-mails.”

The Summit also focussed on the emerging big data analytics to help improve e-mail marketing. Speaking on how Big Data helps e-mail marketing, Vicky Sarin, Business Head & CFO, HT Digital, said, “Big Data helps in getting detailed information and helps a marketer in making more sound decision. We can simply say that it squeezes our time and can help us be more productive.”  Speakers pointed out that it might not be too far in the future that Big Data will provide information about not just what types of content recipients are most likely to consume, but when and where they will actually open the message.

Speakers at the Summit agreed that with innovations taking place in the digital arena, e-mail marketing has also reached another level of personalisation. The focus now is to deal with the challenge of creating a truly personalised e-mail experience.

Speaking on how e-mail marketing was successful for Shopclues.com, Bhavneet Sekhon, Marketing & Client Experience Leader, Experian, said, “To communicate effectively through e-mails, one has to take care of the subject line and do a lot of testing before sending it to consumers. Hypothesis is the major part of e-mail marketing, and we continuously tested the hypothesis before going ahead with one. Open rates were consistently higher and we looked at what a subscriber is engaging with and identified behaviour of customer before going to Shopclues with complete data. Every customer has different behaviour. We approached different sets of consumers differently. The customer insights are crucial, and implementing smart segmentation by device types, trends, attitudes, geography and demography could be very instrumental for pertinent, tailor-made positioning.”

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