In the first part of our email-marketing discussion we outlined how to create personalized and interactive emails to engage consumers. But how do you achieve personalized subject headings for each reader or send emails in response to an individual consumer’s behavior? You need tech that automates these functions and gathers and analyzes data on customer demographics and behavior.

Let’s continue our email-marketing conversation by outlining the data-gathering and other technological features available to get your email read rates high.

Email-Marketing Software: Automation & Data-Tracking Features

⋅  Connect email to data about the customer’s journey — Gather a wide range of data, including your customer’s geographic location and time zone, browsing and search behavior, purchase history, and even the local weather. Using automation, integrate this data to determine when and what email offers should be sent.

⋅  Drip-email campaigns. Using a drip campaign, a company sends emails at various stages of a customer’s interaction with a product. They may offer additional education about the product, entice by highlighting certain features, act as reminders or make special offers. Each email responds to the last action the customer took, such as reading or failing to read a prior campaign email.

⋅  Triggered emails.  Set rules for follow-up emails to specific actions: e.g., automated reminder emails about items left in a shopping cart, or marketing emails about new products similar to past purchases.

⋅  Integrated CRM — Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can integrate with various email-marketing platforms, allowing you to incorporate prior interactions when determining the content of targeted emails. Differentiate your potential clients from long-term customers and make emails responsive to individualized pricing and contracts.

⋅  Omni-channel integration — Tie email automation to multiple sources of customer behavior, including social media engagement and customer service chat history, for a more targeted follow-up to these interactions.

⋅  Segment email lists — Using demographic and customer behavior information, your complete email list can be divided into smaller groups for more targeted, individual-feeling email campaigns.

⋅  Email building — Email marketing software can make it easier to create email templates, optimize emails for mobile view, and even A/B test designs or messages.

⋅  Monitor campaigns — Collect data on interactions with your emails, including click-throughs rates and eventual purchasing or abandonment. Use this data to not only assess any campaign’s ROI, but to also assess the best tag lines, button sizes, interactive features and messages.

What features do you need? What will be most cost effective for your company? Get in touch, and Thanx Media can help you chose and implement the right email-marketing platform.