Introduction

In the dynamic world of digital marketing, Claro Carwash has positioned itself as a leading player in the Benelux carwash industry. The company’s ambition is clear: to become the premium carwash service provider in the region. To achieve this, Claro Carwash has partnered with 100procent (part of United Playgrounds), leveraging their expertise in marketing automation to enhance customer engagement and drive growth. This article narrates the story of this transformative journey, as presented by Martijn van Asten, a seasoned marketing technologist at 100procent, with the help of Actito.

This article is written by Martijn van Asten, Marketing Technologist at 100procent, in collaboration with Actito, one of this year’s sponsors of the DDMA Email Marketing Automation Summit. Tickets are available at: emas.nu.

The Vision and Initial Challenges

Setting the Stage

Let us first highlight the strategic pillars that were uses to drive results: strategy, data, creation, and technology. These elements, when harmoniously integrated, can deliver omnichannel personalization across all customer touchpoints.

Claro Carwash: The Beginning

Claro Carwash, with over 15 locations, approached 100procent in early 2023. They were looking for a partner to help them set up a top-tier marketing automation system. The initial discussions quickly revealed that the challenges were broader than anticipated. Claro Carwash was dealing with fragmented data, manual email processes, and a lack of personalization.

The Partnership and Strategic Implementation

Understanding the Scope

The collaboration began with a comprehensive analysis of Claro Carwash’s existing systems and processes. This included their use of license plate recognition cameras, multiple point-of-sale systems, and various databases that were not centrally managed. The goal was to create a seamless, omnichannel marketing strategy that could utilize all available customer data effectively and find the appropriate tool that could centralise and activate all that data.

The New Website Launch

One of the early successes of the partnership was the launch of Claro Carwash’s new website by LiveWall, also part of United Playgrounds. This new website not only reflected the updated branding of Claro Carwash but also served as a foundation for future marketing activities. The design was carried over to their email communications, ensuring brand consistency across channels.

Overcoming Challenges

Data Integration and Personalization

A major hurdle was the lack of available data and the manual nature of the email processes. To address this, Claro Carwash implemented a robust data collection and management strategy. This involved using data from various sources, including license plate recognition and third-party data from RDW (the Netherlands Vehicle Authority), to create detailed customer profiles.

Creating a Centralized Data Hub

Centralizing data was crucial for the success of the marketing automation strategy. By consolidating data into a single repository, Claro Carwash could achieve a unified customer view, essential for personalized marketing efforts. This platform grouping strategy enabled Claro Carwash to transition from a fragmented system to an integrated marketing automation platform.

The Ideal Martech Setup

The Centralized Approach

The ideal Martech setup for Claro Carwash includes the central storage of data, integration of various customer touchpoints (web, email, social, app, print, and onsite), and the development of a custom voucher system. This system allowed for real-time validation of coupons, enhancing the customer experience and driving loyalty towards the Claro Carwash brand.

Achieving Omnichannel Marketing

The goal was to reach customers through their preferred communication channels, creating a seamless and engaging customer journey. By leveraging the centralized data hub from Actito, Claro Carwash could deliver personalized messages and offers, significantly improving customer engagement and satisfaction.

Results and Future Prospects

Early Successes

The initial results of this comprehensive marketing automation strategy have been promising. Claro Carwash has seen improvements in customer engagement and operational efficiency. The custom voucher system has been a hit, allowing for real-time, personalized interactions with customers.

Looking Ahead

Claro Carwash aims to continue its growth trajectory, with plans to expand its services and further refine its marketing strategies. The partnership with 100procent and Actito is expected to play a pivotal role in this journey, driving innovation and excellence in customer engagement.

Conclusion

The story of Claro Carwash and 100procent is a testament to the power of strategic marketing automation. By overcoming initial challenges and leveraging a centralized data approach, Claro Carwash has set a new standard in the carwash industry. This partnership highlights the importance of integrating strategy, data, creation, and technology to achieve remarkable business outcomes.

Author

Martijn van Asten
Marketing Technologist |
| 100procent

Neleman wijnen, a leading producer of organic wines, has experienced impressive growth since its founding in 2014 by Derrick Neleman. The company is committed to sustainability and social responsibility, which is reflected in their motto: “Together we drink the world more beautifully.” These core values form the basis of their marketing strategy, which relies heavily on email marketing automation. In this article, we will discuss how Neleman wijnen have significantly increased their marketing power with the help of a well-thought-out combination of automation strategies.

This article is written by Hendrik Westerhuis, Senior Content Marketeer at Spotler. Spotler is one of the sponsors of the 2024 Email Marketing Automation Summit. Have you got your tickets yet? Get them at: shop.emas.nu.

The power of CDP and email marketing automation

The use of a Customer Data Platform (CDP) that drives email marketing automation, plays a crucial role in the success of Neleman Wijnen. Email is accountable for about 60% of their total turnover. Neleman uses more than twenty well-coordinated automations and commercial newsletters to convert prospects and nurture customers. This approach ensures that customers receive relevant and personalized content at every point in their customer journey.

Collaboration with mailmeisters and Spotler

Neleman works closely with digital agency mailmeisters to set up and realise the various automations. The collected customer data is managed in the Customer Data Platform (CDP) Spotler Activate, which then triggers the right email flows in Spotler Mail+. This collaboration ensures that Neleman wijnen has set up the right automations at all important touchpoints.

The Customer Matrix

The Customer Matrix of Neleman wijnen is a detailed plan with more than ten important touchpoints, on which various automatic campaigns have been set up. This keeps a customer or prospect in the picture, no matter where they are in the buyer or customer journey. Here are some key automations in the matrix:

1. Onboarding new customers: New customers are welcomed and taken into the world of Neleman wijnen, including the benefits of their organic products.
2. Increase customer engagement: Customers are incentivised to buy more often through personalised recommendations and special offers.
3. Personalised product recommendations: Based on previous purchases, customers get recommendations that align with their preferences.
4. Lead generation of valuable customers: Generating leads through look-a-like models, who seek similar profiles to attract new customers.
5. Upsell active customers: Active customers get offers that entice them to buy more and more often.
6. Preventing churn: Customers who are at risk of dropping out are reactivated with targeted campaigns.
7. Funnel recovery: Customers who do not complete their purchase process are encouraged to complete their order.
8. Personalising content: Each communication is tailored to the individual customer to increase relevance and engagement.

Defining customer groups

Neleman wijnen uses an RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value) analysis from their CDP to divide customers into different groups. This format helps create targeted campaigns that cater to the specific needs and behaviours of each customer group. Examples of these customer groups are:

1. Prospects (unknown visitor/no order placed yet)
2. New customers (1st order < 3 months)
3. Green customers (1st, 2nd, or 3rd order < 12 months)
4. Potential Loyal customers (active customers with 3 to 4 orders < 12 months)
5. Loyal customers (active customers with 5-10 orders)
6. Top customers (active customers with 10 orders or more)
7. Risk Churn customers (no order last 6-12 months)
8. Valuable Inactive customers (no order last 12-36 months with initial high order value)
9. Inactive customers 12-36 months (no order last 12-36 months with low order value/one-time order)
10. Shareholders (to be)

For each customer group, specific campaigns are set up with relevant content and dynamic product blocks, tailored to the customer’s preferences and behaviours.

Campaigns that connect with the different customer groups

The customer groups are based on an RFM analysis, which is a well-known method in eCommerce marketing to classify customers. This classification is done by answering the following three questions:

1. How recently did a customer make a purchase?
2. How frequently does a customer buy?
3. What is the value of the customer’s purchases?

The Customer Data Platform Spotler Activate can define customer groups for you based on such an RFM analysis. The values that the CDP uses for this can be adjusted manually. In this way, the proposed customer groups can be easily adapted to the specific circumstances of – in this case – Neleman wijnen.

Of course, mailmeisters first determined the right strategy for the definition of the RFM groups. After that, different personal campaigns were set up for each group. The emails of the various campaigns work with relevant content and dynamic product blocks, so that each email always meets the wishes of the customer. But also, in these product blocks there is variation with different recommendation sets. In this way, mailmeisters can show the right recommendations for Neleman per target group and per campaign. From the most popular wines to similar in taste and from favourite grape variety to “recommended for you” and much more. Separate flows have now been set up for the most important customer groups.

To name a few examples:

• For new customers, the aim is to make a second (and third) purchase as soon as possible, because Mailmeisters has seen that Neleman customers with multiple orders in the first half of the year appear to be more loyal customers.
• The “About to Lose” customer group is seduced with great offers and short-term campaigns, with the aim of reactivating customers and encouraging them to place a new order.
• For the “Promising” and “Champions” customer group, Neleman prefers to emphasize the relationship and Mailmeisters ensures that this group receives relevant content specifically tailored to behaviour.

Connection to active and inactive customers

Neleman’s automations are aimed at engaging and converting both active and inactive customers. Automatic email campaigns are triggered by actions or lack of action from different customer groups. The goal is to motivate customers to reach the next destination in their customer journey.

The ideal customer journey

The ultimate goal of Neleman wijnen is to turn prospects into loyal customers and ultimately shareholders. This journey starts with a first acquaintance and continues to engage customers in the world of Neleman wines through welcome offers, personal stories and highlighting the benefits of organic and sustainable viticulture. The ideal customer journey looks like this:

1. Welcome potential customers with a nice welcome offer.
2. Bringing new customers into the story behind Neleman. Split into segments: newsletter subscription, direct customers or buyers via retailer.
3. Entice active customers to make a repeat purchase.
4. Upsell from 1st to 2nd order and 2nd to 3rd order.
5. Attention to top customers.
6. Specific flows for shareholders (to be).

 

Birthday campaign

A good example of a campaign that is not directly driven by specific customer behaviour, but is dependent on customer segmentation, is the birthday campaign. Loyal customers receive an extra reward for thanking them for their trust, while new customers receive a warm welcome. The flow consists of three consecutive mailings around the customer’s birthday, with the aim of earning a purchase.

From prospect to customer

Neleman wijnen uses various methods to entice visitors to their website to sign up for the newsletter. This is done through a regular newsletter pop-up, a message bar or personal wine advice from Derrick Neleman. This approach results in an average conversion uplift of 25%, with peaks of up to 56%.

From customer to loyal customer

The ideal customer journey at Neleman consists of several phases:

1. Welcome potential customers with a nice welcome offer.
2. Bringing new customers into the story behind Neleman, segmented into newsletter subscribers, direct customers or buyers via retailer.
3. Entice active customers to make a repeat purchase.
4. Upsell from 1st to 2nd order and 2nd to 3rd order.
5. Attention to top customers.
6. Specific flows for shareholders (to be).

This approach makes customers feel valued and important, which contributes to their loyalty.

Grow into a shareholder

Neleman invites clients to become shareholders. This starts in the third email of the welcome flow and is reflected in various post purchase campaigns and commercial mailings. The goal is to allow customers to actively participate in the company.

Conclusion and future

The combination of different automations is a huge added value for Neleman wijnen. By approaching customers at different touchpoints in their journey, the chance of a repeat purchase increases. This strengthens communication and ultimately has a positive impact on conversion. Neleman wijnen continues to optimise and professionalise to take their email marketing to the next level.

Want to know more about marketing automation for your organisation? Visit Spotler and find out how you can optimize your marketing strategy.

Author

Hendrik Westerhuis
Senior Content Marketeer | Spotler

In the rapidly evolving world of digital marketing, brands are constantly competing for consumers’ attention. With hundreds of emails flooding inboxes daily, it’s crucial to stand out and remain relevant. By integrating interactive elements into emails, simple newsletters are transformed into dynamic mini-websites that capture attention and are hyper-personalized.

This article is written by Jordi Griffioen, COO at RapidSugar, one of this year’s sponsors of the DDMA Email Marketing Automation Summit. Tickets are available at: emas.nu.

What is Interactive Email Marketing?

Interactive emails use elements like tabs, accordions, and sliders that recipients can actively engage with within the email itself. This type of email resembles a small, interactive website. Users can hover over items, click, and scroll without leaving the email. This not only increases engagement but also the likelihood of conversion.

3 Benefits of Interactive Email Marketing:

• Enhanced Experience and Engagement: By offering recipients interactive content, they stay longer within the email. The dynamic elements pique curiosity and encourage users to explore the email more deeply.
• Increased (First Party) Data Collection: Every interaction within an email provides valuable insights into users’ preferences and behaviors, enabling future campaigns to be better tailored to the recipient. For example, integrating a quiz into an email can gather valuable first-party data about recipients’ interests, needs, and purchase intentions.
• Improved Performance: Interactive elements significantly enhance the performance of email campaigns. They not only attract more attention but also boost engagement within the email. By giving recipients control over their experience through interactive navigation, such as exploring different product options, the dynamic of user interaction changes. The sales funnel moves to the user’s inbox, streamlining the user experience and increasing the chance of conversion.

How Does Interactive Email Marketing Work?

Interactive emails can be set up in virtually any email tool using HTML and CSS. Most modern devices, such as Apple iOS and Samsung Android, generally support interactive emails. In some outdated email clients, these elements might not display correctly. Therefore, it’s crucial to implement fallbacks. This means providing an alternative version of the email for those email clients that cannot properly display the interactive elements. Using fallbacks ensures a consistent user experience regardless of the recipient’s email client, minimizing the risk of disrupting the message.

How to Implement Interactivity?

Interactivity can be employed in various ways to improve user experience, increase engagement, and enhance effectiveness:

Reveal Techniques for Curiosity:
Hide essential information that is only revealed through user interaction, such as clicking or hovering over an element. This could involve special offers or important announcements that prompt users to take action.

Showcase: Advent Calendar
Bol took advantage of Christmas to thank loyal customers. For five days, they received an email with an interactive advent calendar. Each day, a new window with a surprise could be opened.
View the showcase

Tabs and Sliders for Structured Content:
Organize content using tabs or sliders. This allows users to explore extensive content without feeling overwhelmed and gives them more control over their experience in the email.

Showcase: Film Year Review
To thank movie lovers for their cinema visits, Pathé sent an interactive email full of film facts and personal highlights.
View the showcase

Using Interactive Surveys and Quizzes:
Create more engagement by including surveys or quizzes in emails, gaining valuable insights into users’ preferences. These techniques can also be used to make personalized recommendations, improving the user experience.

Showcase: Delivery Preferences
PostNL helped consumers discover their best delivery option. Via an interactive email, recipients were asked three short questions. Once the preference was discovered, setting the delivery preferences was a breeze in the PostNL app or online account.
View the showcase

Gamification Elements like Mini-Games:
Integrate simple games such as a ‘wheel of fortune’ to give away discounts, chances to win, or other rewards. Such playful interactions can strongly motivate users to take action.

Parallax Scrolling Effect for Long Emails:
Create the illusion that an element in the email moves along as you scroll through the email using the parallax scroll effect. Especially in long emails, this can keep the recipient’s attention longer. Additionally, the effect can be used to tell a story or present information in a more engaging way.

Showcase: Parking at Q-ParkQ-Park makes it possible to park on the street and in Q-Park garages with one app. In a clever, personalized email flow, the benefits were introduced, and valuable insights were gathered. In a parallax scroll email, recipients drove their virtual car along all the advantages of parking in a Q-Park garage with the Q-Park app.
View the showcase

Zero- and First Party Data Enrichment:
Interactive techniques enable zero- and first-party data collection without the recipient having to leave the email. Polls and quizzes can be integrated into emails, and consent can be given with a single click.

Showcase: Interactive Opt-In Enrichment
In an email full of special Black Friday deals, Bol hid extra offers that were only visible if customers gave an additional opt-in. This could be done with a simple click, making the hidden deals immediately visible.
View the showcase

Measuring Interactive Clicks

With the use of interactivity in email marketing, a crucial new metric has become available, alongside the traditional click-through rate (CTR). Interactions with dynamic elements in emails are measurable in most email marketing tools. These tools can collect and store valuable first party data, providing marketers with better insights. With this valuable information, future emails can be better tailored to the needs and preferences of the recipients, making them more relevant and personalized.

Conclusion

Interactive email marketing transforms the way brands communicate with their target audience. By integrating interactive elements, emails become not only more engaging and personal but also more effective. With the benefits of an improved user experience and higher conversion rates, interactive email marketing is an essential strategy for marketers.

Author

Jordi Griffioen
COO | RapidSugar

As marketers, we’re familiar with the classic marketing channels. Email, PPC, SEO, social media, even SMS. But, what about WhatsApp…? WhatsApp isn’t just a personal messaging app, it also boasts marketing automation functionality which is perfect for businesses to communicate and engage with their audience. In this blog post, we will help you understand what WhatsApp marketing automation is, the benefits of this channel, tips and tricks, some common challenges, and offer a little inspiration.

This article is written by Deployteq, one of the sponsors of the DDMA Email Marketing Automation Summit 2024.

What is WhatsApp marketing automation?

When discussing WhatsApp marketing automation, we are referring to the use of technology to streamline marketing efforts via the WhatsApp platform without the need of manually triggered every message. With the use of WhatsApp API, WhatsApp Business app, and chatbots, businesses can automate entire conversations and message flows. Below are just some of the automation features available:

Automated message flows

Via the WhatsApp API, businesses can create custom message flows of any length, including an entire conversation. Businesses can for example, utilise this functionality for auto-replies to FAQ, provide opening hours, or pointing customers to useful information.

Streamlined sales process

Businesses can automate their sales flow through the WhatsApp chatbot. This functionality can enquire about a customer’s intent, provide assistance when choosing a product, and enable instant purchasing.

Proactive messaging

Proactive message templates can be created through the WhatsApp API to target customers that have opted in to receive updates related to a specific order, appointment, service, or payment.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) call deflection

This feature can be utilised to send phone calls to WhatsApp. Businesses can assign a number in their IVR system which asks the users if they would like to continue the conversation via WhatsApp. Once they accept, they are automatically directed to WhatsApp to continue, either with a real-life agent or WhatsApp chatbot.

What are the benefits of WhatsApp marketing automation?

Using WhatsApp marketing automation offers several benefits for businesses looking to enhance their marketing efforts and engage with their target audience effectively.

Extensive reach

WhatsApp boasts over 2 billion users worldwide. For businesses, this means the opportunity to reach audiences, globally, in a simple and straightforward way. This is particularly useful for businesses who have a global audience that they want to engage.

Increased conversions

WhatsApp has a significantly higher conversion rate than many traditional marketing channels, even email! In fact, WhatsApp boasts a 98% open rate, an average response time of only 90 seconds, and an impressive conversion rate of 45-60%. Resulting in immediate and near-guaranteed engagement.

Better customer satisfaction

Customers love WhatsApp. Notably, the app is favoured by audiences aged between 26-35, followed by audiences aged between 36-45. Even better, WhatsApp offers the ability to communicate with audiences in a direct and personalised way, which has been proven to increase engagement and overall customer satisfaction.

WhatsApp marketing automation tips and tricks

WhatsApp marketing automation can be a powerful tool for businesses to engage with their audience effectively. Here are some valuable tips for using WhatsApp marketing automation to maximise your results:

Building a subscriber list

To start building a robust subscriber list we recommend promoting your WhatsApp across a variety of marketing channels. Use cross-promotion techniques to encourage users on other platforms, such as social media or email, to join your WhatsApp subscriber list. You can even offer exclusive incentives such as discounts, content, or early access to new products.

Increasing targeting with segmentation

Just as with any marketing channel, segmentation is ideal for increasing the relevance of your communications alongside your engagement rates. Segmentation through WhatsApp marketing automation is comparable to many other channels, and can be achieved through a range of criteria, such as behavioural, demographic, or product specific.

Creating compelling messages

To ensure your messages are engaging, start with a personalised greeting to create a more emotional connection. Follow this with visuals such as images or GIFs to enhance the visual appeal of your messages. And keep your messages concise and clear, focusing on the key information you want to convey. And why not experiment with different types of messages? Consider product recommendations, order updates, or interactive surveys.

Integrating WhatsApp with other systems

You can also utilise WhatsApp APIs or third-party tools to integrate WhatsApp with your CRM or marketing automation systems. This allows you to synchronise customer data, automate processes, and trigger personalised messages based on user interactions.

Monitoring and iterating

To optimise your WhatsApp marketing automation efforts, it’s crucial to monitor and analyse the performance of your campaigns. Track metrics such as engagement rates, conversion rates, and customer behaviour, and use the insights gained to refine your messaging, segmenting strategies, and automation workflows.

Common challenges with WhatsApp marketing automation

We’re big fans of WhatsApp marketing automation. But as with any marketing channel, there can be drawbacks, such as the below:

Compliance

WhatsApp boasts fairly strict terms of service which ensure that businesses cannot spam their recipients, or send unsolicited messages. Whilst this can make communications more complicated, overall the effects are positive. Businesses simply need to ensure they follow best practice guidelines, just as they would with any other marketing channel. Therefore avoiding any account suspensions or penalties.

Basic functionality

Whilst WhatsApp leads the way in personal messaging, it is fairly new to marketing automation. Which means it lacks some of the functionality that more traditional channels boast. This can cause drawbacks with design, visual content, or more complex automation requirements.

Limited broadcast lists

Broadcast lists for WhatsApp are limited to only 256 people. Whilst you can still contact more than 256 people, you will have to create multiple lists to do so. This can take some manual effort. So to make the most of it, we’d recommend using these lists to create different segments to increase the relevance of your messages.

WhatsApp marketing automation success stories

Understanding how WhatsApp marketing automation works is all well and good, but we know you want to see it in action. Here are a couple of our favourite WhatsApp campaigns to inspire you.

Adidas Rent-A-Pred

Adidas utilised WhatsApp to create a hotline to help amateur football teams across London to replace missing players, by providing some of London’s best Predator players to those in need. The campaign ran for 6 days and generated some fantastic results, notable press attention in football media, retail websites, blogs, and social media.

 

Hellmann’s

Hellmann’s wanted to inspire consumers to embrace mayonnaise for more than just sandwiches. So they created WhatsCook, a live recipe service via WhatsApp. Users received messages from real-life chefs requesting photos of the ingredients users had in their fridge. In return, the chef would suggest recipes with the use of Hellmann’s mayonnaise.

Not only did the campaign generate media attention, but it also boasted a 99% user satisfaction rate.

Next steps

We hope you’ve been inspired to consider WhatsApp Marketing Channel as a new and exciting technology to add to your marketing stack.

Grace Roberts

Content Marketer | Deployteq

In today’s hyper-connected world, customers expect a seamless experience, whether they are shopping online from their couch or visiting a brand’s physical retail location. However, creating a cohesive omnichannel experience is easier said than done. One powerful tool that retailers are leveraging to bridge the digital-physical divide is personalized email marketing.

This article is written by Becki Francis, Director of Client Strategy, Retail at Movable Ink (Sponsor of the 2024 Email Marketing Automation Summit).

Drive Footfall with Location-Based Personalization

While many think of email solely for e-commerce, retailers can capitalize on location data to drive customers into nearby boutiques and stores. Dutch jewelry brand My Jewellery does this effectively by using live map integrations to showcase the closest boutique locations to each email recipient based on their preferred postal code . This personalized local experience makes it seamless for customers to easily visit a physical store after being inspired by an email campaign.

In the example below, you can see how during peak season, My Jewellery wanted to drive foot traffic to their boutiques. To support this goal, they created a store locator that not only displays the information about recipients’ preferred store in their local city but also incorporates a personalized QR Code. The QR code is tailored to each recipient and offers a 10% discount that can only be redeemed within their boutiques. This innovative approach helps drive engagement but also incentivises customers to visit and make purchases in-store during peak season.

Another way to drive offline engagement is through live polling integrated into email. My Jewellery uses this interactive experience to not only collect voice-of-customer data, but also to segment audiences for triggered location-based messages. For example, if a customer indicates they will be shopping for a necklace in an urban city center through a poll, they can trigger a personalized follow-up email displaying boutiques in that area. My Jewellery is an example of a brand that uses polling systematically and creatively to ensure that they capture zero-party data and personalize their campaigns as much as possible.

For mother’s day, they wanted to fully embody the concept of ‘a gift guide for every kind of mother figure in your life’. In order to gather information of what customers’ preferred mother’s day jewelry was (from minimalist to statement pieces), they launched a live poll.

Once they gathered enough responses, they used progressive polling in order to personalize products based on the customers’ preferred style – be it to gift their mother, a friend who recently became a mom, or any other type of mother figure.

Although this may seem like a heavy lift for marketers, by leveraging the right technology to automate the process, brands can actually reduce production time significantly. By personalizing just one element of the team’s emails, production time went down dramatically — by as much as 300%.

Sustain Online Engagement with Behavioural Personalisation

While driving foot traffic is a crucial revenue stream, maintaining digital engagement is also essential for direct-to-consumer (DTC) retailers. Fossil is a best-in-class example of a brand that has found success engaging online audiences through the use of behavioral personalisation.

Using a series of customer behavioral cues and pre-defined “Waterfall logic,” Fossil is able to customize their newsletter campaigns to each customer’s needs at the moment of engagement.

Below is an example of how Fossil Outlet, one of the diverse array of brands produced by Fossil Group, leveraged a ‘Key Message Module’ that incorporated waterfall logic.

This module effectively displayed abandoned cart and recently browsed items, as well as the customer’s most recently visited categories if the previous two data points were unavailable.

Each banner within the campaign directed customers to their respective shopping carts, product pages, or category pages, motivating them to make a purchase.

This tactic, coupling Abandoned Cart and Browse Banners generated a 27% lift in conversions for the brand.

Retailers can enhance this approach even further by layering in additional data enrichment such as social proof messaging highlighting product popularity or dynamic checkout promotions that resurface discounts when customers are ready to buy.

Recognise that your customer uses various channels and optimize for mobile

The reality is that if you’re a multi-channel retailer, your customers are likely interacting with your brand both online and offline, even if they mostly engage in one channel. The experiences are interwoven throughout the customer’s consideration journey so it’s important to strive to mimic that within your marketing strategy.

The importance of a comprehensive mobile strategy also can’t be overstated here: whether they’re purchasing or researching, it’s probably a mobile device that customers are engaging on. Beyond the basics – designing mobile-first email campaigns, cutting down lengthy text and prioritizing eye-catching images – marketers should lean into mobile-specific channels like push notifications and SMS to drive engagement. Because mobile phones by default travel with the customer wherever he/she is on their journey – this channel is best used to deliver time-sensitive offer messaging as well as location-targeted, helpful communications when a customer is in a store.

As consumer expectations continue to rise, personalizing the email experience is becoming table stakes for retailers. Those who can master people-based marketing and connect the digital-physical dots will be the winners in earning customer loyalty and wallet share.

Author

Becki Francis
Director of Client Strategy Retail | Movable Ink

Marketers often rely on open-and click rates for quick campaign performance evaluations. Yet these metrics have long been known to be inaccurate. We often believe that things on the internet improve over time. That is not the case with email metrics – they are getting less accurate. Why? Should you be worried and should we abandon these metrics altogether?

About the author: Jakub Olexa is Founder & CEO of Mailkit (Sponsor of the 2024 Email Marketing Automation Summit).

The good old times: accurate open rates and clicks

Opens and clicks, or to be more accurate open rates and click rates, have long been the most important metrics for all email marketers. A single number tells how well a campaign has been performing. A single number to judge the engagement by. The underlying interactions have been the go-to data for recipient targeting, marketing automation as well as list cleaning operations. No matter how inaccurate, there are many use cases for the interaction data.

Over the past couple of years, we have seen these KPIs growing until everything broke – Apple announced its Mail Privacy Protection (Apple MPP for short). That was the moment when open rates skyrocketed. Marketers could no longer trust their data.

But the problem started long before MPP – the steady growth of open rates was one of the symptoms.

For the longest time, the tracking of opens was considered as accurate as it could be. We knew about the inaccuracies caused by tracking images not being loaded, email clients blocking images for security reasons, etc. The overall consensus in the industry was that while inaccurate, the data represented real interactions and therefore could be trusted.

Open and click patterns didn’t add up

Unlike opens, clicks were considered highly accurate. Clicks could not be easily intercepted by email clients (as always, there are exceptions) and provided firm data. Over time, we have started to see more and more emails being opened and links clicked with patterns that did not add up. The opens and clicks occurred at extremely high speed – messages opened immediately after delivery, and multiple links from a single mail clicked in a single second. These were clearly “Non-human interactions”!

We had so many questions… Did Rossum’s Universal Robots* escape to conquer the world of email?! How do we stop them?! How do we make the analytics accurate again?

We soon found out that these Robots opening emails and clicking the links did not come to conquer the email. They came to protect it – from the evil Robots! (Oh yes, there is such a thing as evil Robots – spam, phishing and malware are often sent and controlled by these evil Robots). By opening the messages and following the links inside, they were able to identify phishing attacks and spam campaigns faster and better than before, protecting individual recipients.

The challenge here is twofold – on one hand you have the Non-Human opens which skew the open-rate metrics marketers heavily rely on. On the other hand you have the Non-Human clicks that drive traffic but also automations.

The common denominator: Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection

The industry was fairly quick to identify the most common denominator for Non-Human Opens – no surprise, it was Apple’s MPP. Our data shows that 99% of all Non-Human opens are attributed to Apple. More importantly, over 50% of all email opens in Europe were Non-Human at the end of 2023. The percentage is even higher in the US, where Apple products have larger market share.

While easy to detect, the industry response was not that straightforward. Although the technical understanding is in place, the business priorities are often quite different. Detecting and removing Non-Human opens from reports was not a priority for most platforms. The resulting drop in open-rates would put extra pressure on support staff and could scare away some customers. Businesswise there is only one argument to do the detection – data quality. An argument that is hard to translate to sales and therefore most platforms put this feature in the backlog.

Deciphering Non-Human Interactions

It’s safe to say that if you are an email marketer doing B2C in Europe and your platform doesn’t remove Non-Human interactions from their reports you can divide your open rates by 2. Before you do, check if your platform offers any detection of non-human interaction. If it does there is usually the option to hide/discount such interactions.

Non-Human clicks are a different beast though. These are performed by anti-spam filters, security vendors, etc. to identify abusive links. The impact of such scans vary a lot. In B2C space you can expect around 3-5% of all the clicks to be non-human. In B2B space we have encountered cases where 100% of clicks were caused by scanners. This is easily explained by the fact that each industry segment uses different anti-spam methods.

In B2C most mailboxes are operated by large freemail providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. These systems are built to identify clusters of messages (bulk mail) and scan only a sample group of the messages. Results of the checks on the sample group are then applied to the whole cluster of messages – be it 10 or 10 million messages. Only the links from the sample group will be followed for security check and only those will show up in the reports as clicked.

Anti-spam systems in the B2B space usually can’t reliably cluster messages as even the largest enterprises count their mailboxes in thousands. As a result each message has to be scanned individually. Each message being scanned means links in each message may be subject to being scanned for abusive content. Every link in every message is “clicked” before the message gets delivered to its recipient.

All of these clicks (but opens as well) may trigger automations. Automations that will result in more emails to be sent. This is where the detection becomes extremely complicated. Security scanners are working extra hard to stay undetected – not because they want to mess with click rates but because they need to. They must stay undetected to protect the recipient’s mailboxes. It’s not only about this one campaign, but all the future campaigns and automations.

The end goal: finding a balance of data quality

The goal for us as ESPs is to find the right balance of data quality. We can’t detect all non-human interactions but we should do our best, as these interactions not only affect the reports but also our customer’s costs. Data quality becomes a very strong business case.

Author

Jakub Olexa
Founder & CEO | Mailkit

If there is one marketing trend we can be sure will continue to dominate, it’s AI tools for content creation and distribution. Within one week of its launch on 30th November 2022, OpenAI’s Chat GPT crossed one million users, a trajectory that is only going in one direction.

This article is written by Maileon, sponsor of the DDMA Digital Analytics Summit 2024 on June 27th. Tickets available at shop.emas.nu. 

Regardless of whether you see this as a threat or an unprecedented opportunity, AI-powered tools are here to stay. In fact, a recent survey from Contentoo found that over half (53%) of content marketers are already using or testing AI. To stay ahead of the game, marketers must get a good understanding of the current capabilities and use them to their advantage.  and keep their finger firmly on the pulse.

This article will explore the benefits of using AI in email marketing and when it should be avoided. We’ll also reveal some dos and don’ts of using AI in your marketing processes.

The benefits of using AI in email marketing

AI can be used in email marketing to craft killer headlines, create whole sections of body text, personalise messaging, optimise send times, and even inform strategy.  Here are some of the key benefits of using AI in email marketing.

• Saves time.I’m yet to meet a marketer who couldn’t do with more hours in the day. AI tools can take on multiple tasks, automate processes and reduce time-consuming jobs from hours to minutes.
• Improves copy quality.AI’s ever-expanding data sets help to identify and reduce errors and improve messaging. For example, AI-powered email marketing platforms can alert users to spelling and grammar mistakes or inconsistencies in tone of voice. It can even recommend ways to improve phrasing or construct clearer sentences.
• Improves deliverability. AI tools use historical data to ensure your emails are sent to people at the best time possible. They cleanse and segment data lists and optimise the content structure so they stand the best chance of being received and read.
• Want to improve your email deliverability with smart personalisation? Take a look at our platform today.
• Increases impact and engagement.Email marketing tools that are powered by AI can create personalised messaging at scale in a matter of seconds. Providing leads and customers with targeted content based on their purchase history or behaviours can mean the difference between conversion and losing your recipient’s interest.

When should you avoid AI in content creation?

Full disclosure – this article was produced without using AI. Or was it… 😉‘

AI is great for creating generalised content but you need to be careful that the automated content does not plagiarise, show bias, or include incorrect or unsupported information.

Furthermore, AI tools can’t produce original ideas (yet) so publishing AI-created content risks damaging your brand identity and alienating your audience if you don’t give them the rich, unique content they want and deserve.

Dos and don’ts of using AI in email marketing

As you know, AI in content creation and distribution is developing at a pretty mind-boggling rate. While busy marketers will want to take advantage of using these tools it’s important to be aware of the risks involved.

Here are some dos and don’ts to keep in mind so you can reap the rewards and avoid the pitfalls.

Dos

• Use AI to do the legwork. This could be finding topics, helping with research, or to write out generalised content in your email.
• Use AI-powered tools to find or even generate images that will perfectly communicate and emphasise your written content. Some tools can even analyse your audience profile and recommend visual content based on that data.
• Choose the best integrated email marketing AI tools to suit your business. Key functionalities to consider include:
  • The ability to set up SMS campaigns within automation flows.
  • Automated tool to proactively check and cleanse email lists to get rid of fakes, spam and inactive users. Find out how this works on our email address checker.
  • The ability to test email addresses before sending to optimise deliverability.
  • The ability to predict the best time to send your email on an individual subscriber level and automate/set send times accordingly.
  • Functionality to include automated personalised recommendations, such as product promotions from your webshop.

Psssst… if you want all these benefits, and much more, check out our solution today!

Don’ts

• Forget about the importance of unique content and the creative process. As mentioned above, AI content is machine generated and is not composed of original thoughts and ideas. Your brand’s standpoint and view of a subject can offer real value and must take precedence.
• Publish AI-created content without giving it a thorough review and fact check. This includes adapting the tone of voice so it reflects your brand style.
• Rely too much on automated processes. You still need to check in regularly to make sure the programming you set is running as it should, and that email distribution and content personalisation are optimised. It’s important to keep your automation goals in mind, as your campaigns evolve. Automation is a tool to help you and/or make it easier to reach your goal – not a goal in and of itself. You’ll always have to do some of the legwork yourself and it’s your knowledge and input that will help ensure you get the best results.
• Forget that the world of AI-powered content is constantly evolving. Review your processes and tools regularly to make sure you and your customers are getting the most benefit possible.

A recent survey from Contentoo found that over half (53%) of content marketers are already using or testing AI.

As with all developments in marketing technology, it is vital that you and your team don’t get left behind. Like it or not, AI is here to stay and, when used with the best interests of your brand and audience in mind, it can present some exciting opportunities.

As you know, the worlds of marketing and technology move fast and we simply don’t know what developments are around the corner. Our advice is to experiment with the tools and identify solutions that could help you save valuable time and enhance your processes. Maintain a healthy level of caution and remember that your customers chose your brand and are loyal to it because of the value you offer and the trust you are committed to building.

Make sure your brand voice is clear and present across all marketing channels, at all times. AI is a long way from replicating the personality and human touch that ensures you stand out from the crowd. Use it as a tool to enhance creativity and innovation rather than replace it altogether.

It’s almost time for this year’s edition of the EMAS Battle of the Agencies, but we’re taking a moment to look back at our winning case from last year. Curious about how we did this for Amnesty International? Read it here!

Happy Horizon is one of the sponsors for the 2024 Email Marketing Automation Summit in Circa Amsterdam. Tickets available here.

“It’s great to see that our taken risk has paid off well,” said our email expert Joep after the victory during the Battle of the Agencies. For charities like Amnesty International, donations are one of the most important sources of income. But enticing consumers to make a (long-term) donation is becoming increasingly challenging, partly due to the economic situation and reduced purchasing power. With a team of specialists, we proposed a well-thought-out yet daring idea. This idea earned us the victory at the Battle of the Agencies 2023.

The question from Amnesty International

Develop an email for the recruitment of as many members as possible, with the highest possible annual value. That was the task given by Amnesty International to the participants of the Battle of the Agencies 2023. Amnesty aims to recruit members who, extrapolated over 1 year, achieve the highest possible value.

“It’s really nice to see that our insights into non-profit and email marketing have been decisive in our victory.” – Joep van Ham

Our approach

We started with a brainstorm with non-profit specialists, email marketers, and content specialists. What do we already know about the target audience, and what do we know from similar campaigns? That brainstorm yielded relevant insights:

• Donors often think that their donation is just a drop in the ocean. Therefore, we need to emphasize that every donation counts;
• Emails to recruit members often have a high open rate. However, the click-through rate (CTR) is often low. If we want to achieve results, it is our task to make the email content different from previously sent emails;
• A relatively large number of recruitment emails are sent. We need to stand out.

With these insights in mind, we opted for a bold but, given the collected information, a very logical option. We chose a text email, written from the perspective of the director. With this, we wanted to stimulate urgency, reciprocity, and a sense of togetherness and claim authority. We did this by…

• Writing a personalized greeting (Can you help me, <name>?);
• Making the text as concise and powerful as possible;
• Adding the director’s signature;
• Placing text links above the fold;
• Making text links blue instead of black;
• Personalizing the text per segment;
• Testing extensively;
• Creating an English version of the email.

Additionally, we redesigned the landing page with our UX designer.

Result

The text email was live for 2 weeks and brought in 45 new members, with an average donation value of €77.58. The annual value – the campaign’s most important KPI – was even €3,491.00. That is over €500 higher than the second-place, and over €1000 higher than the third-place. Thanks to these results, we were named the winner of the Battle of the Agencies for the second year in a row.

Author

Joep van Ham
Teamlead E-mailmarketing | Happy Horizon

Ever since Google and Yahoo announced their new requirements for email senders, they have been the talk of the town. In addition, they also act a bit as a connector between worlds that otherwise are so far apart.

Because maybe for the first time, even email marketers begin to be concerned about email security. And you should be. The effectiveness of your email campaigns depends on it.

Although email security and email marketers both deal with the aspect of email management, their focuses are different. So we from DMARC Advisor are very excited that both worlds are now forced to communicate and work together, which is awesome news for the safety of the email ecosystem!

In this article, we’ll explore the email authentication protocols that are relevant to email marketers and explain why implementing them is essential for the success of your email marketing campaigns.

Email security

Email security protects email systems, networks, and data from various threats. These threats vary from malware, phishing attacks, spam, spoofing and other forms of unauthorised access. Each of these can seriously harm the brand reputation your organisation has worked so hard for to achieve. The main objectives are to ensure email communications’ confidentiality, integrity, and availability, safeguard sensitive information, and prevent data breaches.

Implementing encryption, spam filters, anti-virus software, and firewalls are measures to ensure the objectives above. But also — and this is where we are most excited about — email authentication protocols, such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

Email authentication protocols: How do they work?

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are open standards anyone can implement for free online. The image below provides a quick view of where to find each authentication method within an email.

The ‘From:’ domain, also known as the DMARC domain, is shown in an email. This is what everyone sees as being the ‘sender’. But this is exactly the domain that is used in phishing campaigns. So even though SPF and DKIM can pass a validation check, that doesn’t mean DMARC passes. The DMARC domain needs to be aligned with the SPF and DKIM domains to protect them from phishing or email abuse.

Sender Policy Framework – the mailman

SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework, and it allows the domain owner to specify which email servers are authorised to send emails on behalf of that domain.

The easiest way to explain SPF is that you are sending a package to your friend and have authorized DHL to deliver it. Any other postal service is not authorized.

DomainKeys Identified Mail – the postal stamp

DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail and works by adding a digital signature to the header of an email message.

The easiest way to explain DKIM is to add a seal to the package you sent. The seal should be intact upon arrival. If the seal is broken, you know the content can be tampered with.

Domain-based Messaging Authentication Reporting & Conformance

DMARC stands for Domain-based Messaging Authentication Reporting & Conformance. It is an open standard built on top of SPF and DKIM. DMARC allows a domain owner to specify how their emails should be handled if they fail SPF or DKIM checks + the alignment checks. The domain owner can have the email rejected, marked as spam, or delivered as usual.

Without DMARC, domain owners cannot see who or what emails are being sent on behalf of their domains. DMARC also provides feedback about how other email servers are handling their emails.

DMARC allows a domain owner to choose a policy that tells the email-receiving server what to do with an email if it fails the DMARC verification check. DMARC offers three policies to choose from, which are:

• p=none: monitors email flows. No further actions are taken.
• p=quarantine: handles email that doesn’t pass the DMARC check as spam and sends it to the spam folder.
• p=reject: blocks email that doesn’t pass the DMARC check. Emails simply don’t arrive at the inbox. P=reject should always be the goal when implementing DMARC.

Email Marketers

Email marketers mainly use email as a marketing tool to reach and engage with prospects, customers, or subscribers for promotional or informational purposes. Their primary goal is to create and execute email campaigns that drive specific actions, such as purchasing, signing up for a service, engaging with content or attending an event.

A fair chunk of email marketers measure the success of their campaigns by metrics like open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates and overall campaign ROI. With wrongly configured authentication, emails will not be delivered, which results in zero opens. So make sure you’ve properly authenticated your mail flows to get the best deliverability results!

But what if there’s a way to even show your company’s logo in your target audience’s inbox and improve your valuable metrics? Meet BIMI, the authentication protocol that is built on top of DMARC.

Brand Indicators for Message Identification

BIMI stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification and is one of the latest email authentication protocols. It has gained a fair share of attention from email marketers. BIMI allows a company’s email to stand out from the crowd in a crowded inbox.

PostNL being one of the first to implement BIMI in The Netherlands with DMARC Advisor

When the recipient server checks your domain for DMARC, it also looks for a BIMI record (in the DNS). If the records match, your company’s logo is displayed. The logo is not part of the email message but appears on the mail server, inaccessible to scammers. This feature distinguishes emails from phishing attempts, enhancing email security and trust.

Why implement BIMI?

From a security perspective, BIMI can only be implemented when the DMARC policy for that particular domain is set to either p=quarantine or p=reject. That’s simply the requirement. So, the domain needs to be protected in a certain way to be eligible for BIMI.

From a marketing perspective, BIMI allows you to:

• Show your logo in your email messages;
• Create more visibility within the inbox of the receiver;
• Gain trust amongst your receivers;
• Generate more opens and, therefore, clicks!

The first collaboration between security and marketing

BIMI is the first open standard that brings email security and marketers together. For email marketers to have greater success with their campaigns with BIMI, security must first implement the open standards SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. WIN—WIN for everybody!

At DMARC Advisor, we have been talking internally for quite some time about

the marketing department being responsible for a lot within an organisation. The brand image, the tone of voice, content, events, etc. But why not the reputation of a domain? Whenever an organisation is being attacked by cyber criminals via domain spoofing, the marketing team gets to clean up the mess by making public statements. So why aren’t they more involved in preventing the attack from happening in the first place?

Google & Yahoo Sender Requirements

Email giants Google and Yahoo have announced stricter requirements for bulk email senders. These new terms, although email authentication is not new at all, which went into effect on February 1, 2024, are expected to keep more spam messages out of their users’ inboxes. The enforcement of their requirements has been rolled out partially.

Finally these email giants recognise their responsibility and impact on the safety of the entire ecosystem. So while we may call this a gigantic and positive shift in the battle against spam and phishing, it does put many companies under significant time pressure. But in our honest opinion, organisations had more than enough time to get started in the first place.

This will seriously affect your emails, especially if you are a bulk email sender and have not yet complied with these rules. Then, they are either marked as spam or blocked completely.

A bulk email sender is considered a domain that sends more than 5,000 emails in a day from one “From: domain” to Google or Yahoo. You are permanently labelled as a bulk sender if you send over 5,000 emails a day just once.

We have created an image that shows an overview of these requirements for both bulk email senders and non-bulk senders.

This is very important for email marketers: starting June 1st, 2024, the one-click unsubscribe link is mandatory for all non-transactional emails.

To Summarise

In the past, email marketers weren’t involved in email authentication protocols like they should have been. BIMI created traction with email marketers by adding value to the inbox placement. The only downside is that BIMI can only be implemented when DMARC has been added to the domain with either p=quarantine or the p=reject policy.

This meant that email marketers were now forced to work with the company’s IT security departments to start with DMARC.

At DMARC Advisor, we saw many organisations still struggling to start with DMARC and get all their domains to stricter DMARC policies. But now, with the Google and Yahoo requirements for (bulk) email senders, email marketers and security are feeling the pressure to start. Nobody exactly knows the impact of the enforcement of the requirements, and it’s still too early to draw any conclusions.

If you want to start or are working on getting your organisational domains to DMARC with a strict policy, take your time and start gathering data first before jumping straight to p=quarantine or p=reject.

Author

Joost Brand
Marketing Coordinator | DMARC Advisor

“Guys, it’s almost three o’clock, we’re about to send out the emails!” This was a very common phrase at the organisation where I worked back in the 1990s. Every day at three o’clock, the system administrator would connect to the internet via a 28k8 modem and send out the emails for that day.

This article is written by John Eising, Marketing Automation & Customer Journey Expert and Managing Partner at De Heeren van Veertig Plus (Sponsor van de Email Marketing Automation Summit 2024).

It has not been that long since email started to become commonplace in the business world. In the same 1990s, this form of communication really began to take off.

With the emergence of this new channel, completely new opportunities opened up for marketers. In this article, I will discuss the developments that digital communication has undergone, as we currently stand on the brink of a revolutionary step in the pursuit of greater efficiency, relevance, and personalisation: the application of AI in Marketing Automation.

The SPAM Era: Within the age of Unwanted Messages

The rise of email subsequently marked the beginning of ‘the SPAM era’. During this time, emails were mainly simple advertisements for various dubious products. Such as irrelevant emails about weight loss pills or Viagra. In this era of unwanted messages, the term SPAM was coined: Sending People Annoying Mail. Email was not yet seen as a very serious channel for commercial mass communication, but rather as an irrelevant addition to the traditional marketing tools that could merely be used to SPAM people.

Rise of Personalisation: The Importance of Relevance

Smart marketers quickly recognised the importance of personalisation, and thus the enormous power of using email as a marketing channel. Emails became much more focused on the individual recipient, and became based on personal preferences, purchase history, and behaviour. In other words, the content of emails was tailored to the recipient’s interests.

This shift marked the first steps towards relevance in email marketing. Additionally, because of the measurability of the channel, it could be proved that relevance directly impacted customer engagement. Therefore, the marketeer was finally able to discern a direct correlation between the costs and revenue in terms of conversion rates, leading to the widespread adoption of the term ROI (Return of Investement).

Striving for Relevance: Advanced Segmentation and Targeting

Distinguishing your product or service from the competition has always been an important challenge. This is no different for email: Why would someone give their personal details to receive all kinds of emails from you? Organisations can distinguish themselves by delivering relevant and personalised content, but how do you decide who will receive that content? In other words: Which content is relevant to whom?

The answer to this question was: segmentation. After personalisation of email content became more popular among marketeers, advanced segmentation and targeting techniques were used to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. This focus on relevance led to further improvements of the final email marketing results.

Rise of Hyper-Personalization: The New Standard

The next phase was characterised by hyper-personalisation, where every interaction with the recipient is utilised to further refine the content and offers. This is not just about using the recipient’s first name in the subject line, but about delivering highly personalised and contextual experiences, which is mainly based on real-time data and machine learning algorithms.

Therefore, instead of merely spamming a costumer with as many products as possible, this enables the marketeer to add relevant products to an email based on, for example, someone’s behaviour on the website, purchase history or clicks in previous emails.

To achieve this, it is important to have access to some important ingredients. First of all, rich and sufficient data is needed in order to make well-informed decisions.

Secondly, there is a need for an adequate platform which is able to interpret this data based on algorithms. Lastly, a solid technical design of email templates and webpages is of great importance to be able to process variable and personalised data.

This will bring you endless possibilities in the use of personalisation and variables, and thus of hyper-personalisation. A dream for the real data-driven marketeer.

Data-driven Marketing Automation

Adding more relevance to your marketing communication might sounds easier than it actually is. How do you make sure that the enormous, and often complex, amounts of data will help you send the right content, at the right time, to the right person? This data driven approach created a need among marketeers to automate such processes. In other words: this sparked the emergence of marketing automation platforms.

A marketing automation tool is able to make decisions based on these enormous amounts of data, coming from various data sources, enabling these tools so often go beyond the human brain. A risk, however, is that this encourages discussions within an organisation. Because what should be trusted? The human gut feeling, or the data?

One thing is certain: both will result in completely different emails.

As an example, if you were a marketeer within the travel industry and someone booked a trip to Ibiza last year, a logical thought is ‘maybe this year they would want to go to Ibiza again’.

When using a data driven approach however, this case is analysed from many more different perspectives. Additional data that is taken into account with such an approach is, for example, which reviews the costumer left after the last vacation, recent click behaviour, or behaviour of comparable costumer profiles, etc. In the end, this could potentially lead to completely different offers presented in the email, compared to those that would have been put in the email based on gut feeling.

As a result, with a data driven approach, some costumers would indeed get the offer to go to Ibiza again, while other costumers will be offered a road trip to the coast of France. In other words, all costumers will get a tailored offer in their email which is based on data.

Omnichannel Marketing is key

As email marketing evolved, the concept of omnichannel marketing emerged alongside it. Omnichannel refers to seamlessly integrating various marketing channels to provide a consistent and personalised experience to customers, regardless of the channel they use. This could then be done via email, social media, SMS, or even in physical stores.

The goal of omnichannel is to optimise the customer journey and increase engagement by delivering an integrated and cohesive brand experience.

Dilemma for the Marketer: Which Tool Is Truly Suitable for Omnichannel?

With the emergence of the omnichannel approach, the need for suitable tools also arose. This has caused, to this day, a diffuse landscape of very diverse platforms all claiming to facilitate omnichannel marketing. However, for the end-user, it is very difficult to assess which tooling is suitable for their organisation.

Indeed, this can potentially lead to misjudgements, resulting in the failure to achieve success with the omnichannel approach.

The Role of AI in Marketing Automation

The development of Marketing Automation has taken a significant leap already, but there is more to come. A recent development is the emergence of AI Agents. Many might immediately think of popular agents such as ChatGPT, Alexa, or Siri, but AI Agents are rapidly integrated in more and more facets of our daily life.

It might not come as a surprise, but even the use of AI in marketing automation is becoming more common. Until now, this often means that AI is used to come up with alternative email subjects or to translate an article. On the other side, I personally believe that AI Agents will soon take over tasks of marketeers.

AI agents are set to play a crucial role in automating and optimising marketing processes across different channels. By analysing large amounts of data, AI agents could generate insights, identify trends, and make predictions about customer behaviours. These insights could then be used to deliver personalised and contextual experiences via different channels, resulting in increased engagement and conversion rates.

Considering the great opportunities AI offers, a commonly asked question then is: will AI Agents take over all the work of the marketeer and in the end replace them? In other words, is AI a threat or will it result in the perfect collaboration between AI agents and the marketeer?

What are AI Agents?

AI agents, also known as AI bots or virtual assistants, are advanced software programs designed to perform tasks in a way that resembles human intelligence. They use various forms of AI, including machine learning and natural language processing, to learn from data, understand context, and make decisions based on complex information.

Unlike traditional bots or chatbots, which are often limited to pre-programmed scripts, AI agents have the ability to learn and adapt to new situations and problems. They can communicate with users via text, speech, or other interfaces, and are capable of performing tasks that were previously only possible by humans.

Not Just Reactive

It is important to note that AI agents are not just reactive, as they can also act proactively. AI agents can anticipate user needs, identify problems before they arise, and take action independently to solve problems or seize opportunities.

To summarise, AI agents represent a new generation of intelligent software that is capable of performing tasks, making decisions, and communicating with users in a way that was previously only possible through human intervention.

The Role of AI-Agents in Marketing Automation

But what role could an AI agent play in Marketing Automation? Is your job at risk because of this? Are we heading towards a landscape where humans are redundant and only AI agents communicate with each other? I personally do not think it will go that far. The key is to use the smart aspects of these agents to optimise your processes, which will enable the marketer to focus on other important tasks.

When used properly, AI-Agents could play a crucial role in automating repetitive tasks. To demonstrate this, I will focus on two important processes: ‘Customer service and support’ and ‘more advanced marketing’.

Improved Customer Service and Support

One of the most obvious applications of AI agents within marketing automation, in my opinion, is that you can significantly improve customer service and support. Availability of these services, first and foremost, is of great importance: twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. During a time where employee perspectives are changing, while looking for a healthy work-life balance, together with the limited supply in the job market, AI could be a very welcome addition here.

But how can you increase the efficiency of your customer service or support department with AI agents? In addition to continuous availability, I believe response time could play a crucial role. Where you currently have to endlessly press keys and wait on hold, an AI-Agent can assist you within just a few seconds.

If AI agents are provided with rich data, companies could increase the efficiency of their customer service by providing faster response times, 24/7 availability, and personalised, relevant support. Not entirely unimportant to know, through natural language processing, AI-Agents can engage in natural conversations with customers. Therefore, they are able to identify and solve problems, and even answer complex questions without the need for human intervention. Ultimately, this could be the

solution for organisations in the pursuit of improved customer satisfaction, increased loyalty, and lower operational costs for the company.

Automated Marketing Campaigns

In addition to customer service, AI-Agents can be used to automate marketing campaigns. For the majority of marketing departments, setting up a digital marketing campaign still involves a lot of manual work.

The reason why marketeers continue to set up campaigns manually, is often partly due to their insufficient or very limited technical knowledge about marketing automation. At the same time, the technical limitations of tools and the highly fragmented landscape are at the same time reinforcing the difficulty of the marketing automation process as a whole.

Marketeers are often still manually setting up emails, web pages, segmenting target groups, personalizing content, and analysing results. With AI agents, they could largely automate and optimise these processes, which provides the marketeer with valuable time which can be used for things AI agents cannot do.

More Time for the Fun Stuff

So, is AI a threat for the marketeer or rather the perfect colleague. I personally believe marketeers and AI agents could form a great collaboration which will eventually benefit the marketing automation processes in an organisation as a whole.

Based on advanced algorithms and machine learning, AI agents can analyse large amounts of data to generate insights, personalise campaigns based on individual customer needs, and even make real-time adjustments based on changing circumstances. This enables marketers to spend more time on strategic tasks and creative aspects of marketing, while AI agents handle the operational tasks.

A collaboration between the marketer and AI agents could potentially lead to fully optimised campaigns where the technical superiority of AI is combined with the creativity and strategic vision of the marketer.

Currently we are still discovering the opportunities of AI in marketing automation. As with every new development, there are many worries and questions regarding the use of AI. In the end, the success of AI in marketing automation will depend on the marketer being able to use it in such a way that it actually works for them and so they can benefit

from the possibilities. And when that happens, I personally believe that marketing automation can truly ‘work’ for you!

Author

John Eising
Marketing Automation & Customer Journey Expert and Managing Partner | De Heeren van Veertig Plus

Loyalty is often seen as a phase in the customer journey, but if you really want to approach it well, you should consider loyalty as a separate journey. This journey requires a new strategy. Your data and technology need to be in order, and you need new content. In short, it’s different from your regular marketing efforts.

This article is written by Mi-Choe Emanuelson, Recruitment & Content Marketer at 100procent (Sponsor of the Email Marketing Automation Summit 2024).

Loyalty programs are used to increase customer lifetime value. You not only want customers who spend a lot, but also customers who return regularly. Research from the loyalty platform Comarch found that on average, a consumer participates in 13 or 14 loyalty programs, but feels truly connected to only 3 or 4 brands. 64% of surveyed consumers are willing to provide personal information in exchange for a personal benefit. In this blog, we explain how to turn customers into brand ambassadors using the four pillars of strategy, data, creation, and technology.

The Loyalty Journey

When setting up the loyalty journey, it’s important to know that there are two different forms of loyalty:

1. Transactional Loyalty: Customers are loyal because of discounts or gifts. They value loyalty programs and attractive discounts. They don’t necessarily feel connected to your brand, but to your actions.
2. Emotional Loyalty: Customers feel emotionally connected to your brand, which is a sustainable form of loyalty. If they could buy the same product elsewhere with a discount, they would prefer the qualitative customer experience they expect from you.

By setting up loyalty as a separate journey, you ensure that your customers have a unique and consistent customer experience across all channels.

What You Need to Set Up the Loyalty Journey

• Data and insight into customer behavior across all channels.
• Good accessibility across all channels.
• Feedback from customers to continuously optimize the journey.
• A mix of email and direct messaging campaigns to reach customers at the right time.
• Dynamic content to show relevant content to each individual customer.
• Advertisements based on customer behavior.
• Monitoring and staying informed about developments in customer behavior and value development.

The Strategy Behind a Successful Loyalty Journey

You want to retain customers and extract more value from them, so you’ve come up with the idea to start a loyalty program. Then it’s logical that you’ll encounter a few challenges, which you can tackle with the right strategy. Ask yourself how you’re going to implement the loyalty journey in practice? Does this fall under marketing, CRM, or is there someone else who will be responsible for this? How do you ensure that the contact moments are well aligned with the regular marketing efforts so that customers are not overwhelmed by messages? What do the loyalty campaigns look like, do you need a different template? How do you use the different channels and how do you deal with customers who, for example, want to redeem a voucher from an email in the store? How do you display the loyalty program on the website?

6 Reasons to Implement a Loyalty Program

1. Turning customers into repeat customers
2. Collecting (positive) reviews
3. Testing new products
4. Gathering customer data
5. Increasing newsletter subscriptions and other mailings
6. Selling specific products

In this blog, you’ll learn more about the strategic value of loyalty and the reasons to implement it.

Data and Loyalty

Now that your strategy and goals have been determined, it’s time to inventory the data. What do you already know about your customers? How much is a customer worth, i.e., what is the customer lifetime value? A loyalty program generates a lot of data. You collect data during every contact moment and every purchase. You can use this wealth of information not only to approach your customers even more targeted but also to better tailor your product offering to the demand. This way, you know better what the customers need, which is exactly what the purchasing department also wants to know.

Create Engaging Content that Connects

With all the data in order, you can create dynamic content and ensure that the messages are personalized. Often, a loyalty program has different expressions, but still in line with the corporate identity. This way, the customer immediately sees that it’s a message about the loyalty program and not, for example, the regular newsletter. By consistently using loyalty content across all channels, it will become a kind of sub-brand for your customers. And you create extra engagement with your brand.

Is Your Martech Setup Adequate?

The loyalty journey presents a great challenge for your martech setup. Customers expect a seamless transition across all channels and a user-friendly experience. Whether someone is in the store or using your app or website. The data from the loyalty program must always be up to date everywhere, and the different channels must work together flawlessly. Your systems must be able to process large amounts of data and ensure that everything is visible and up to date everywhere.

What Do Successful Loyalty Programs Have in Common?

BP was one of the first major brands to start a loyalty program, the well-known Freebees. With every refuel, you collected free points that you could redeem for nice gifts or a discount on a refuel. And who doesn’t collect Air Miles? This loyalty program from Loyalty Management Netherlands has been one of the most well-known loyalty programs for 30 years. By now, we all know the loyalty programs of major brands like Albert Heijn, Hema, and Bol.com. Albert Heijn conquered the Netherlands with personalized bonus offers and various loyalty programs. Whether a loyalty program is successful depends on its user-friendliness. Customers drop out as soon as it doesn’t work smoothly or if the channels don’t connect.

Trends in Loyalty

Gamification: Think of surprising game elements like a quiz, challenge, or reward. It’s all about interaction and engagement.

Sustainability: Showing social responsibility can lead to positive customer reactions. For example, you can offer a sustainable reward. Redeem your points and donate the amount to a charity.

Exclusivity: Customers love preferential treatment and rewards for their loyalty. Exclusive events, early access, and new products in pre-sale always work well. Personalization can also remain high on the agenda. Customers want offers and actions that exactly match their wishes and needs. Let your customers know that you personally appreciate them!

Conclusion

Those starting a loyalty program don’t necessarily expect immediate success. Projects like these require perseverance. First, you need to create awareness, and then customers need to get used to the loyalty program. So, the better you collect feedback, the faster you can optimize the journey. Customers love good news, surprises, privileges, gifts, and discounts. Provide tangible rewards that are relevant to your customer. And use it for extra contact moments that contribute to customer loyalty. Reward your most loyal customers. Be grateful and original!

Author

Mi-Choe Emanuelson
Recruitment & Content Marketeer | 100procent

Voor de DDMA EMAS Awards 2024 staat de Battle of the Agencies ook dit jaar op het programma. De inschrijving is vanaf vandaag geopend. Ambitieuze e-mailmarketingbureaus kunnen zich vanaf nu registreren door een motivatie in te dienen via: emas.nu/awards/battle

In deze bureaucompetitie strijden bureaus om wie de beste e-mailcampagne maakt voor een opdrachtgever. De winnaar zet zichzelf op de kaart als autoriteit binnen het vakgebied en speelt zichzelf in de kijker van een (inter)nationaal publiek, met potentiële klanten.

De opdrachtgever dit jaar is retailer Brabantia. Bureaus kunnen tot uiterlijk 5 april een motivatie indienen om mee te doen. Brabantia beoordeelt de motivaties anoniem en selecteert drie bureaus voor deelname.

Gang van zaken voor geselecteerde bureaus

Nadat Brabantia op basis van de motivaties drie bureaus hebben geselecteerd, doorlopen deze bureaus de volgende stappen.

• De bureaus ontvangen de case vanuit Brabantia
• De bureaus maken een ontwerp voor de mail op basis van de briefing van Brabantia
• De genomineerde bureaus dienen één HTML-e-mail in bij Brabantia op basis van het design dat is geaccordeerd, die dynamische inhoud kan bevatten zoals beschreven in de briefing.
• Het doelpubliek voor alle e-mails is uniform en zal worden geselecteerd door Brabantia.
• Brabantia zal de verzending afhandelen met behulp van haar eigen systemen.
• Alle communicatie zal gelijktijdig door Brabantia worden verzonden.
• Brabantia zal de resultaten meten en de winnaar bekend maken op de EMAS op 27 juni
• Als de verstrekte e-mail niet voldoet aan de regels, behoudt Brabantia zich het recht voor om op elk moment af te zien van het verzenden van de e-mail.

Criteria

Brabantia beoordeelt de verzonden e-mails op basis van de volgende metrics:

• Conversieratio
• Openratio
• Click-to-open ratio
• Afmeldratio
• Beoordeling van creativiteit en originaliteit (door het e-mailmarketingteam van Brabantia).

Casepitch en uitreiking

Op 27 juni, tijdens de DDMA Email Marketing Automation Summit (EMAS), strijden de 3 geselecteerde bureaus om de prijs. Ieder bureau houdt een boeiende pitch (8 tot 10 minuten) waarin ze hun aanpak, de redenering achter hun keuzes en het uiterlijk van hun campagne uitleggen. Daarna maakt Brabantia de winnaar bekend.

Over de EMAS

Met vorig jaar bijna 500 bezoekers is de EMAS de grootste conferentie op het gebied van e-mail marketing automation in de Benelux. E-mailmarketeers, CRM-marketeers, digital marketeers en marketing automation-specialisten komen bijeen om te leren over de nieuwste ontwikkelingen op het gebied van onder meer deliverability, security, e-mail marketing automation en leadgeneratie. Voor bezoekers is de EMAS hét moment van het jaar om te sparren met internationale, toonaangevende sprekers binnen hun vakgebied. De volgende editie vindt plaats op 27 juni 2024 in Circa Amsterdam en wordt mede mogelijk gemaakt door sponsoren 100procent, Maileon, RapidSugar en Deploytec.

Over DDMA
DDMA is de grootste branchevereniging voor marketing en data. Wij zijn een netwerk van ruim 360 merken, non-profits, uitgevers, bureaus en tech-leveranciers die data succesvol en verantwoord willen inzetten voor marketingdoeleinden. Wij duiden ontwikkelingen op het gebied van technologie, regelgeving en ethiek en brengen marketeers, dataspecialisten en juristen bij elkaar om hen te helpen groeien in hun vak. Ook bevorderen we zelfregulering en zijn we gesprekspartner van beleidsmakers en toezichthouders.