Automated emails outperform their manual counterparts when it comes to engaging customers, but the key is to ensure that these automated messages are timely, relevant and personalized.
That was a key finding of Silverpop’s 2014 Email Marketing Benchmarks Study, which examined emails sent by nearly 3,000 brands across 40 countries throughout 2013.
{loadposition SPIAA}“While you need all types of messages, email, for the vast majority of companies, is still the No. 1 driver of direct revenue and conversions,” said Loren McDonald, VP of Industry Relations at Silverpop, in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “It remains a key tool for converting prospects into quality leads.”
Although inbound marketing campaigns have garnered a larger portion of the overall marketing budget, McDonald said that the survey confirms that companies can still benefit by refining their outbound efforts.
“Outbound marketing is stronger than it has ever been,” McDonald explained. “For example, how do you get people to sign up for a webinar, one of the top inbound marketing tactics? On average, 95% of webinar registrants signed up for a webinar based on an email campaign.”
The study found that automated messages achieved an open rate nearly 15% higher and overall click-through rate nearly 7% higher than their manual counterparts, indicating today’s buyers are more likely to engage with individualized messages that are delivered when it’s most relevant to them. Top quartile performers’ automated messages achieved click-through rates nearly 60% higher than manual sends and open rates more than double the median, and five- to 22-times higher than bottom-quartile performers.
“The study results confirm that in today’s customer-driven world, highly relevant, individualized messages are what drive buyers to engage with marketing emails,” McDonald said. “In order to achieve this level of true one-to-one engagement, marketers must adopt marketing automation technology, sending messages with personally relevant content based on the customer’s timeframe, not the marketing department’s.”
McDonald added that this survey marked the first time Silverpop compared automated and manuals emails.
The Value Of Transactional Messages
It also is the first time the survey examined the impact of transactional messages — emails triggered automatically by behaviors such as purchases or account activity, McDonald noted.
Transactional messages sent by companies with results in the top-quartile have open rates four-times higher than median open rates for non-transactional messages. In addition, transactional messages achieved a median click-through rate of 4.2% and click-to-open rate of 15.1%, compared to non-transactional messages at 1.5% and 9.9%, respectively.
The success of transactional emails could have a significant impact on some segments of the B2B industry, McDonald explained. He said transactional emails are particularly important for software companies that operate on a “freemium” model. “In those types of B2B sales scenarios, transactional messaging plays a key role, as it is more about direct sales and upselling, and the transaction amounts are typically lower.”
Another significant finding from the survey was that companies are paying stricter attention to data hygiene, as evidenced by the fact that the overall median hard-bounce rate was just under 0.04%.
“This indicates that email marketers made list hygiene a top priority in 2013,” McDonald said. “It seems over the past year or two we’ve crossed that chasm and people realize that they can’t get away without ensuring that their databases are clean. Companies are focused on applying best practices when it comes to database maintenance and using real-time email validation solutions.”
