Big data is the latest buzzword that has opened up newer opportunities for business growth and revenue generation.
It is the hottest trend in marketing where the most perceptive marketers are strategizing to take advantage of the massive amount of data available to increase their outreach.
What is big data?
Big data is the accumulation of the substantial amount of complex data generated through traditional and digital sources such as social media, CRM, online interactions, etc. This form of data is difficult to process using traditional data processing application.
Big data analytics can reveal customer behavior pattern and upcoming trends to facilitate your marketing endeavors. However, only a quarter of the businesses are analyzing their data to procure actionable insights that result in a significant amount of missed opportunities.
Moreover, when KPMG inquired CFOs and CIOs about the impact of big data, more than 50% of them concurred that big data is a huge deal, especially for the retail industry, further validating its importance.
Big data and email marketing:
Big data is projected to revolutionize not only the marketing tactics but also the entire business strategies. The digital phenomenon helps organizations comprehend customers’ behavior and expectation. This allows them to meet customer demand and leads to significant profit acquisition.
Email marketing, used by 82% of the B2B and B2C companies, is another channel that requires an astute understanding of consumer expectations to create appropriate content for the email. Thus, the performance and relevance of email marketing can benefit significantly from the inundation of data.
Following are five ways that will help you leverage your email marketing using big data:
Segmented audience:
If your emails have a low click-through rate (CTR), there are high chances that the emails are not reaching the appropriate audience and this is one of the most common pitfalls of email marketing. Despite the fact that targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue, 42% of the marketers ignore this practice.
Therefore, to increase the ROI of your email marketing campaign, utilize big data to create a smart algorithm that divides the audience into different groups based on their:
- Geographical location: For example, city blocks, city size, country, region, climatic zones,
- Behavioral pattern: For example, order histories, loyalty status, previous interactions,
- Demographics: For example, age brackets, marital status, income level, etc.
Personalization:
Intelligent marketers are always looking for ways to create precise email contents to increase their impact and viability. Therefore, dividing your target customers can help you generate more personalized emails instead of blasting out the same email to the entire subscriber list.
A study shows that personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rate as compared to non-personalized emails. Despite that, 70% of the brands fail to utilize them.
Moreover, personalized emails increased click-through rates by 14% and conversion by 10%.
This is because when you tailor the contents of an email in a way that reflects the receiver’s interest, it is bound to grab attention and increase customer engagement.
A few examples of personalization include:
- Offering discounts in emails for selected customers who have spent a certain amount on your products
- Personalized birthday email based on the birth year of the subscriber
- Emails with products similar to the products recently purchased by the receiver
Predictive analysis
Big data has paved the way for calculated predictive analysis. Marketers do not have to rely exclusively on their instincts to conduct successful email marketing campaigns. Instead, the collection and evaluation of large amount of data help marketers gain valuable insight about the current buying preferences of each user, which can help predict their future purchases.
For example, when a customer buys a product, big data analysis can identify other products commonly bought in combination with the customer’s purchase. A business can increase its post-purchase profits by curating an email with a list of related products that will intrigue the buyer to return for more business.
Furthermore, comparative analysis of the most engaging content and emails that did not garner any reaction can help marketers produce emails that would be most valuable to the customers.
Automated Emails
Automation has expedited the email marketing process for the marketers and streamlined the path to purchase for the customers. But automation is not possible without big data.
You can use data to create relevant and compelling emails automatically for each trigger, for example:
- Congratulatory email for a customer’s birthday
- Welcome email to new subscribers
- An email reminder for abandoned cart
- Post-purchase emails for appreciating recent purchases
- Emails with promo codes or special offers for customers who have been MIA
Automating certain aspects of your email marketing can save valuable amount of time that you can devote towards lead generation. Automation also ensures that all the subscribers are engaged promptly and, relevant to their position in the buying funnel.
Timings
There is nothing worse than to have your perfectly created email ignored simply due to bad timings. This shows that even the seemingly simplest of variables can have a massive impact on your marketing efforts.
Big data can help you decide the optimal time to dispatch the email depending on the time of the day that drives most conversions, CTR, and engagements.
The key focus of every marketing campaign is to generate profits, ultimately. Big data can facilitate every aspect of your email marketing required to optimize its outreach. These can include the formation of relevant content, increasing the open rate, decreasing the bounce rate and deciding the best email blast time amongst other things.
AUTHOR BIO
ABOUT Erica Silva
Erica Silva is a blogger who loves to discover and explore the world around her. She writes on everything from marketing to technology, science and brain health. She enjoys sharing her discoveries and experiences with readers and believes her blogs can make the world a better place.
Find her on Twitter: @ericadsilva1