Being proactive instead of merely reacting to every new technological advance in the industry is essential if you’re going to stay ahead of the competition and deliver the sorts of email experiences your customers are going to come to expect in the future. It’s always important to remember that you’re not marketing in a vacuum. Your subscribers’ inboxes are being flooded with marketing emails every day, from companies large and small. Some of them are going to take advantage of the latest technology, using machine learning, AI, or other cutting-edge tools in order to create sophisticated, highly personalized email campaigns. And once your customers get those emails, that’s the level of experience they’ll come to expect from everyone. You included.
That’s why it’s important to consider what the future holds for the email marketing industry. In our latest webinar in conjunction with the Email Experience Council, we gave our take on where we see email headed. But, more importantly, we looked at what the enterprise marketer will need to have in order to continue to meet consumer expectations:
A centralized source of truth
The only way to create the real-time customer data access you need to take advantage of developing technology is to break down silos and have a single source of truth for the data you’ve collected. You need to know it’s accurate, both generally and up to the minute. Without that sort of access and trust, you’ll always be playing catch-up. And the customer experience you deliver will necessarily suffer. The time it takes for you to copy data up to your cloud provider in order to use it is time you can’t afford. Keep your data in house, and under your control.
Location-agnostic tools
Keeping your data in house also impacts the types of tools you use. Why would you use an ESP that requires you to move your data to it? As an enterprise marketer, your data is too massive and too important to be shipping pieces of it back and forth. Don’t move your mountain of data. Get an ESP that will come to the mountain. That way, you’re able to maintain control over your data in real time, with the right tools for the job.
Smart and scalable tech
There are lots of technological tools from innovative companies like Movable Ink that use machine learning to automate work. This tech can scale with your business, and enable new levels of personalization. They also free you up to be more creative. When more operational tasks can be done by your tech stack, you can focus on strategy. And when you do that, not only does it create a better work environment, but it delivers a better experience to your customers as well.
Cross-channel orchestration
While email is a high-ROI channel, it’s not enough to succeed in today’s connected world. Push and SMS are becoming increasingly important as marketing channels. They allow for different types of messages that can reach customers at the time and place that’s right for them. But if you’re building separate campaigns for each channel via multichannel technology, not only is it inefficient, but it leaves open the possibility of confusing delivery overlap. That’s where cross-channel comes in. If you can build one campaign that intelligently determines the correct channel for each message and each recipient, you’ll spend less time setting the campaign up, avoid confusing repetition, and have far better results. This is one more place where silos will leave you behind. Take them down.
If you’d like to learn more about what we see as important for the future of email marketing, you can watch the full EEC webinar at their website.
