Hyperpersonalisation & real-time data in email marketing

For years, it's been simple to personalise everything from subject lines through to the content of your email marketing campaigns based on the data you hold for your subscribers.

It works too. Email campaigns with a personalised subject line are 26% more likely to be opened (Source: Campaign Monitor), 74% of marketers say targeted personalisation increases customer engagement (Source: eConsultancy), and there's an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalised experiences (Source: Monetate).

Personalised emails are more likely to be opened, engaged with, and have a better chance of driving sales. Sounds pretty good right? Well it's about to get better.

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Segmentation and dynamic content work because they put the right message in front of the right people at the right time. Relevance is everything and, the more relevant your campaigns are, the more successful they will be.

However, historically there's always been a limiting factor on how relevant email marketing campaigns are and that's the data they use. 

Let's look at an example - say you run a hotel and you're sending your guest a 'pre-stay' email. This email might include a weather forecast for the guest's upcoming stay. But this forecast isn't live; it will only be accurate at the time of sending. This is about to change.

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Thanks to hyper-personalisation and new technology, email marketing campaigns can now contain real-time content that refreshes at the moment of open. But what does this mean and why does it matter?

Let's go back to our weather example in the pre-stay email sent by a hotel. If the weather forecast changes from sunny to wet and windy, the content of the email will automatically refresh when the email is next opened. So, instead of showing the guest the activities they can do nearby when the sun is shining (a game of golf, a trip to the beach, or a walk along the coast), the email campaign will show wet weather activities (like a spa day or a trip to the museum).

All of a sudden, the experience the email campaign delivers is instantly enhanced and everyone wins because, regardless of when they open the email, the recipient is always getting the most pertinent, up-to-date information and you're the one providing them with that information.

It's not just words that can personalised either, images can too, and alongside this, location data can also be used to automatically update the content of the email based upon where the recipient opens it.

Other examples of how these new features can be used include:

• Displaying real-time stock levels of a product ("Hurry! Only 5 left in your size...")
• Showing reservations or bookings ("Only 4 spaces remaining...")
• Personalised images (imagine seeing a picture of a suit or jacket with your name embroidered inside)
• A location based map showing the nearest store or restaurant
• Show the latest odds on a sporting event
• Display the latest screening times at a cinema
• Show real-time timetables 
• Countdown timers which could show the time remaining on a flash sale, for example

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According to Reignite, one of the pioneers behind this new tech, click-through rates can be boosted by up to 30% when real-time content is used in email marketing campaigns.

In short, using real-time data in your email marketing campaigns will give your subscribers a better experience, give your campaigns a better chance of being successful, and create a more powerful and longer lasting impact.

If you want to find out more about how real-time data and hyper-personalisation can take your email marketing campaigns to the next level we'd love to hear from you. You can get in touch with us here.