With the advent of truly efficient spam folders, many people have the misconception that email-based marketing is dead. On the contrary! It just needs to get smarter. Mailing lists, newsletters, and carefully targeted promotional invitations are popular methods of successful email marketing, but new methods are constantly being tried and tested for appeal and effectiveness. While your best bet is with subscribers who have volunteered to receive your promotional emails, conversions are still more frequent when the content of the emails are engaging, useful, and relevant to the readers. This has naturally caused companies to seek more and better ways to target their email marketing content to appeal to each individual subscriber.
One incredibly clever Italian business decided to combine two power-house marketing tactics to completely turn the tables on their sales strategy and succeeded in boosting their email revenue by 60%. What did they use? The one simple change was cleverly implementing AI-assisted marketing automation software. With the help of an intuitive and constantly learning computer, the marketing automation software can analyze and qualify thousands of customers worth of data every day and then calculate exactly what those customers would be most interested in buying, and when, in order to create stunningly effective promotional email offers.
Cosabella and Emarsys
This family-owned Italian lingerie retail company wanted to make better use of its marketing talent and decided to switch from a normal marketing plan to integrating the Emarsys B2B suite of business management services and their unique marketing automation AI. The program and it’s self-learning artificial intelligence was then tasked to analyze Cosabella’s customer information in order to build customer engagement and help the company increase their number of conversions with each email contact.
While email marketing is still an incredibly powerful tool and a great way to reach out to invite previous customers back to your business, creating an effective email marketing campaign is always a challenge. Only 20% of emails ever sent are opened and even fewer get the clicks and responses a company is looking for. The unique set of challenges involved in both dodging the spam folder and really catching a customer’s attention is part of the reason why Cosabella decided to try automating one of their most difficult marketing tasks.
They recognized that the lingerie market is a busy and complex environment full of very personal decisions about style and comfort. Generic offers are very likely to be rejected because they don’t suit the customer’s exact size, style, and personal preference. Therefore, the best way to make quick sales with satisfied customers is to cut through the clutter and offer the customers options they will prefer immediately. For hundreds if not thousands of customers, this kind of personalized selection would take unreasonable amounts of human time but is a snap for marketing automation.
AI-Assisted Marketing Automation
Before integrating with a marketing automation platform, the Cosabella marketing team tried to leverage their email response data by hand, but it was taking up way too much of their time without powerful and definitive results. Plugged in with their new marketing automation and intuitive AI helper, they were able to quickly and efficiently examine not just email data, but information from advertising, on-site merchandising, and purchase conversion metrics from every direction. The automation program then calculated which customers were responsive to emails versus those that never opened them and then ran an analysis on what these responsive customers liked to buy. The program then puts together the ideal promotional email offer for each customer and sent them out. Suddenly, their promotional emails weren’t generic anymore and customers who received them were delighted to get discounts on items they really wanted to buy. Email-inspired purchases and customer satisfaction both went through the roof, as did subscribers to Cosabella’s email list.
Astounding Email Results
While marketing automation has become an integral part of a more than just Cosabella’s email marketing system, the results of their AI assisted email campaigns are the most profound argument for the effectiveness of their recent software and cloud services integration. Between 2015, before marketing automation, and 2016, Cosabella doubled their number of subscribers and email-generated revenue increased by over 60%. Clearly, integration with AI-assisted marketing automation reached the pinnacle of a marketing project success: it made the Cosabella email offers system much more desirable, more satisfying, and more effective at creating sale conversions all with a single brave decision about leveraging modern technology.
Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a buzz word to throw around when theorizing about the future. It is real and being implemented in an increasing number of business environments, personalizing shopping experiences and enhancing the power of pre-existing marketing strategies. Your marketing team works hard but the amount of data it takes to successfully build a modern business, customer base, and lead qualifying system has become more massive than any human team can reasonably handle. With Cosabella realized this, they quickly adapted to the new world and reaped incredible benefits by integrating a marketing automation system into their email promotional campaigns. However, emails aren’t the only place that marketing automation can enhance your results.
Marketing automation software is actually most often used to sift through thousands of potential leads, qualify them, and only pass on the most likely conversions to a human sales team. It can also analyze your CRM data to find potential return customers who might enjoy a little friendly invitation to come back, work like Cosabella’s did and calculate the perfect personalized discount to induce a sale, or even go the other direction and calculate which wide-spread deals are likely to appeal to the largest number of registered customers. There’s no limit to how much time marketing automation can save your marketing and sales team as long as you know what you want and implement the solution. For more information about finding the perfect marketing automation plan to boost your business, contact us today!
