Email Marketing is Dead. How can Retailers cope?

Emails sent by marketers today have average open rates of 25% and clickthrough rates of 3%. These poor response rates can probably be attributed to the fact that the average number of promoted mails received by a consumer today stands at 121.

The only reason emails are still used for marketing is because of the high ROI (3800%) which is only due to the fact that it barely costs anything to send a mail.

The traffic for Retailers nowadays from Emails is low. Is this engagement channel absolutely lost?

No. We believe that there are multiple workarounds/tactics that can Retailers can employ to make their email marketing more effective

1. Data science/AI:

• Segmentation/Personalisation technologies to send highly relevant mails to consumers. We don’t just mean first name and last name insertion here. Clickthrough rates improve by an average of 15% and conversions by 10% through this.

 2. Alternatives:

• Text messages
• Push notifications – The average clickthrough rate for retail is 12%. Personalisation can improve these rates too.
• Facebook Messenger Bots
• Create and post content that can be useful to users on social media to get interactions like Likes/Comments. This would contribute to brand marketing.
• Having offline loyalty programs compels direct visits

  3. Dealing with Email providers:

Email providers like Google check every mail for spam based on multiple techniques. We’ve compiled ways here to work around these techniques:

• Personalisation – If mails are personalised for each user, mail servers wouldn’t recognise a mass blast being made to their users.
• Using a Transactional email provider over a Promotional one. Mails are less likely to be marked as spam this way.
• Avoid words like “Sale”, “Discount”, etc in the Subject line
• Intersperse promotional content within content marketing – This means there are lesser chances of being marked as spam
• Avoid too many images – Higher chances of mail being marked as spam
• Have customers subscribe to the brand’s Youtube channel which can then be mentioned in the mails. Google/Gmail would not block these mails as Youtube is their own property

4. Playing on consumer psychology:

• Transactional mails have 8X more opens and clicks. Showcasing promotional content over these mails itself provides a unique opportunity for user attention.
• Invent transactional mails/messages to catch user attention. An example would be a reminder email reminding the user that he has Rs200 in his wallet.
• Rather than pure promotional messages, mails could have highly engaging/interactive content – (A facials vendor can show the effect of their product on a person’s face by having them upload an image). This can be a way to make emails viral.