CONSUMER
The consumer is, after all, who the rest of the players work for. So it makes sense to ask how the consumer perceives and “uses” the marketing they receive by email. In 2016 ADigital, together with Digital Response and other companies in the sector, published the “ Research on the uses and perception of email marketing in Spain ”. The study covered two areas, one dedicated to the use that companies make of email marketing, and another dedicated to the perception and assessment of consumers. In this last section, the most relevant conclusions that were drawn were the following:
– Email is the most used service on the Internet by users (96.4%), followed by the use of social networks (RRSS), the consumption of multimedia content, instant messaging services and the consumption of news/current affairs media. – 80% of users check their email several times a day. – 75% of users use more than one email account. – Users generally have a positive perception of Email Marketing. – The aspects that encourage the opening of email are: that they contain offers on products, that the subject of the email is direct and clear and not saturating the user by sending them emails in a massive way. We see how the final consumer has a good perception of the advertising they receive by email, as long as it provides valuable content. We believe that in 2017, customer perception regarding email advertising will remain the same or even improve, mainly thanks to the efforts that marketing professionals are making to make email marketing more personalized and relevant. MARKETING PROFESSIONALS
The main challenge for email marketing professionals is, as we transportation email list mentioned before, to do our job better. This means taking advantage of the technological advances that the industry is making available to us (we will see this in detail later), and adopting a more “relational” approach to the way we do email marketing. Customer relationship management and email marketing campaign management platforms allow us to personalize content, segment and maintain a 1:1 “relationship” with each member of our database. The challenge is to dedicate time, effort and imagination to take advantage of all these functionalities that we have at hand. And the challenge is considerable. Going back to the research we mentioned at the beginning. After surveying companies, some of the conclusions that were drawn were the following:
– More than half of the companies surveyed do not carry out any type of testing before launching their email marketing campaigns.
– When analyzing the level of expertise in email marketing, almost half of the professionals surveyed say that, in their company, the level is very basic
– Mass mailings (Newsletters and promotional emails) are the norm. Very few companies have implemented “relational” programs. Thus, we believe that the main challenge facing email marketing professionals is to take advantage of technological advances and carry out more personalized, pertinent communication aligned with what interests each user . TECHNOLOGY PROVIDERS Recently Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, said that the role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) will become increasingly important in companies as a result of the strategic weight that brands are giving to the user experience . This statement goes straight to the heart of digital marketing. If this is true, and we believe it is, it is easy to understand why in the last two years Oracle has spent 3 billion dollars to buy companies dedicated to marketing technology, including Responsys, a leader in email marketing and cross-channel marketing. And it's not just Oracle that is betting heavily on this sector. Three years ago, Salesforce acquired ExactTarget, a company specializing in email marketing, and shortly before that, it had acquired Radian6, a leading platform for monitoring social networks. For its part, Adobe closed the purchase of another company specializing in email marketing, the French Neolane, and a couple of years ago, the technology company IBM acquired the email marketing provider Silverpop. The big technology companies see clearly that the future of marketing will involve promoting the best user experience with the brand, and the email channel is key to this.
