The Renaissance of Email

A not so long time ago in a galaxy far, far away – from reality – it became trendy to proclaim the ‘death of email.’ Electronic mail went to the dark side of modern communication – as a posterchild of information overload and the “distraction-industrial complex.” 

Marketing emails earned monikers like “graymail,” “BACN” and “ham” because they were not quite “spam,” but not quite welcome either. Gmail began quarantining marketing emails in a separate “Promotional” folder. Yammer, Slack, Evernote and other collaboration platforms now strive to rescue office workers from the collateral distractions of poorly aimed email. Unroll.Me has made an entire business out of unsubscribing people from email lists.   

In actuality, email is more important than ever before because it is the one unifying data point that travels with consumers across the marketing galaxy. It is the one and only identifier that can deliver the mythical “360-degree view” of customers.

Some marketers thought that cellphone numbers would become the universal identifier. This didn’t pan out because people are cautious about sharing cell numbers. In an international survey conducted by the software company SAS, 94 percent of respondents were willing to share an email address, but only 53 percent would share a cellphone number. A similar survey conducted by Pitney Bowes found the same discrepancy. Email is free, easily replaceable and accepted almost everywhere on the internet. 

Though often maligned, email marketing still produces remarkable conversion rates. Indeed, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company reports that email is 40 times more effective at customer acquisition than Facebook and Twitter combined. It prompts purchases at a rate three times higher than social media. Personalized emails are particularly effective. As Experian Marketing Services found in 2013, “personalized emails generate transaction rates and revenue per email that is more than six times higher than non-personalized emails.”  

Not surprisingly, investment and M&A activity in the email marketing space is strong. VB Profiles labels 20 companies as “Email Service Providers,” and they’ve collectively raised $655 million in funding. They are effectively a ‘farm team’ for B2B tech enterprises that call up new players to keep their marketing clouds competitive. Salesforce, for instance, acquired ExactTarget for $2.5 billion in summer 2013 and Oracle picked up Responsys only months later for $1.5 billion. IBM grabbed SilverPop in 2014 for an undisclosed sum. This year, NetSuite acquired Bronto for $200 million and on November 2, Endurance International Group announced its plan to acquire Constant Contact for $1.1 billion.   

Email is far from dead. People are more willing to share email addresses than cell numbers; marketers can get better conversion rates on email than social media; and the world’s biggest marketing technology companies are willing to spend billions on top email services. So one question remains: where does that 360-degree view of customers come from? 

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram won’t hand out email addresses to brand marketers. It’s not hard to collect social usernames or email addresses but then linking them to together in a CRM — therein lies the rub. Think about it: many consumer apps, like Foursquare in the past, ask for an email address at sign up and then allow users to link social accounts so they can share activity and achievements. That ties social media usernames to an email address but consumers are becoming more and more reluctant to exchange personally identifiable information about themselves without a perceived value such as increased security, more personalized deals and less spam. Have you added your cell phone number to your Facebook and Twitter accounts? I definitely have not. 

As a result, marketers and customer insights professionals are looking outside of the “walled gardens” of the social platforms to third-party audience insights and data aggregation platforms to stitch their data. “Stitching” is the ability to identify and unify duplicate records across multiple data sets. For customer analytics, this falls into the general task known as identity resolution, in which an algorithm must decide whether two (or more) personal profile records refer to the same or different people. Such algorithms typically use a mix of rule-based and machine learning components, and they pay attention to fuzzy string matches on names, geographical proximity, and known demographic attributes. This capability brings together the structured data such as name, location and email address, already inside of the CRM and unstructured social data. As a result, you get a more complete view of the customer (or potential customer).

So, let’s imagine you run an ecommerce site. You connect purchase histories and high-level demographics to each email address. On the social media side, you listen to conversations at scale and link psychographic data back to those same email addresses. You can now identify personal interests, habits and even emotional states. 

In my experience, this ‘360-degree data’ can lift conversion rates threefold our fourfold when it’s used to segment email lists. Consider this example: I buy enough khakis at J.Crew for them to realize that I like khakis. However, they don’t know that I play golf. They sell shirts and shorts that are ideal for golf, but they don’t market those to me. 

If I were to tweet photos and comments from golf outings, and J.Crew listened to that activity and linked the data to my email address, they could place me in golfer segment. Marketing the joy of golf is way more effective than marketing the wonders of khakis. When J.Crew identifies that I’m taking a trip to Pebble Beach in two weeks (I wish…) – and very excited about it – they can ramp up the golf apparel emails. 

Simply put, email is the unifying data point that enables marketers to link purchase patterns, interests, habits and emotional states to individuals. It enables marketers to send these messages at the right time, with the right content and through the right medium. Email even allows marketers to target social media users thanks to products like Facebook Custom Audiences and Twitter Tailored Audiences.

As consumers become segments of one, expect them to tolerate fewer email lists but engage more deeply with the brands they like. People will try to cut the cheap BACN out of their inbox, but only so they can get thicker, juicier, well-done BACN from a select few retailers. Brands and customers will both win if “the email awakens” to its destiny in our marketing galaxy.  

If you want to get a sample of your customer data “stitched” or want to learn more about it, please feel free to email me ken@peoplepattern.com or tweet me at @chonuff.