With increased competition for the customers’ time, wallet, and mindshare,
top performing organizations are maximizing the effectiveness of their
email campaigns by personalizing outbound marketing messages. Heavy
personalization techniques allow organizations to develop highly
personalized relevant marketing campaigns by incorporating customer profile
information, segmentation or demographic behavior, channel behavior,
purchase history, personalized product or service recommendations, online
activity, and other attributes from customer databases.

A recent study,
"Email Marketing: Get Personal with Your Customers," conducted by the
Aberdeen Group, reveals that 96% of
organizations surveyed believe that email personalization can improve email
marketing performance. Furthermore, organizations that leverage email
personalization techniques increased average order values by 57% as a
result of their efforts.

While the pressure to improve return on marketing investments (ROMI) and
increase online revenue were identified as the top two factors causing
organizations to focus resources on an email personalization initiative,
the research reveals the businesses are challenged by an inability to
create personalized marketing content and a lack of data for use in
personalized emails.

Best-in-Class companies indicated that they currently
utilize landing pages (78%), forms and survey tools (57%), and segmentation
tools (49%) to supplement accessible data and improve the effectiveness of
email campaigns. These enabling technologies allow Best-in-Class companies
to improve customer retention rates and opt-in rates by an average of 5% as
a result of segmenting customers with email campaigns.

"Companies are still struggling with more advanced email marketing
techniques (beyond the simple mail-merge of a name in the salutation). The
research unequivocally demonstrates that email personalization plays a
critical role in delivering superior email marketing campaign performance,"
explains Ian Michiels, Senior Research Analyst in Aberdeen’s Customer
Management Group.

"All organizations surveyed recognize the value of
personalization. They also realize the essential role customer data plays
in attaining Best-in-Class performance. As a result, all respondents have
initiatives in place to both consolidate and cleanse customer data before
implementing more advanced personalization techniques. Best-in-Class are
still early adopters of highly personalized techniques and technologies;
however, their performance is a clear indication that we will continue to
see increased adoption of more advanced automated personalization features
like dynamic message assembly within top performing organizations,"
concluded Michiels.

The report demonstrates the value of collectively leveraging organizational
practices in process, performance measurement, knowledge management, and
technology to provide a foundation for marketing success. By combining
published rules and regulations governing who in the organization is
allowed to communicate with customers and prospects via email (67%) and
processes for segmenting email lists for improved message relevancy (53%),
Best-in-Class companies are able to maximize the effectiveness of their
outbound email campaigns by personalizing each message with key information
specific to the intended recipient.

Download the report here.

Source: CNNMoney.com