Behavioral Email

 

Behavioral emails are emails that are customised based on the actions that a user has taken on a companies website. For example, they may include follow on offers and information based on products bought, content viewed or items searched for.

According to a survey of UK businesses carried out by eConsultancy, 47% of companies want to use website behaviour to target emails . It is a great way to make emails more relevant and targeted. For example, not only with basket abandonment emails, but also if someone views pages on pet insurance on the way to buying motor insurance. A behavioral email can follow up with a pet insurance offer at a later date.

Similarly, if a customer has browsed hotels in Thailand but not booked anything, an email with special offers for Thailand hotels can have very high open and conversion rates.

Most email campaigns of the future will come from relevant, targeted email rather than bulk email. The way to make emails relevant is through customised alerts and behaviour-based segmentation. The average number of segments used by online businesses is growing as technology enables more granularity.

The challenge is that website behaviour is normally tracked by web analytics programs that are run by the IT department, where as email evolved as a direct marketing platform used by the marketing department. It is a legacy problem to link these two platforms together and get the true power of behavioural email embedded in organisations. It is messy, but well worth the effort.

Industry Standard Response Rates – Email Marketing, North America

Open Rate: 26.7%

Click Through Rate: 6.9%

Delivery (Non-Bounce) Rate: 93.%

Source: Epsilon