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DELIVERING RELEVANCEYour Guide to Making Emails Count

ABOUT DELIVERING RELEVANCEEmail has never gone out of style as a marketing tool. That’s because email rocks at getting results — driving more conversions, maximizing ROI and boosting loyalty. But, you have to be spot on with your customer communication and make every email truly count. By gathering and analyzing Magnetic’s email performance data, this eBook will walk you through the four

must-have components of creating relevant and meaningful emails people want.

Prepare for Moments of RelevanceUse the right data to know when to reach and influence people

Understand Your AudienceGive people what they want to acquire customers and drive up loyalty

Drive Performance with Customized CreativeAnalyze design templates and nuances to drive performance

Make the Move to MobileFocus email strategies towards the growing trend in device engagement

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Introduction: Tear down the walls of email with data

INTRODUCTION

The fact is, customers still love their email. According to eMarketer’s Retail Email Marketing: Benchmarks and Trends in the US, internet users of all ages continue to open promotional emails, welcome targeted messages and think of email as a preferred channel for interacting with retailers. And while you might assume young adults have abandoned email for other channels, checking and send-ing email is still the leading digital activity for 18-34 year-olds, according to a February 2015 poll from the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago.

But here’s the catch: You’ll only succeed with email if you deliver relevant content. Certainly, spamming your cus-tomers isn’t the answer, while sending email that doesn’t align with a customer’s expressed interests doesn’t move the needle much either. Your audience will be most recep-tive to messages about merchandise they have already shown interest in, explicitly or passively.

Great news! Email has evolved to become smarter than ever to help you to provide the messages your customers want most. Now, you can create an individual relation-ship through email that is thoughtful, responsive, and personalized.

By tearing down the walls of email with data. Through learning about your customer’s behavior in other channels, you can provide them with the relevant content they want in the channels they use most. And, by understanding how customers want to interact with you away from their inbox, they will receive the right content at the right time when they are in their inbox.

However, this is definitely a challenge for today’s market-ers, who still have a long way to go towards delivering email relevance.

That can change, however, with an understanding of the different elements that make up the perfect email market-ing process.

We’ve taken a look at Magnetic’s own data and performance spanning millions of email sends from 2015, as well as data from an Ipsos consumer survey, to decipher how time, de-vice, marketing messages, and email design come together to shape performance and people’s actions.

In a Magnetic study, only 55% of retail respondents currently send emails featuring relevant information, such as reviews, recommendations, sales and trends

ABOUT DELIVERING RELEVANCEWondering how you can do that?

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1 Magnetic/Retail Touchpoints study, October 2015

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1Consumers are definitely ready to re-ceive, as we know they regularly check their personal email and click through promotional messages.

PREPARE FOR MOMENTS OF

RELEVANCE

On average, Ipsos Consumer Survey respondents checked their personal email 7 times a day

In a typical week, respondents clicked through 7 promotional emails

But delivering the right message isn’t just about what you send ... but when. Preparing to reach out at just the right, relevant moment is criti-cal to converting a browser to a buyer.

Chances are, you have lots of data about how your customers interact with email, including what time of day they are most likely to open messages. Understanding that behavior, within the context of their other email inter-actions, can help you decide whether to send that email to an audience of ear-ly risers, the post-lunch crowd, or late night shoppers.

of consumers would like re-tailers to email them when an item goes on sale

But how do you prepare for those mo-ments of relevance? With the right data from behavioral and intent signals, you can be ready to react when a customer expresses an interest in what you have to offer.

check their personal emails during the evening

check personal email first thing in the morning (before 9 am) 2

Women check their personal emails during the evening more than men

54%

62%

67% 57%

62%

2 Ipsos Consumer Survey Commissioned by Magnetic, 2016

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REALIZE WHICH ACTIONS SIGNAL PIVOTAL TIMES TO COMMUNICATELet’s say a person showed interest on your website and clicked, but did not convert or left before buying the items in his shopping cart. Wouldn’t you like to entice him back to the site to com-plete his purchase? Sending emails based on these actions or “triggers” can be a smart way to reclaim lost sales and catch a customer at just the right time, while engagement is still high.

In addition, triggered emails do more than simply allow you to automatically send precisely targeted emails at the optimal time. You can also personalize the content of your emails based on a customer’s browsing and purchasing behavior.

of consumers would like to get notified of a price drop on an item they are searching for

43%

22%would like to get a dis-count notification to come back and buy their abandoned cart items

Consumers especially love abandoned cart and site emails: If your customers are close to making a purchase, it’s no surprise that quickly reaching out to them can be a game-changer.

Abandoned cart emails:— Convert at the highest percentage of triggered alerts— Bring in $4500 in average weekly revenue— Drive the highest revenue per send ($2.54)

By populating your emails with items shoppers left behind in their shopping carts, or using predictive algorithms to add personalized recommendations based on the visitor’s past shopping and purchase behavior, you’ll be able to deliver the right level of relevance to influence and engage shoppers.

22% of orders placed as a result of email recommendations will happen within the first hour. While 47% will happen within the first day.

Triggered alerts can be a great driver of customer acquisition and loyalty.

Abandoned site emails:

Show highest open rate of all triggered alerts

Have highest click-to-open rate 3

Result in 2.5X the average weekly revenue of abandoned cart emails

70.2% 24.4% 2.5x

2 Ipsos Consumer Survey Commissioned by Magnetic, 20163 Magnetic Email Performance Data, 2015

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2 With the combination of past purchase information, search intent, and browsing behaviors, you can create timely and meaningful recommendations for each individual that can be in-serted into the body of your existing email templates.

Think about the larger value of this: That means every email, whether it’s your weekly news-letter, shipping notification or transaction receipt, is a useful opportunity to provide custom-ized and timely suggestions that customers appreciate.

UNDERSTAND YOUR

AUDIENCE (AND DELIVER WHAT THEY WANT)

Data signals, like browsing behavior and purchase history, are amazingly powerful pieces of information. They allow you to predict the products people are most likely to buy based on past shopping behaviors, their journey across the web and real-time activity on your site. The more you know about your customers, the better you can react to them in a personal, relevant way.

Customers want personalized emailsof consumers expect retailers to deliver tailored email promotions with offers and recommendations78%

54%

of consumers want retailers to give more relevant product recommendations

44%

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51 Magnetic/Retail Touchpoints study, October 2015

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of consumers want retailers to customize sales and offers to personal tastes and preferences

Email recommendations within order confirmations increases customer loyalty.

10% will drive in-cremental revenue

Provide an average weekly revenue of

$1044

Bring in $0.56 of revenue per email

open

Newsletters with email recommendations drive the highest average weekly revenue Magnetic clients saw $1285

A key strategy to ensure intelligent product recom-mendations is to provide consumers many opportu-nities to interact with the products they are likely to want and love. Putting these recommendations with-in emails, and powering them across your brand’s site and communications, provides multiple relevant touch points throughout the customer journey. In addition, it increases marketers’ opportunity to get in front of people during a specific point in the buy cycle.

Each interaction builds knowledge that informs more intelligent recommendations that subscribers highly value. This knowledge becomes an interactive feed-back loop that spans email and site interactions, and aligns the experiences across channels — providing what prospects and customers really need and want.

Pairing email recommendations with site recommen-dations can be a powerful one-two punch that boosts results.

Email Alerts: Your Personal Shopper

“Our goal is to deliver automated, 1-to-1 personalized communication to each customer. With Magnetic, we’re making significant strides in catering our emails to people’s shopper profiles, so the messages are unique to what

they’ve browsed or bought.” – Shayla Foley, Director of Marketing, Bluefly

25:1ROI for Shopper

Alerts

5.7xRevenue per email versus

other email types

25:1

3 Magnetic Email Performance Data, 2015

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ROI for Email Recommendations

Bluefly emails with relevant, specific recommendations drive great results

As a result of getting to know your customers and giving them what they would like to receive — almost like a personal shop-ping assistant or concierge — you can drive discovery, upsell and cross-sell and boost average order value. Email alerts, which can pro-actively cross-reference your catalog events (like sales and new arrivals) with your subscribers’ profiles, al-low you to discover a compelling event that matches an indi-vidual’s interest. You can then send an email to draw them to your site.

3DRIVE

PERFORMANCE WITH CUSTOM

CREATIVE

The amount of email sent each and every day is staggering.

Experts predict the channel will boast over 206 billion emails sent and received each day by

the end of 2017. And when it comes to sending emails to

your customers, one size does not fit all. There are dozens of creative, aesthetic elements that can affect your email per-formance, depending on your industry, your audience and the type of message you’re sending.

For example, you have choices to make about logo placement, images and your call-to-action. Should you include prices and ratings? A navigation bar? Where should you place content zones? Should you use words such as “alert”? How long should your message be?

Apparel Office Supplies Sporting Goods Speciality Non-Apparel

Books, Music & Video

An analysis of Magnetic data shows that for all industries, the inclusion of product-level pricing has a general positive influence on email performance metrics. The addition of price information allows users to decide at a more detailed level whether or not to pursue the item. Results indicate that when product pricing is included in marketing emails, there is a significant correlation to performance, showing a lift in conversion rates of 11.15%.

Ultimately, your template design can have an impact on performance (both positive and negative), so trying new things, running A/B tests and tracking performance can help you to hone in on the perfect subscrib-er communication. Don’t get stuck in a rut!

Center LogoNavigation BarCTA as TextRatingsMulti-color CTA2-Line Product Name LengthSocial Bar

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4 The Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report, 2013-2017

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Check out the elements in your industry, gleaned from Magnetic performance data, that have a positive impact on orders per click, dollars per email send, and click-to-open rates.

Best Practices: Design Features by Industry

DesignFeatures

Over the 2015 holidays, mobile opens increased by 9% to 56% on average.

Marketers are getting the message re-garding mobile — and sending that mes-sage right back out.

4MAKE THE MOVE TO

MOBILE

Over the past five years, there has been no stopping email’s organic move to mo-bile — with smartphone and tablet-tot-ing consumers spending ever-more time on their devices.

In 2014, US adults spent, on average, close to three hours a day on their mo-bile devices.

On average, 46% of trigger emails and 50% of abandoned cart emails are opened on mobile. And a whopping 59% of Millennials use their mobile device to read their personal email at the start of the day.

42.3% of US mobile users surveyed by BlueHornet said they would delete an email that didn’t display properly on their device, and smaller screens need to be taken into account in terms of image size and copy length. All of this means mar-keters need to make sure that all of their emails are optimized for small, portable screens.

A recent study found that mobile email conversion rates jumped 70% (2014/2015) as marketers adjusted their strategies to cater to their mobile-lov-ing customers.

Jewelry mobile opens achieve 58% in Q4 (55% overall)

Jewelry spikes in Q4 to 64%, compared to 48% in all of 2015

Apparel / Accessories spikes in Q4 to 62% (49% overall)

Apparel / Accessories take a huge jump in Q4 to 62% (52% overall)

Sporting goods opens reach 54% in Q4 (47% overall)

Shopper Alerts

Trigger Emails

2 Ipsos Consumer Survey Commissioned by Magnetic, 20163 Magnetic Email Performance Data, 20155 eMarketer6 2015 Yesmail Email Marketing Compass Benchmark Report

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The holiday season is no exception, with massive spikes in mobile email opens and conversions.

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Industries really rocked the holiday emails on mobile:

The number of emails sent and received each day continues to boom, while consumers are constantly distracted by dozens of other channels and multiple devices. You have to be spot on with your customer communication and make every email truly count — whether it’s the right product recommendations, the right email aesthetics, or optimizing for mobile domina-tion. That means making sure your emails are always relevant.

How to raise your relevance? Dig into your data. There are a variety of elements that can im-pact email performance — so testing, tracking and learning based on data is essential. With the right combination of behavioral, purchase intent data, and shopping patterns, you can prepare for the most relevant moments and provide influential messages to your customers that drive both acquisition and loyalty.

The bottom line is, email has evolved beyond the inbox. It needs to be aligned with the many other channels where your customers are interacting with you, so you can find out more about what they like, value and search for. Once you’ve learned more about your customers and connect with them in a relevant, meaningful way, you can draw them back through the inbox and build the long-term, relevant relationship you need — and they want.

CONCLUSION

Email Has Evolved Beyond the Inbox

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CONCLUSION

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