Ryan Phelan
Co-Founder, RPEOrigin

The Commandments of Big Data for Emails from the Expert Himself

What really goes into making big data work for email marketing

Big data has marked the beginning of a major revolution. It is not about teaching a computer to think as humans; it is more about applying math to huge quantities of data so that you can infer possibilities and predict every customer’s behavior.

Although it can get complicated and messy at times, big data is transforming the way businesses work. It has made marketing more effective and emails are no exception.

We got in touch with Ryan Phelan, co-founder at RPE Origin, to get deeper insights into data and its significance in emails.

Ryan: The concept might be basic – on the surface you have a lot of data – but the implication of big data is more advanced. It’s data that is organized, accessible, usable and actionable.

A lot of peope have a lot of data. They can see email opens (for now), clicks, where they clicked, whether they’re active or inactive, and what they did after they clicked. Big data is an advanced strategy because it makes vast amounts of data actionable beyond a single use or app.

Do you have big data in your ESP? No, you have lots of data. Some of it is actionable, but only in relation to your email response data.

If you have other data, great. Now you have the start of big data. But more important than that is what you do with it. That should be your focus.

Ryan: But have we really seen this? I don’t know that we have.

We have seen in the last 12 to 18 months with the pandemic how much data an email marketer can have, or have access to, but I still see marketers doing list-based segmentation and campaigns. That’s not a “surge.” That’s routine.

The advantage to Big Data is that we expand the possibilities of our marketing. We’ve said the gateway to greater success is segmentation, production based on propensity, and other natural reactions to customer behavior.

All of this data is available if marketers take the opportunity to get it and organize it for use. Ninety percent of the email in my inbox is still “batch and blast.” It tells me these marketers still don’t know who they’re talking to and sending the wrong content.

The secret fact of email is that it’s the only channel where you can make money even if you don’t do it well. But you’ll make a lot more money if you can organize, use, and expand on your data beyond the basics.

Ryan: First up, the most advantageous email programs are triggered emails – marketing automations right out of the gate. You can see a customer’s action or behavior and react in real time.

That could be a product upsell after a purchase, or special messaging when you detect signals that a customer is moving (see my latest Only Influencers column for more on this overlooked opportunity).

It could be browse behavior or buyer history. Your email system is looking at consumer signals and acting on them.

Next, I would add transactional emails. I buy Product X, and you know people who buy Product X usually go on to buy Product Y. That’s called “next logical product,” and it’s an email you can send to follow up on the first purchase.

These are emails that are constructed automatically at time of send. It’s an advanced strategy that relies on models, propensity, and inventory to support the customer profile. That complexity takes time to build, but the additional money you can make far outweighs your time investment.

It also makes building emails much easier because you can rely on your data to tell you what to send, not the merchandising team. You’re more likely to include products that your customers actually buy, not just what comes close based on your merchandise assortment.

The more sophisticated your approach to using data, the better results you’ll have. That’s why it’s not enough just to have data – it’s what you do with it that makes the data valuable.

Ryan: I see personalization as not just putting someone’s first name in a subject line or message copy. That’s entry level personalization. Anybody can do “Hello [first name].” I see personalization as how personal that email communication is to the end user. Rate your own emails from 1 to 10 on how personal they are to your own interests and activity.

Do the products in your emails relate to your own predisposition or propensity, or your purchase history? That’s level 8 to 10 personalization.

Data helps you get smarter in how you market. It’s akin to the websites you visit every day. They should be smart and relevant experiences if the site is built to take in all types of data and present you with a highly personalized web experience but it takes a lot of work on the back end to make that happen, especially at scale.

Effective personalization means the consumption of communication happens more regularly because the communication is more relevant.

Ryan: The lifeblood of marketing automation is data, and the more data you have, the more decision trees you’ll have in that automation. Take the abandoned cart. It’s easy to detect when a customer abandons a cart. That signal triggers an email, where you say, “You left something in your cart. Come back and check out.”

But, if you increase the data in your email, you make it more relevant and give your customer more reasons to act. You can say, “Hey, you left these cool shoes in your cart. Did something go wrong? Do you need more information? Let us help!”

The more data you use in your marketing automations, the more intelligent and effective they will be. But don’t overlook the planning process. Always think it through first. Ask yourself, “What other pieces of data can I bring in to make this even more effective?”

Go back to your own inbox, and look at the automated emails you receive. Rate these from 1 to 10. Are they fancy? Or did the marketer just phone it in?

Ryan: No. Many people believe this, but the only thing that’s important to deliverability is having the right email address. That’s data, but not necessarily big data. What’s more important is how valid your dataset is.

From a deliverability standpoint, did you validate the email address at opt in? Did you use double opt-in?

Another issue is how recent your data is. How old are your records? A 6-year-old email address might not still be in use, but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. I still use the Gmail address I got back in 2004 when Gmail launched.

The perennial challenge with any large dataset is the validity of the data itself. Your first questions to your CRM group should be “How old is this data? How recent are the responses?” That plays into deliverability.

Ryan: Big Data can help you craft an amazing subject line. Should you use it to craft the perfect subject line for each subscriber? No. It’s a waste of time.

You’re better off spending that time and effort on crafting the perfect message that they’ll open and read. Yes, there’s a science to creating good subject lines that persuade people to open your email. But we’re addicted to the subject line. With the recent news that Apple will be killing off open rates, who cares?

Yes, the subject line is important. But let’s focus on the things that make us money – and those are in the message itself.

Ryan: The biggest big data project I ever worked on was a massive telecommunications company with more than 2 billion email records. Our goal was to reactivate customers who had moved to other brands. With that big of a dataset, we could do fun stuff.

We took a methodical, data-driven approach with those email records to match them to third-party data on factors such as where they live, what their interests were, how old they were, if they had children in the home, if they were married, watched the news, played golf, and more. Then we used data pieces to fun complex models that grouped these records into seven cohort groups, all similar to each other.

Once we had that, we developed custom strategies for each cohort group, such as people who were attuned to news and technology, people with college-age kids, people who were the tech support for their families, and so on.

Building that dataset changed my perspective on how data can be used effectively and responsibly to craft messages. But it was a lot of work. Nothing in this world is easy, so buckle down and get it done. The bonus for all of our work? Effective campaigns that could be replicated time and time again!

Ryan: The propagation of consumer data platforms (CDPs) have given businesses the benefit of the single-record view of a customer. That’s what we’ve been talking about forever. A CDP organizes the data to show us everything we know about this customer in one place. That makes it easier to use the data for effective messaging.

To be effective email marketers, we need to know not just what our customers do with email but also how they behave on our websites, in social media, with videos and SMS. We need to consolidate that data to draw conclusions and make decisions.

That’s the CDP’s promise: to be able to query the database more effectively to find good segments. If more companies adopt CDPs, email will finally become more sophisticated.

Ryan: Big data starts with small data. Take whatever data you have, organize it, use it, and then add to it. There’s no threshold that tells you you’re now using big data.

Big data is multidimensional. You see that someone bought something, but what did they buy next? Someone browsed your website. What did they do after that? Someone watched one of your videos. Which one, for how long, and what did they do next?

The hardest part is just getting started. Tell yourself, “I refuse to participate in the “batch and blast” mentality any longer.” Then work out a road map to move beyond that muscle memory.

The gateway to that achievement is through greater use of data. You might have a lot of data, but if it’s specific to one event or one channel, you don’t have big data. You just have a lot of data.

So that’s how big data works!

For us, it was a pleasure conversing with Ryan, and we really hope you have some wonderful takeaways from this insightful conversation.

Let us know in the comments below

The post Expert Interview Series: Part 3 appeared first on Email Uplers.

Magan Le

Content Marketing Manager, Litmus

“Agile Email Marketing”

– The Way Forward

Magan Le

Content Marketing Manager, Litmus

“Agile” — It is such an impressive word. In today’s times, every marketer wants to be agile. However, the problem is that as attractive as it sounds, people are neither fully aware of what it means nor do they know how to implement it correctly.

Agile marketing encompasses six disciplines and four shifts, as you can see here:

Figure P.1 The Six Disciplines and the Four Shifts of Agile marketing

Source: The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Proven Practices for More Effective Marketing and Better Business Results

By Jim Ewel · 2020

When it comes to email marketing, the agile methodology helps you to deliver timely content to your target audience while maintaining a consistent pace and sustainable approach.

To learn more about agile email marketing, we got in touch with Magan Le, Content Marketing Manager at Litmus, who has been actively executing the agile workflow since quite some time now.

So, let’s get some great insights into the subject from the subject matter expert, Magan.

Magan: Yes, agile email marketing is the future and the best way to stay ahead of your competitors and on top of your audience’s needs. We’ve seen during the pandemic and chaotic political and social climate how much things quickly changed and still are. Agile email marketing makes it much easier to adapt and focus on your subscribers.

Magan: We use our own tools to be quick and flexible in our email process. Our email design system lives in Litmus, so we can quickly drag and drop to create emails. Once we know the content we need to cover, I can start copywriting while our designer mocks up the email. And our developer can start to build it out because we already know what template and modules we’re going to use. Then, it’s just a matter of plugging text and images in and syncing to our ESP. And because Litmus automates QA testing, we don’t have to worry as much about broken emails.

We also have a reviews & approvals tool built in so we can collect everyone’s feedback in one place and we know exactly what it’s for. I hate all the usual back and forth because it’s sometimes confusing and wastes so much time. That’s not agile!

We’re also A/B testing a lot more because some of the things we thought we knew don’t work anymore. We’re all about staying in tune with our customers and subscribers, flexing to their needs.

Magan: The most important thing is to have an agile mindset. Know, accept, and expect that things change. So when you do need to adapt for the sake of your subscribers, everyone’s ready to jump in.

Beyond that, communication and team effort are critical. And email modules don’t hurt! So, even though I mostly do copywriting in our email process at Litmus, our modular email templates make it so that I can go in and easily build emails if I have to. And with my prior email experience, I can jump into our ESP to build lists and hit the send button.

So, set up your processes and tools so that they’re easy for others to spring into action. And then train them as needed so you’re not left scrambling.

Magan: If you’re not familiar with agile marketing, you might think it’s just about moving fast. I would argue that that’s merely a side effect.

The true purpose of being agile is to test and learn so you can get to know your audience better. And by doing that, you’re creating an experience that’s inherently empathetic.

So it’s not that 2020 forced everyone to change their marketing plans. 2020 changed people’s behaviors and feelings—and that’s what’s forcing brands to empathize and shift to stay relevant. Many companies that weren’t agile enough to do so suffered the consequences—getting shut down or canceled.

Magan: The main benefits of agile email marketing are:

Saving time in your email workflow

Focusing on your audience’s needs

Greater speed to market

According to our State of Email Workflows report, 52% of marketers spend two weeks or more to complete a single email from conception to hitting the send button. Our email developer can literally build an email in 10 minutes! That’s probably going to be the most noticeable impact for most brands.

Magan: I wrote a helpful guide on the agile email workflow, but to summarize, my suggestions are to:

• Get your team and tools in place. Cross-team collaboration is important to staying lean and agile without adding a new headcount. And with the right toolset, you can fill in skills gaps and streamline or automate parts of your process.
• Align on email strategy. Otherwise, there can be miscommunication and confusion which results in even more work and time wasted.
• Write, design, and build at the same time. Finishing one thing before doing the next takes too long. Standardized email design and a visual email editor can help your team do these tasks concurrently.
• Collect feedback in one place. Juggling feedback from different people in different places is a pain, not to mention hard to keep up with.
• Analyze and share insights. It’s the best way to learn what resonates with your audience so you can fine-tune your emails and make sure your time is spent working on what matters.

Magan: Get help from someone else at your company, even if it’s not their role. Maybe your web developer can code emails and tinker with design. Agile is definitely not about being perfect; as long as it’s on brand, works, and meets your audience’s needs, you’re good to go.

There are also a lot of free or very affordable tools out there that can help speed up execution. Some kind of WYSIWYG or visual editor would be a huge asset. There are also plenty of free email templates and stock images you can use so you can whip something up real quick.

And remember to learn as you go! As a small business, you’re likely more nimble and closer to your customers than larger businesses with lots of red tape and hoops to jump through. Use that to your advantage.

Magan: Agile marketing isn’t really about multi-tasking. Sure, it’s about doing tasks in tandem, but that doesn’t mean it’s one person doing multiple things at the same time. Agile marketing is about collaboration, using the expertise of others across your company. It’s not an excuse to be overworked. But that’s why it’s critical to have strategy alignment so you’re not wasting time. And if you don’t have the team, then you should have tools to help fill in the gaps.

Magan: It depends if you’re doing true agile marketing or if you’re just taking ideas from it to make your email workflow agile.

You talked about being overwhelmed. That can happen—as well as being slowed down—if not everyone is on board or understands what agile means. Getting buy-in and support across the company is a must! In a previous role, we had focused teams doing agile marketing projects and then other folks doing business-as-usual (BAU) work. But we worked closely with sales and legal teams who were not agile, and that was painful. And if you don’t set boundaries (and have the support for that), then if you’re doing agile work, people are going to expect you to do BAU work, too. That’s not good for both your workload and the agile project.

If you’re just using some ideas from agile in order to do more with less, the risk is that you may be working too fast—and that leads to mistakes. Automation tools like Litmus Test can do the heavy lifting for you because QA testing emails for things like broken links are so easy to miss.

Magan: If we’re just talking tools, some helpful ones are:

• WYSIWYG or visual editor, preferably one that’s drag-and-drop to make it easy for literally anyone to build emails (there are several choices out there, including Litmus Builder)—and even better if it also syncs your code instantly to your ESP
• Collaboration or messaging tool to keep everyone on the same page and to make the feedback process seamless (of course I have to mention Litmus Proof but even something like Slack works; just avoid email threads!)
• Automated QA testing tool because it’ll save you a ton of time and catch critical issues you might overlook
• Automated reporting tool because manually pulling data takes way too long (and please don’t skip post-send analysis)

The recurring theme is efficiency! Get what you can to do great email marketing fast. Automate and use artificial intelligence (AI) as much as possible if it’s in your budget.

Magan: My biggest advice is to start small. Start with one email. One reusable code module. Or one part of the process. Take a half-step if you need to.

Change is hard and won’t happen overnight. Going agile isn’t an all-or-nothing deal. Even one tiny step will make a world of difference. And those tiny steps add up.

We hope this interview has added to your knowledge about agile email marketing and got you all prepared to go agile.

Thank you Magan for your time and this valuable information. It will surely inspire all our readers to try out agile marketing methodology.

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