Dive Brief:
- Numerous studies have shown that email personalization has a positive impact on open and clickthrough rates. New research from Venture Beat found 90% of marketers saw increases in both metrics when adding personalization to email campaigns.
- Pinterest has teamed up with SparkPost to take advantage of personalization by dropping batch email campaigns in 2016 in favor of a multi-channel approach that includes individually personalized email messaging.
- According to TechCrunch, Pinterest wants to reach $2.8 billion in revenue by 2018.
Dive Insight:
Seth Weisfeld, who leads Pinterest’s efforts around all notifications, including desktop, email, push notifications, and SMS, told Venture Beat, “Email is an extension of the product. Pinterest itself is very personalized platform, so email needs to be, too.”
VB Insight analyst Andrew Jones said one aspect of email personalization is knowing when not to send email and reach an audience through another channel, such as SMS or social media. He stated marketers should be taking advantage of data management, segmentation, dynamic content and triggered campaigns based on user behavior to personalize email efforts.
Even though personalizing email is a proven effective tactic, it does require effort from marketers. According to research from Forrester and SAP Hybris, that 66% of marketers reported their personalization efforts were "very good" or "excellent," and 48% said they were actively leveraging behavior-based data. But, only 16% said they were capturing data on customer intent and using it in real-time marketing efforts.