(Magilla Marketing)—Fewer than half of marketers personalize any aspect of their e-mail campaigns and of those, nearly 40% limit personalization to the salutation, according to a study by Responsys.
And while most plan to increase their use of e-mail personalization, many may have to change the way they think in order to carry the plans out.
Forty-four percent of 300 marketers surveyed said they personalize some aspect of their e-mail marketing, and 89% said they plan to increase their use of personalization in future efforts, according to Responsys. However, 64% said the biggest roadblock to more personalized e-mail marketing is lack of time and resources.
Other major obstacles include limited information about customers and lack of integrated customer data, according to Responsys.
The e-mail service provider’s findings are somewhat in accord with those of Silverpop, which recently released a study in which marketers said lack of customer data is the No. 1 challenge to their e-mail efforts.
Marketers hesitate to ask too many questions during the opt-in process for fear of a drop-off in registrations. They also tend not to use traditional data overlay services, according to Silverpop’s Vice President of Strategy Elaine O’Gorman.
“There seems to be a feeling that e-mail data is different in some way from direct mail data, whether it’s because direct mail tends in many cases to be household-based or because e-mail marketers simply aren’t familiar or comfortable with the data matching services out there,” she said in an interview this month.
According to Scott Olrich, Responsys’ vice president of marketing, the problem isn’t a lack of data, time or resources. Many online merchants simply take too traditional a database-marketing approach to their e-mail personalization, he said.
“A lot of direct marketers come from a world where they do traditional personalization [such as] offer optimization, testing and advanced segmentation, and that’s great,” said Olrich. “But if you stop there, you’re not going to get the best results.”
To get the most out of e-mail, marketers need to think more about capitalizing on real-time behavior, he said.
Using traditional database marketing, he said, “I may know that someone is male or female, and that their segment should be worth some amount based on some algorithms. But what if they’re on the Web site searching for some product that’s not related to anything that I would be able to use traditional data to determine that they’d be interested?”
The folks at Responsys have been making the event-based-commercial-e-mail argument under the name “individualized lifecycle marketing” for well over a year. Olrich claims recent developments indicate the idea may finally be gaining real traction.
“We’ve had a big growth of marketers starting to use Web analytics for personalization,” he said. Also, vendors are increasingly making it easier to integrate their services with the various Web analytics firms’ products.
“This [trend] started two years ago, but has really turned on in the last six months to a year,” he said.
One example is Omniture’s unveiling last week of Genesis, a platform the Web analytics firm claims will allow Web site operators to integrate their online marketing applications and get a single view of the data from the various sources. Sixty vendors, including Responsys, are included in the initial product.
“The heart of the Genesis announcement is that the marketer can get re-marketing feeds in their e-mail system very easily,” said Olrich. “What products did [prospects] browse? Which things did they abandon? Which ones did they buy? Omniture has basically made it easy to get that data into an e-mail tool, and all of the e-mail-response data can be rerouted back into the analytics system.
“The leaders are building composite applications to make it easy for you to move this data,” he said. “If they’re not, you’re with the wrong vendor.”
