Conventional marketing wisdom places great value to “batch and blast” emails, wherein the marketer sends a generic email, usually unsolicited, to each prospect or customer in the list. Customers are now more informed and demand individual attention which has forced marketers to re-think this strategy.
Marketers continue to use email as the basic tool to communicate with customers, but rather than “batch and blast”, they customize and personalize their emails. Most marketers now use automated platforms for this purpose.
Automated email-marketing platforms allow marketers to automate email communications while still allowing for personalized emails throughout the customer lifecycle phase. It makes the otherwise daunting task of communicating with customers on a personalized basis very easy by providing the marketer with an email editor with build-in templates and ability to add custom templates.
Advanced platforms equip the marketer with insights such as ability to “test-send” the email to check for the potential impact and views in different browsers, a “spam-score,” which compares the email to conventional spam, ensure compliance with statutory regulations such as the requirements mandated by CAN-SPAM Act, and more. It would also provide tracking reports that would allow the marketers to gauge the impact of their emails.
The ideal email marketing automated platform complements the marketing effort rather than functioning as a stand-alone tool that makes the task of sending and analyzing email easy. For instance, it would gel with the company’s multi-step and multi-channel marketing campaign management to facilitate audience segmentation and thereby ensure seamless automation of campaign experience.
