What Deliverability Data Reveals About the Entire Customer Journey

• Updated on: 2019-02-03
• Read original article here

Albert Liu, Head of Deliverability for MessageGears, Tim Moore, VP of Customer Solutions for 250ok, and Paul Midgen, VP of Engineering for 250ok explain, deliverability data has become a checkbox on the path of email marketing, but what does deliverability data reveal about the entire customer journey? When you feed deliverability metrics into the collective knowledge of what you know about a customer, you begin to understand the unique points of diversion that comprise a customer’s experience

Deliverability data has become a checkbox on the path of email marketing, but what does deliverability data reveal about the entire customer journey? The success of an email marketing campaign is usually evaluated by a few key deliverability metrics.

Was the email accepted by a recipient’s Internet service provider (ISP)? Check.

Did the recipient open the email? Check.

Did the recipient click on any links? Check.

Did the recipient unsubscribe or report the message as spam? No. Phew!

If you can put a checkmark by these metrics, your email marketing campaign was a success, right? Perhaps that was the case in the early days of email marketing, but consumers are more sophisticated than ever before, and the customer journey is more complex than it has ever been. While it’s good to know a recipient opened an email or clicked on a link, that doesn’t tell you much about where they are in the customer journey. Or does it?

Connecting the Dots Between Deliverability and the Customer Journey 

Deliverability metrics are more than a marketing process checklist - they are a window into how your customers are behaving in a specific moment in time and a key in determining how customers might behave in the future. However, deliverability metrics are best served in context with other marketing channel metrics. Deliverability metrics come alive when they are plugged into the larger customer journey picture.

When you feed deliverability metrics into the collective knowledge of what you know about a customer, you begin to understand the unique points of diversion that comprise a customer’s experience. Is the person a purchaser? Does the person access the website? If so, what is their most recent activity? Does the customer open emails and click on links? Has the customer logged a customer service complaint with your company? Was the issue resolved? Is this customer a strong referral source?

While each customer is unique, you can begin to use collective data to segment customers using more than demographic data about age, income level, and geography. Instead of sending a generic “20% off sale” email to a list segmented by basic demographics, imagine the power in being able to send a “Refer a Friend” offer to your most loyal purchasers who consistently open your emails, have accessed your website, made a purchase in the past 30 days, and who have also referred a friend in the past year.

A recent survey released by eMarketer found that retailers’ biggest concern and priority for 2017 was connecting customers’ in-store experiences with their digital preferences and tools. Traditionally, email data has notoriously been isolated from other marketing data, but advances in email technology are making it possible for marketers to move away from viewing customers as solitary email addresses and toward seeing them as individuals on a unique customer journey. So what can organizations do to gain a global customer view? Below are three steps marketers can take to gain a deeper understanding of customers:

The high adoption of cloud software as a service (SaaS) platforms, whether for e-commerce, email, content management, or analytics has set businesses up to store and manage data in multiple locations. With every new platform, a new database must be created that updates independently and allows little flexibility in the way data is structured. Obtaining a cross-channel, global customer view means a shift away from silos to a centralized database that businesses can control, marketers can utilize, and new technologies can access directly. However, a recent report by The Relevancy GroupMessageGears found that only 37 percent of enterprise organizations share a centralized data repository. For businesses that want to successfully implement a coordinated multi-channel strategy, storing all facets of marketing data in a single on-premises database is a must for gaining a unified view of the customer journey.  

Centralizing data is a key step in gaining a global customer view, but data is useless unless it is accessible. Even when data is centralized, marketers often have to rely on I.T. to access data. If you still rely on I.T. to add filters and pull lists, or if you are shipping data in and out of spreadsheets, you are using outdated technology. Centralizing data is also a key step toward being able to access data in real-time. No matter how quickly an email service provider sends information back and forth to databases, it can never match the accuracy and speed of using fresh data directly from your company’s internal systems. Companies with real-time access to data are nimble enough to make appropriate adjustments to marketing strategies as data shifts. 

In the era of big data, marketers find themselves swimming in metrics. Even tech-savvy marketers who have the capabilities to analyze raw data don’t often have the time to make complex data usable. If you want your customer data to be actionable, it also must be user friendly. Instead of spreadsheets, think dashboards that consolidate data from multiple sources and allow you to drill deep into analytics. As brands have strived to deliver increasingly relevant messages to increasingly fickle users, diving deep into customer purchase and behavioral data has become indispensable.

The more you know about your customers, the better able you are able to choose the right message using the right channel at the right time. In turn, this accuracy has a downstream effect on email deliverability. By applying the intelligence, you have about how customers want to be communicated with, you will enhance those customers’ level of engagement with your messages and your company. 

Co- Authors: Paul Midgen, VP of Engineering at 250ok, believes that inside every ruthless revenue-driven sender lurks a recipient-centered Jedi master, and he’s dedicated to setting them free one sender at a time. Before joining 250ok, Paul was CEO of Message Bus, ran Inbound Delivery & Anti-Spam at Hotmail, and co-authored the DMARC specification. 

Tim Moore is an email deliverability expert and the VP of Customer Solutions at 250ok. He is known as the Swiss Army knife of the deliverability world through previous experiences at Oracle Marketing Cloud, Message Bus, and Return Path.