presented by Constant Contact partner Skyvia

Email marketing is a valuable tool at every stage of the customer journey. Depending on its business objectives, a company might implement a single or many different campaigns. Each email campaign is usually dedicated to a particular customer journey stage. Some emails aim to increase brand awareness, while others are destined to promote products or improve customer retention.

Sometimes, promotional email campaigns don’t produce the desired outcomes. Luckily, there’s a way to improve them through data integration. This article explores how to integrate data from email automation tools and other sources.

How data integration benefits email marketing campaigns

Data integration, once a time-consuming and manual process, has become more popular and commonplace in business’s digital marketing plans over the years. The evolution of data integration has made it more accessible and easily implemented, and the benefits it provides to businesses make it well worth any effort.

  • Content personalization. By combining data from different sources, marketers can personalize email content based on a subscriber’s past interactions, preferences, and purchase history. Personalized emails are more relevant to recipients, increasing open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
  • Enhanced targeting. Data integration enables marketers to combine demographic, behavioral, and transactional data for targeted email campaigns. By addressing the right audience with relevant content, marketers can improve the effectiveness of their email campaigns and achieve higher ROI.
  • Detailed campaign analytics. Marketers obtain a more comprehensive view of the marketing strategy by sending analytics data from marketing automation tools to BI services. By analyzing email open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue generated, marketers can identify trends and understand what’s working and what’s not.
  • Improved customer retention. By bringing CRM data to email automation tools, marketers can identify and target customers at risk of churning. Sending personalized and timely emails to these customers helps to improve customer retention rates and increase lifetime value.

Data integration and email marketing best practices

If you’re reading this article, you might already be running an email marketing campaign and want to advance it further. But before you jump straight into improving your campaigns with integrated data, it’s important to evaluate whether you’re already utilizing email marketing best practices — and how data fits into those best practices.

  1. Use concise titles. Make sure to include the offer in the subject line as well as in the email title. Concise and eye-catching titles grant high open rates.
  2. Optimize for mobile. The dominance of tablet and mobile devices is in place. Practically every smartphone has email applications for download (Gmail, Outlook, etc.). So, companies need to optimize their emails for desktop and mobile versions of emails.
  3. Optimize email preview. Many users have a preview of messages and emails on a smartphone screen. Creative and precise previews encourage people to open an email. 
  4. Include the landing page link. As a rule, an email summarizes the offer designed for a specific marketing campaign. As the detailed information usually resides on the landing page, you must include its link in the email.
  5. Avoid ‘No-reply’ in emails. Exclude the ‘no-reply’ signs in the email subject line, title, or body text. This phrase impacts the customer’s perception of the email, eliminating the will to proceed with it in any way.
  6. Personalize emails. This best practice is precisely where data comes in, and can be a significant lever to success, considering how much customers prefer personalization across all types of marketing. Customer segmentation powered by (you guessed it) accurate, up-to-date data can set you up to send the right messages to the right people. For instance, you can create and automate emails pertaining to a customer’s abandoned cart and send them to visitors who didn’t make it all the way to checkout.

Examples of data-driven marketing campaigns

So what does it look like when a business follows email marketing best practices and uses data integration effectively to drive their campaign? Here are just a few real-life examples of email campaigns that do just that.

Netflix uses viewer data to send personalized emails, including “rewatch” reminders, upcoming show announcements, and retention emails for canceled subscribers. Their emails also utilize their brand style and clever graphics to engage the reader.

Netflix uses viewer data to engage subscribers and personalize their communications.

Domestika is a world-famous EdTech platform with hundreds of online courses available. Its marketers regularly send personalized emails with hot offers and discounts for courses that might interest a particular person.

Domestika combines a discount offering with tailored recommendations based on the recipient’s history.

Rideshare app Lyft integrates rider data and achievement badges into their email marketing campaigns, celebrating rider milestones in the inbox.

Lyft uses rider data and engaging content for a personalized, celebratory email.

How do you know if your efforts are working?

While there are a number of factors outside of data integration and personalization that can determine the success or failure of your email marketing strategy, there are several metrics you can track to better understand your readers’ engagement.

  • Open rate. The ratio between opened and total emails sent. The most recent average among Constant Contact customers is just under 38%.
  • Bounce rate. The number of emails that weren’t delivered to subscribers.
  • Click-through rate (CTR). The number of people who click on a CTA embedded into an email. The most recent average among Constant Contact customers is 2%.
  • Conversion rate. The ratio between the number of users who completed a purchase and the total number of people who received the email.
  • Website visits. The number of people who interact with your website.

By monitoring and interpreting your email marketing results, you can begin to identify trends, successes, and areas of improvement in your campaigns.

Using data and technology to improve your results

Once you’ve determined your performance benchmark and are ready to start improving, there are a number of ways that data integration can help to craft more personalized, engaging, and successful communications.

Data integration

To improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign, it’s worth using such a data integration tool like Constant Contact partner Skyvia, which is a cloud platform for various data-related tasks and integration scenarios. 

A platform like Skyvia can connect your marketing and email automation tools with CRMs, databases, and other apps to boost the effectiveness of your overall marketing strategy. For example, Skyvia’s Source Lookup Mapping option helps segment email contacts based on customer behavior and demographics, ensuring each recipient receives tailored content.

Marketing automation

Constant Contact’s marketing automation features depend on data to effectively target your subscribers at the right time with the right message. Data points like customer birthdays and anniversaries, as well as purchases, donations, event attendance status, and more, can all be used to create customized, automated emails that are timely and relevant to their exact audience.

Real-time email personalization with Skyvia + Constant Contact

By integrating Constant Contact data with a CRM, database, or data warehouse containing customer interaction data, Skyvia can help create a single source of truth for digital marketers, creating significant opportunity for personalization.

For instance, you’ll better understand which products interest each customer, see their history of purchase, and other pivotal engagement points. And this kind of personalization generates revenue: according to Adobe, almost 89% of marketers report that personalized campaigns have positive ROI, with 14% citing a return of more than $15 per dollar spent.

Summary

When crafting email marketing campaigns, it’s critical to stay abreast of current trends and adhere to best practices, including effectively utilizing your data to power personalization and engagement. Integrating data from CRMs, databases, and other apps into your email automation software lets you personalize content, improve customer retention, and enhance targeting.

About Skyvia

Constant Contact partner Skyvia is a no-code cloud-based data platform offering solutions for data integration, data management with SQL, CSV import/export, automating workflows, creating complex data pipelines, etc. G2 Crowd has Skyvia on the easiest-to-use ETL tool list, proving that this platform is attractive to IT professionals and non-technical users.

The platform supports 180+ data sources, including cloud apps, CRMs, databases, and data warehouses, and provides tools for integrating, replicating, migrating, synchronizing, and managing data.

Follow Skyvia on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/skyvia