Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

Don't abandon the cart abandoners

The 'Q1 2014 Email Benchmark Report' found that personalised abandoned cart emails that show the actual customer cart had 25% higher transaction rates than abandoned cart emails that just linked back to the brand's Website. Furthermore, personalised subject lines had 12% higher unique open rates than mailings without personalisation.

"Email remarketing through a series of personalised content can have a real and direct impact on a brand's bottom line," explained Peter DeNunzio, general manager of cross-channel marketing for Experian Marketing Services. "Brands that are able to 'test and learn' their way to personalisation are particularly successful as they embrace cross-channel programmes."

Among other significant findings from the study:

• Abandoned cart emails should be delivered in a three-part series. Brands that send second abandoned cart reminders had a 50% increase in abandoned cart revenue compared to just their first abandoned cart mailing. Those sending three mailings saw a 56% increase in revenue compared to just sending the initial abandoned cart email.
• Test including an offer. Including an offer in the first abandoned cart mailing boosted transaction rates by 54%. The highest transaction rates for offers were for dollar-off offers (2.05%), followed by free shipping (1.87%) and percent off (1.15%) offers.
• Half of all email opens are now occurring on mobile devices, on average, although this does vary by vertical market. While 63% of emails from multichannel retailers are opened on a mobile device, mobile opens account for only 22% of email opens for business products and services.
• Total email volume increased by 15.6% in Q1 2014 compared to Q1 2013 but that volume had declined in Q1 compared to Q4 2013 (attributable to increased activity during the holiday period).

According to another recent Experian Data Quality study, 66% of companies had experienced email deliverability issues in the previous 12 months, while the Q1 2014 Email Benchmark Report highlighted a 14.3% year-over-year increase in email bounce rates, with even larger percentage increases been reported in several of the industries studies.

This dramatic increase in email bounce rates may be largely due to the increasing practice of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) of shutting down inactive accounts more frequently and aggressively to aid their systems' performance.

"It is vital that companies adopt more effective targeting, list cleaning and data quality practices to improve the deliverability of their emails and the health of their cross-channel marketing programmes," concluded DeNunzio.

Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to turn every customers into a 'super spreader' for your brand. It's better than free advertising. Once you start this ball rolling, your brand can grow rapidly through word-of-mouth, advocacy, influencers, and customer loyalty. Super-charge your company's marketing strategy, build up your market share, and make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty.

Find out what works - and what doesn't - and who's succeeded, and how they did it. See how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds.

The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook walks you step-by-step through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations for successful marketing strategies - both traditional and emerging - with expert guidance from thought leaders in every major market. Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability. This is a marketing book you simply can't afford to be without.

This book aims to hand you all the facts, figures and research data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy. It also highlights all the facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, news, studies, research and articles, and presents you with an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook at your side, you'll have instant access to a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)