Break through Singapore's email marketing slump

Email marketing is an absolute necessity in the modern world of digital advertising. However, after time, users that were once happily engaged with your emails eventually tune you out.

Coupled with the Personal Data Protection Act, or PDPA for short, it is not uncommon to see KPIs including open rates, click rates, and conversion rates declining over time.

The key to overcoming this challenge lies not in content, but through understanding and leveraging your data to optimise the targeting for every campaign you send out in Singapore.

Your database is a goldmine

The reason email marketing is such a profitable marketing channel is because it requires a near-zero acquisition cost. An email database is built almost as an accident of all that money you spent on Google, Facebook, or offline marketing to get users to your website in the first place.

From there, sending out email campaigns is both inexpensive as well as highly profitable. What is your expected Subscriber Lifetime Value (SLV)? This is the amount of first-time purchases or repeat purchases you expect from each subscriber.

For example, a local online beauty shop - if their SLV is $40 and have a 100,000 subscriber list, that means they are sitting on an asset worth $4,000,000. This is often most companies' largest asset.

Understanding the email lifecycle

New subscribers will open, click, and purchase from emails at a far higher rate than users that have been subscribed for a long time. You likely know this from your own inbox even if you're not an email marketer.

You are interested at the start of signing up for the PAssion card, but after the promotions just keep rolling in, you eventually start to tune them out.

We call it fatigue, and it is completely expected. As your database ages, a larger and larger amount of your database is comprised of "fatigued" users that are no longer engaged with your mailings.

In order to fully optimise your email marketing channel, the goal should be to reduce fatigue right now so that as little of your audience as possible ends up in that state.

Leverage your data

By understanding the customers' behaviour pattern, it is possible to deliver emails only when each customer wants them, minimising fatigue and maximising results. There is a wealth of information to be found in your historical email marketing data on each customer. This includes:

- The amount of email sent / opened / clicked
- Email tenure (the length of time since subscription)
- Transactional data (i.e. previous purchases)

Gathering these details is key to deciphering your customers' actions - you just need to make sense of it to your advantage.

Refine your mined data for optimised targeting

Before the data is of any use, it needs to be understood. One method is to apply a "Propensity to engage" model to your user and behavioral data to provide predictive analytics. With this information, you can now answer the question, "who should we send today's campaign to?"

To get the best results: only send to those users who are engaged or who have an increased propensity to engage after a sufficient period of not mailing to them.

That said, measuring this phenomenon is an emerging science in the email marketing space and isn't particularly well quantified or understood by most Singaporean marketers.

The end justifies the means

It may be painfully obvious to some to only email those subscribers who are likely to engage, but the hard part is sorting out who they are. Often times, it takes much operational effort and labor costs to execute.

However, looking at the results it is definitely worth it.

By optimising your targeting, you will see:
- Increased click-through rates, open rates, and revenues
- Reduction in emails sent and hence marketing costs
- Increase in ROI

By leveraging big data analytics, optimised targeting will turn your email channel from stagnant to sparkling, and make the needle move more than any other single thing you can do.