Broadcast or ‘blast’ emails are no longer relevant for effective customer engagement. Customers, in fact, enjoy and respond to personalized emails tailored to their shopping journey, segmented for their behavior and personalized to their preferences.
Consumers in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, prefer journey based and smartly triggered email interactions with brands whilst purchasing media & entertainment products or shopping online according to the latest Email Benchmark Report 2022 released by MoEngage, the insights-led customer engagement platform. The report provides marketers with insightful findings about consumer email behavior and strategic benchmark approaches to successful click-through rates. The report analyzed metrics such as click rates, conversion rates and open rates across four major industries. It also analyzed the influence of marketing strategies like personalization, segmentation, and journey-based campaigning.
The report closely examined over 5.3 billion emails sent between August 2021 and February 2022 in Banking & Fintech, Media & Entertainment, Shopping and Lifestyle Services.
The study also found that customers who shop in MEA prefer to open emails that are smartly triggered and journey-based. They also respond much better when segmentation or personalization are deployed: unique CTRs see improvements of up to 7X, CTORs see an improvement of 5X, and conversion rates increase by 7X due to dynamic personalization. Other main findings were:
Shopping brands see a 5X improvement in CTOR when auto-triggered emails are used.
With auto-triggered emails, you can trigger an email to automatically be sent whenever an ‘event’ of your choice occurs. This ‘event’ can range from a customer visiting your website to adding a product to their cart, checking out, or even calling customer support for a refund. This type of email works best for the shopping vertical because it gives the customer exactly what they want when they want it. It helps brands maximize high-intent leads.
Brands see a 10X increase in CTR when dynamically personalized emails are deployed.
Dynamic personalization allows you to automatically create a dynamic group of products for each customer. Each item in the product set is intelligently identified to match the customer’s interests, preferences, or behavior. These products can be filtered based on attributes like price range, favorite category, discount range, etc. This type of email works well because customers prefer timely recommendations on products, such as a payment reminder, a promotion, or a special cashback offer.
Media and entertainment brands see a 15x increase in unique CTR when emails are tailored to the customer journey.
Customers don’t convert right away. They take a small series of micro-steps that move them closer to the end goal, usually conversion. As a marketer, you have plenty of opportunities to engage with the customer along their journey, but messaging at these touchpoints needs to be tailored to their lifecycle stage. When a customer has first found out about your brand, you can send them messages about an upcoming new TV show or article to peak their interest. When they’ve made a payment or subscribed, you can send them transactional messaging to confirm their payment status.
Commenting on the relevance of the report and the impact of personalization of emails, Raviteja Dodda, CEO, MoEngage said, “The shift in email behavior will continue thanks to the impact of increasing demand for personalization and intelligent marketing. Marketers therefore need a whole range of benchmark metrics and feedback to appreciate and capture their audience needs and more importantly, engage them and fulfill their needs then and there.”
Some of MoEngage’s top customers in the region includes:
Bayut, DAMAC, Azadea, Mashreq Bank, Landmark Group, and Swvl.