Carlos Carvajal, VP of marketing at Baynote, a personalization and digital marketing software company, spoke to Direct Marketing News’ Shahnaz Mahmud about the role of e-mail in marketing strategy. The company launched its Adaptive Web Suite last month.
Direct Marketing News: How big a marketing component is e-mail?
Carlos Carvajal: E-mail is a very big component. We see it as one of the key touch points. We talk about the Web a lot, but in many cases, especially if companies are running certain promotions where they want to improve their targeting effectiveness, e-mail is still front and center from a promotional aspect. So that’s something that we are seeing. Clients still want to harness as much of the core collective intelligence that we bring to the table and use those insights to improve their e-mail targeting.
DMN: What is the Adaptive Web Suite? How does e-mail fit in it?
Carvajal: The Adaptive Web concept is simply all about how do you adapt the entire digital experience across different customer touch points, including e-mail, based on what they need or are interested in right now. So the Adaptive Web is about serving those customer needs or serving those interests and continuously adapting to them.
DMN: How does e-mail work in the Adaptive Web concept?
Carvajal: One of the core concepts of the Adaptive Web is really trying to understand someone’s intent or interest. We firmly believe the closer you can align with someone’s intent – as close as you can make it to real time – the more effective your conversion rate will be. That’s true across e-mail and across the website; that’s true across any channel.
With one customer, one of the largest telecommunications carriers on the planet, they launched an e-mail to about 9 to 10 million opt in subscribers. In this e-mail, they basically promoted their most popular products. So, it could be most popular phones at the time or different things that are hot at the moment. They use our technology to gain those insights based on what’s happening on the website. They are trying to get people to come to the site. So by observing customer behaviors, then sending a second e-mail tied to their interest based on what they observed online, they were able to increase their conversion rate by more than 300%. It’s about being able to tie it to what are people actually interested in.
