Email Marketing Holds the Key to Igniting Customer Obsession

Today, more than ever, is the time to Make Experience Your Business. Yet while the case for becoming an Experience Business is obvious, it’s less clear how to go about achieving it. One challenge that many enterprises are facing is dependency on old, legacy methods for orchestrating experiences that perpetuate channel, data and content silos, and ultimately cause damage to the brand and business. It’s essential that enterprises modernize their technology and transform their marketing function to be centered around the customer. Modernized email marketing can be a catalyst to becoming an Experience Business.

Today, we’re unveiling findings from a new study conducted by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Adobe, “Email Marketing Can Launch Customer Obsession,” May 2018. It’s focused on what Forrester refers to as “customer obsession” maturity, why it’s important, and the opportunity that email marketing can provide in launching customer obsessed marketing. In other words, this paper is your prescription for achieving Experience Business transformation.

Assessing customer obsession: Forrester’s key findings

Forrester defines customer obsession as “deliberately making your customer the center of your total operating model.” We think the premise is perfectly aligned with Adobe’s focus on Experience Business, underscoring the importance of a customer-centric approach, which is why we sought out Forrester for this study.

Forrester’s customer obsession assessment measures maturity across six dimensions – structure, technology, processes, metrics, talent and culture. Upon surveying 260 professionals across these dimensions with responsibility or influence over marketing strategy and technology decisions, Forrester found:

• Customer obsession is a leading indicator of revenue growth and other benefits, such as greater technology acumen, competitive differentiation, customer satisfaction and innovation.
• While 60% believe that their company embodies customer obsession, only 12% fall in this category.
• Smart companies take a different approach to email and marketing overall; 91% of customer-obsessed firms consider email marketing a strategic asset for innovation.

Customer obsession is linked to revenue—do you need another reason to read on and take action? If email marketing is a strategic asset for successful customer obsessed customers, what’s their secret?

The need to abandon email marketing solely focused on promotions

Forrester found that nearly 70% of respondents still rely on email for promotions. Yet just 8% of consumers said they’re “very satisfied” with the promotional email they receive. And 60% of marketers believe their emails are interactive, whereas only 26% of consumers find brand emails to be interactive. Talk about a disconnect!

To truly become customer obsessed or an Experience Business, brands must move beyond promotional marketing. While promotions have value, an organization’s entire marketing strategy cannot solely consist of promotions. The same holds true for email campaigns.

Email marketing is ripe for innovation

In addition to moving beyond promotional marketing, brands must make increasing customer satisfaction their number one marketing goal. This applies to email marketing and overall marketing efforts. So how do you make this happen? Here’s advice coming out of the Forrester study:

• Leverage email to create an immersive brand experience, versus only about getting more people to click on links in emails.
• Reduce low-value promotional emails. Instead, build better engagement strategies around increasing loyalty among your best customers, rather than blasting deal seekers.
• Leverage email as a utility for cross-channel brand experiences and measure more than just opens, clicks and conversions. Start tracking when email assists conversions in other channels and how it boosts lifetime value, customer satisfaction and brand engagement.

Adobe Campaign can help

We believe the findings of this study reiterate our focus on continued innovation and helping brands reach customers with more relevant and effective email campaigns. We know email is critical to becoming a customer obsessed Experience Business, and we’re here to help you take email marketing to the next level with Adobe Campaign. No other solution on the market can help marketers transform email marketers into cross-channel experience heroes.

You can read more here about insights and effective strategies we’ve garnered from working with the world’s largest brands and brightest minds in email marketing.