Why and How Email Marketers Should Use Contextual Data
What is context anyway?
Today, we all have a mobile and we have it with us at all times. It’s the first thing we check when we get up, we spend our time on it when commuting to work, it’s on everyone’s desk when we’re at work and also on too many people’s table — like me — when having a drink or eating at the restaurant.
So because of those new habits towards mobile, we tend to check our emails all the time, everywhere. By doing so, we’re making it harder and harder for brands to engage us via email, even if the content is relevant. Indeed, email marketers can control the content of the message, its design, the sending time but they cannot control each opener’s context. It’s out of their hands.
Actually, it was out of their hands. Thanks to email intelligence technologies, marketing teams can now send emails that adapts to each opener’s context in real-time.
This will definitely change the way brands communicate with their customers, they can now adapt the content of their email based on each recipient moment-of-open device, location, weather conditions and much more. Let’s dive in some concrete examples of contextual data marketing.
Device
Brands email marketing strategy should adapt to openers’ device in real-time, guiding recipients who are on the go — opening on mobile — to one of the brand’s store, and redirecting the ones opening on desktop to its eshop.
A few days ago I received this email with two discount codes from Adidas: a barcode to use in a store, and a text code to use online — smaller, on the right side of the screenshot.
This is a good practice but the best practice would be to use email intelligence technologies to instantly display the right discount code (barcode vs text code) based on each recipient’s device at the moment-of-open.
Localization
For brands that do have physical stores, a pretty convenient thing to do would be to display live maps on emails depending on each opener’s location. Indeed, using localization would allow the brand to insert a map in the email showing each opener’s nearest store in real-time. One click on the map would then allow the recipient to get the itinerary to this closest store. How cool would that be?
Weather
Context also includes weather conditions at the moment-of-open location of each subscriber. Is it raining, snowing or is it sunny? Recent studies have clearly established the fact that weather conditions impact customers behavior. So if we take the example of an eCommerce website, it could be smart to choose to display ankle boots if it rains when one recipient opens the email, and sandals if it’s sunny when another recipient opens it.
Temperatures
So we talked about weather conditions but temperatures are also a good factor to monitor and adapt the content of its emails to. Actually, for some industries, temperatures are even more relevant than weather conditions. Indeed, if you sell food for example, you can choose to display salads and ice cream on your email if it’s hot at the opener’s location, and soup and hot chocolate if it’s cold for another opener.
