Guest Blog - Eddy Swindell from Exact Target on making digital marketing messages more relevant with product data

ExactTarget’s Eddy Swindell explains how product data feeds enable a smarter approach to ‘lifecycle marketing’

Interactive marketing has progressed way beyond conventional email. It combines social media, mobile and other emerging applications so that brands can create an appropriate and effective marketing strategy for today’s multi-channel environment. Nevertheless, when it comes to marketing products online, email still rules.

Recent research by ExactTarget in the US found that more than half of online consumers make purchases as a direct result of email, meaning it drives more conversions than any other channel. At the same time, consumer expectations for relevant, engaging and timely messages continue to rise. They know it’s possible for companies to send targeted and personalised messages, meaning relevancy is no longer an option for marketers.

That’s why we’ve taken a different approach. We have developed a sophisticated lifecycle marketing platform that combines many different types of data sourced via enterprise web analytics – such as transactional, profile, CRM, and behavioural – to power highly-targeted interactive marketing campaigns. We can then combine this with product information provided by e-commerce sites to deliver personal, relevant and timely content to customers across multiple digital channels.

However, obtaining accurate product information from our e-commerce clients can be a major challenge. Only a minority of marketers today are aware that their firm either has or could be using a data feed that contains product information such as availability, description/promotional text, pricing and images. Moreover, information such as product category and availability often sit in different platforms at the merchant – creating information silos serving different marketing functions.

Historically, we would have to lift the lid on the merchant’s ERP system to obtain detailed information on products and their availability. But with the ability of companies like FusePump to extract product data directly from the merchant’s e-commerce website, it is possible to create an accurate feed comprising rich product information encompassing the merchant’s entire inventory. This feed can then be used to power rich product information into a number of online marketing applications.

For example, we are able to personalise each communication based on the types of products the consumer has looked at previously, combining this with current similar products. A common application is shopping cart abandonment, whereby a merchant sends an email offering a discount to a consumer who has previously put a product into their basket but didn’t convert. Typically, this type of email activity drives a conversion rate of 8-12%. Using product feed data to populate the email with details and images of the exact product the consumer had viewed previously, the conversion rate can rise to around 18-22%.

The success of this approach hinges on the accuracy and richness of the product feed. And the onus is on the merchant to provide the granularity required to power more sophisticated lifecycle marketing applications. The more granular the level of product information provided via the  feed, the higher the conversion rate will be and the more scope there is for us to innovate across our client’s digital marketing campaign.