By Adam Oldfield, CEO at Force24

Email marketing has been around for a quarter of a century – and it shows no signs of slowing down. Not only does it provide a powerful way for marketers to tell recipients about promotions, brand messages and news – it’s a versatile, low-cost, and efficient tool helping marketers to deliver hyper-personalised comms that are measurable and create positive ROI.

This can certainly be the case if an industry professional chooses to use an integrated email marketing platform that supports their brand in customer engagement.

Of course, the next email campaign will go somewhere as soon as the organisation clicks ‘send’ – but how do marketers know if they’re sending the right message to the right person, at the right time? Plus, modern-day marketers are today battling with privacy and data protection pressures which have come to the fore following the introduction of GDPR so the vital nature of ensuring every piece of comms is compliant has never been more important.

What that also means is that there’s an even greater expectation for brands to only send hyper-personalised content to individuals who have consented to receiving it. With that, the power is ultimately with the recipient and – with data protection regulations and the ability to hit ‘unsubscribe’ at any given time at their fingertips – they truly have the sender right where they want them.

However, marketers are also in a powerful position if they couple email content with an intuitive marketing automation platform because it’s soon to become their most cost-effective, efficient marketing channel. When brands plug in automation too, it can help to understand the audience on a more granular level – resulting in professionals sending relevant digital comms as a result.

So, what are the benefits of email marketing platforms, and what should marketers be looking for when they’re ready to buy a savvy tool that could help transform their customer conversations and empower email deliverability?

1. Liberating email marketing

As an email marketing tool, it’ll be able to take on the mundane and time-consuming everyday tasks that industry professionals end up putting to the bottom of the ‘to do’ list – such as retrieving data from each campaign which, when manually carried out, can take several hours to collate, and something that won’t ever be entirely complete.

With marketing automation, brands can disconnect from the wheels of the marketing machine as it’s able to manage those routine jobs. And the result? Organisations can spend more time focusing on strategy, creativity, and customer conversations and continue to ensure their brand is engaging the right people, at the right time.

2. Email marketing platform integration for multi-channel journeys

For comms to work in harmony and drive real results, companies need an email marketing platform that can segment audiences and talk to multiple groups of recipients at the same time – all from one email build.

A savvy email marketing platform enables teams to create hyper-relevant landing pages, microsites, newsletters and email journeys – in minutes. And if a marketer is saving hours each week thanks to automation, just think how much time they can spend creating their next campaign!

3. Measuring the metrics that matter

What is being monitored to discover whether the latest email campaign was a success or failure? Are brands analysing what improvements they could make? If they’re only looking at email open and click through rates, it’s vital that marketers delve even deeper into the data because these ‘vanity metrics’ don’t tell the full story as to howengaged a recipient was.

For example, a reader could’ve accidentally clicked on an email and discarded it seconds later. And unfortunately, not only are they not interested in what that piece of content has to say, but the organisation itself is getting skewed data as a result.

However, any savvy marketer will know that they shouldn’t ignore them altogether – it’s just a case of not relying on them as the only form of measurement. Instead, using an email marketing automation platform can monitor each campaign alongside what the lead scoring data is telling marketers about every individual’s interaction in their brand, and where they are in the buying funnel.

And, if marketing departments are  unsure as to what lead scoring is, imagine numbers above each recipients’ head based on how engaged they are in the organisation. The higher the figure, the more these individuals should be targeted with hyper-relevant content they want to consume.

4. Unlocking personalisation using email marketing platforms

And speaking about ultra-individualised digital comms, if brands are sending the right content to the right person, at the right time, email campaigns will be far superior to those of a manual send. That’s because customers are being targeted with the type of material they’re interested in, and it goes a long way towards showing that they’re the onlyperson in the room that a company is talking to (even when the businesses is speaking to multiple recipients).

Consumers no longer want bland, irrelevant ‘batch and blast’ emails because the overall message will be loosely received by all. An audience needs to be segmented into specific groups so they can receive tailored sends that show the brand understands their of-the-moment interests.

Plus, when marketers plug in an email marketing platform, they can help to guide audiences through their customer journey and support conversion thanks to their hyper-relevance.