The future of email marketing

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It is difficult to say how many times email marketing has been “killed” in recent years. From the appearance of IRC chat and everyone predicted that the world of email was dead, to the appearance of social networks that said that this would put an end to communication via this means; not to mention mobile phones and even SMS. The reality is that email has never died, but in fact, today it continues to grow quite healthily and the innovation it has experienced continues to maintain it as the main means of digital communication with users by companies.

And many people wonder if it is possible to greatly improve the technology that supports e-mail, and the answer is yes, of course, it can be improved. And I am not referring to the e-mail itself, its design, incorporating videos or other attractive features, but to everything that supports the infrastructure that makes it possible for us to receive an e-mail in our inbox. In short, I am referring to the data.

The information that companies have about their users is the great advertising database enabler for email to continue evolving, to continue being (more) attractive for users and to continue being one of the preferred tools of any digital marketing department.

Until now, it was possible to personalize an email according to certain criteria and following established segmentations, but this management was somewhat complicated. It was necessary to create various creatives according to the segments that were to be targeted, the calculation of the number of users that would go into each segmentation was slow and more or less manual, the number of attributes on which to segment was limited or static and, in addition, especially in large and somewhat complex companies, there were real internal wars over who owned the data and how it could be used.

No one with a minimum of experience will find this definition of the situation strange, and they will surely have smiled knowing the complexity of implementing an e-mail marketing program that follows this way of working.

Even though technology offered these limitations, it was imperative to find a solution, since one of the things that users – all users – demand is to receive information by email that is truly relevant and useful. Or don't we feel disappointed when we receive a message from an online store that offers us information about products that don't interest us at all?

The solution is called cloud infrastructure. And although the term “cloud” may sometimes seem more like a marketing term than something truly effective, the possibilities it offers are truly amazing.

The idea is simple: host all the information you have in the cloud (i.e., in a niche of secure servers): customer databases, leads, loyalty cards; and also upload complete product and service catalogues, as well as price lists. Decentralized databases can be uploaded from different locations, which will make the work even easier. In addition, all the information can be updated in real time by obtaining data on a user's behavior on the web, or how they interact with an email, or on social networks, or with any purchase they make, or even by geolocation. All of this is "connected" to the cloud so that the information is stored in these relational tables that use a single identifier: a user's email address.