To achieve the goal of converting subscribers into buyers, you have to send them emails that are relevant and contextual to them. Promoted deals of the day, loyalty programs, time-limited coupon codes, product launches—all of these are staples in email campaigns. But, how do you send them personalized, relevant campaigns? It’s a lot more than simply using someone’s first name in campaigns. Below, we will discuss contextual email marketing and how you can implement this strategy into your email campaigns.

What Is Contextual Email Marketing?

Contextual email marketing is email marketing content that is personalized and relevant to each of your customers based on their location, past purchases, time zones, or devices they use.  Essentially, it’s delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time.

If you want successful email campaigns with more engagement, it’s important to harness the power of contextual marketing for two reasons:

Personalized Content: When you have more information about your contact, you can send relevant and personalized content targeted to their needs—basically the foundation of successful marketing.

Enhanced Performance: By creating campaigns that are targeted at people’s needs, they will perform much better because you aren’t sending content that’s misaligned with their interests or stage in the sales cycle. Makes sense.

Marketers can gather this information by using live polls with results that update in real-time, onsite forms and surveys, competitions and campaigns, likes on social networks, and many other strategies.

Implementing Contextual Email Marketing

Here are four ways you can implement the power of contextual email marketing into your campaigns:

1. Weather-Targeting

When you set up your emails to detect the weather, you are able to target content more effectively. Depending on the weather, you can send out a sale for summer clothing if the afternoon suddenly gets increasingly hot or humid.

Another example, someone could read your email in Boston, hop on a plane to the west coast, open the email again, and then see fresh content that reflects the current climate and location-specific offers. This is what makes context so powerful: it transforms marketing campaigns from static to interactive and favors personalized engagement over broad targeting.

2. Geo-Targeting

Live maps in emails can help make the content of the email relevant and initiate the customer to engage. You open an email from a shoe store that is having a one-day sale. The map in the email shows you that the store is right around the corner—how convenient.

Another benefit of geo-targeting is highlighting exactly where customers can redeem their products or points and how far away the location is from them. Geo-targeting can personalize a customer’s experience and transform an email into a helpful shopping companion.

3. Device Detection

The users experience on different devices should be, yes, different. Essentially, emails have to adapt to the current devices they are being viewed on. This doesn’t mean that you need to create different variations of each email.

Brands can include dynamic elements in the emails itself that will react to the exact device and offer the correct content. For example, on a mobile device, the brand can prompt app downloads that won’t show up on a desktop. Or the brand includes a large hero image that only appears on mobile devices. It then can be further customized depending on the device—iPhone users are given a link to the Apple store whereas Android users are offered a link to the Google Play store.

4. A/B Testing

It’s vital to run these tests when trying to find out new techniques or formats for your email campaigns, so your customers have the best possible customer experience: you need to test what resonates the most with your audience. With A/B testing, you’re able to split the audiences, test different content, and then change the losing creative content in real-time. Some examples you might consider testing include:

• Call to action (“Buy Now!” vs. “View Our Pricing”)
• Subject lines
• Images
• Testimonials
• Specific offers
• Personalization (“Mr. Smith” vs. “Jake”)

Here at Vision Advertising, we can proudly say we’re contextual email marketing champs…not chumps. To retain and acquire new customers, it’s important to send them personalized and relevant content. If you’re interested in learning more about email marketing or effective tactics to start implementing contextual email marketing campaigns, contact the experts.