Drive Personalization, Not Segmentation

Marketers Must Reach Beyond Segmentation

As a marketer who has worked in personalization for nearly a decade, I’m deeply familiar with the struggles companies face when engaging customers. This is all the more true since I’ve started my role at Movable Ink, where I’ve seen firsthand the specific challenges surrounding batch email campaigns. Marketers will often turn to segmentation in an effort to tailor their content, but still fall short of the customization needed to drive maximum engagement and revenue.

To make the most of batch email programs, something has to change. Without it, marketers risk seeing minimal results from their largest campaigns.

The Current Problem with Batch Email Campaigns

For branded messaging beyond batch email campaigns, marketers already know the power of personalization. Think of triggers or customer journeys, both automated cadences that drive stellar engagement. The problem is, applying these tactics to batch email programs is not as simple as a quick copy-and-paste.

Why? Because for batch email campaigns, marketers are the ones making the first move, not the customer. Abandoned cart notifications, web visits, or welcome series work so well because in these cases, the customer has already initiated engagement—all the brand has to do is follow their lead.

Batch email campaigns, on the other hand, are outbound and focused on what the brand needs to promote, and may not always relate to the customer’s most recent interests. This can lead to messages that don’t resonate, resulting in lower engagement and conversion rates.

To revitalize batch email campaigns and truly personalize them from header to footer, marketers must address their diverse audiences with their differing interests and engagement levels. And to do that, they need AI. But not just any generic AI solution will do. They need a powerful AI designed to make the millions of decisions necessary to tailor batch email campaigns for each recipient.

How AI Personalizes Batch Email Campaigns

The challenge for batch email campaigns is two-fold. First, marketers need to map out relevant, creative messages to millions of customers within an email file. At the same time, these messages must also drive both short- and long-term goals such as conversions, discovery, and re-engagement.

This complexity reaches far beyond segmentation, and infinite personalized messages for each batch email requires an AI-based approach. The sheer number of unique decisions that need to be made for each campaign and each customer is impossible through manual effort and traditional approaches alone.

Innovative AI solutions can implement personalization for batch email campaigns. By analyzing each creative asset and the known data for each customer, AI makes unique decisions tailored to every recipient. For instance, AI can determine the best creative asset for each customer by considering factors like past interactions, browsing history, and purchase behavior—or lack thereof.

‍Victoria’s Secret used this AI-powered approach for their batch email campaign. On the left is their original approach, where they sent a single message to their entire email file. Engaging to some, and irrelevant to many others.

On the right is Victoria’s Secret’s current method for these types of campaigns. Rather than a one-size-fits all email, the copy and the creative in each send is fine-tuned to each customer’s affinities. Automated content decisioning transforms a Herculean personalization task into a smooth and efficient process.

By leveraging Movable Ink Da Vinci, Victoria’s Secret mapped promotional messages to millions of customers, achieving both short- and long-term objectives. In the short-term, this drives conversions by delivering relevant content to engaged customers. In the long-term, it aids in customer discovery and re-engagement by gradually delivering content that draws disengaged recipients back into the fold.

Trading Segmentation for Personalization

Moving away from segmentation and transitioning to AI-driven personalization for batch email campaigns may seem daunting, but the benefits far outweigh the challenges. While segmentation may be familiar ground to marketers, true personalization’s payoff of enhanced customer engagement, higher conversion rates, and improved ROI is more than worth the extra step. The hurdle of training, integrations, and documentation is temporary, whereas the greater business results are lasting.

Personalize Batch Email Campaigns Today

While traditional personalization techniques work well for reactive, customer-initiated interactions, batch email campaigns require a different method for optimal success. Da Vinci transforms this paradigm, allowing for true one-to-one personalization at scale, ultimately enhancing both customer engagement and business results.

Explore the related resources below to discover more of AI’s capabilities, or try Da Vinci for yourself.