Are Batched Emails Worth It?
Marketers are always on the hunt for innovative ways to provide value to customers, even when they're not actively making a purchase. Cultivating personalized experiences that nurture the customer-brand relationship and boost engagement is always top of mind, and email marketing is a cornerstone of achieving those goals.
Within email marketing, marketers' strategies usually boil down to two approaches: batched and triggered emails. While batch and blasts have been used since the dawn of email marketing, marketers today often seek to discard the “outdated” method in favor of dynamic, personalized triggers.
But omitting a batched program leaves a massive revenue opportunity on the table; while triggered emails nurture the top 10% of customers, batched emails have the ability to reach everyone, no matter their stage in the lifecycle journey.
So don't break up with your batch sends too soon--instead, it's time to update them with a dose of AI-powered personalization.
Triggered and Batched Emails: A Both-And Solution
Marketers don’t need to opt for triggered or batched emails. Here, get a quick understanding of the strengths that each type of program offers and how you can leverage both for a well-rounded strategy.
Triggered Emails
Triggered emails use a predetermined set of rules to immediately respond to customer behaviors. Whenever a customer completes a specific event or action, an email with follow-up content is triggered.
These highly dynamic and personalized emails are delivered at the precise moment the customer acts, making it a strategic choice for converting leads or sales. Key examples of this approach would be abandoned cart messages or product sign-ups that lead to Welcome Series campaigns.
Batched Emails
As the name suggests, a batched email refers to a message sent to a "batch" of recipients all at once, and often involves sending the same email to a large list of subscribers at predetermined intervals.
Because of their broad audiences, batched emails are a great way to reach everyone with a consistent message, such as promotions, product announcements, tentpole events, and holidays. Traditionally, these emails fall into the category of “batch and blast” sends, as they’re often used for generic campaigns that are less effective for nurturing individual customer relationships.
But only noting how the program has been used historically undersells the true potential of batched emails for effective marketing. While every brand has some version of a batched email program for its scalability, it's often not approached strategically. However, when it is used tactically, batched programs have the ability to re-engage dormant customers on your list.
The choice isn’t scalability or dynamic personalization, and batched emails don’t have to mean sending the same email to everyone. With AI for marketing, every customer can receive hyper-individualized messages in a simultaneous send–without manually building multiple segmented versions.
Da Vinci: Solving for Better Batched Programs
Using the power of AI and automation, marketers can change the game with enhanced batched email programs. Solutions like Da Vinci excel at content decisioning, reducing customers’ reliance on promotional messaging, and enables marketers to craft personalized, 1:1 emails for their entire list without manual segmentation. This relieves tedious work, builds better customer-brand relationships, and ultimately results in higher ROI in one fell swoop.
Bloomingdale’s generates best-in-class batched emails. Using AI decisioning from Da Vinci, the brand can automatically determine which creative is shown to customers to reach short- and long-term goals. In this use case, each category in “The Best Sellers List” feed is personalized to the customer using AI. For further relevance, the team uses Send Time and Frequency Management to ensure that customers receive emails at the optimal time and cadence for them.
The creation and deployment of dynamically personalized batched emails is automated, meaning marketers no longer have to choose between time-consuming segmented emails or generic content. Da Vinci enables batched email programs to be more effective and efficient, ensuring that each customer receives the right message at the right time.
Personalize Every Send, Every Time
The most effective email marketing programs utilize personalization in both triggered and batched email strategies, rather than choosing one type over the other. It’s time to maximize your email’s full potential to deliver a highly personalized and dynamic experience to your customers with every single campaign.