What if I told you that you could increase net response rates for your email marketing program by over 100%? You can and it’s easier than you think.

As email marketing programs continue to mature, customers come to expect more offers based on past purchases and interests. Thus, email marketers have made great advances in the sophistication and targeting of their campaigns. But as their programs become increasingly personalized, new challenges arise. For example, customers receive more messages from more parts of the marketer’s organization and often times those targeted messages are sent in bulk. As a result, brands get diluted, messages get filtered or go unread, and the full benefits of message targeting go unrealized.

Real-Time Messaging (RTM) helps marketers overcome these marketing challenges and allows them to break through the clutter. Using RTM, marketers can automatically trigger email messages to their customers when they complete a specific action. These actions may include registration, order and service confirmation, shipment notifications, billing and payment notices, cancellations, returns, refunds, rebates and bonuses, profile update notifications, alert messages, customer services messages and information request responses. All of these are vital opportunities to interact with customers.

RTM also enables marketers to establish one-on-one relationships with their customers, by allowing an immediate conversation with customers based on their actions. Marketers can include up-sell and cross-sell offers in transactional messages to take advantage of the automated communications that are already occurring. When marketers combine email platforms and RTM they can centralize customer communications so that offers and transactional messages originate from the same place. When you add in reporting features (including delivery, bounce-back, open, click-through, pass-along and conversion rates), marketers can see how campaigns perform, and determine the best recency, frequency and message formats for future messages. Lastly, by monitoring the sent messages to see which reach customer inboxes, not bulk folders or spam filters, the marketer’s IT department is free to concentrate on its core business, and not on sending out thousands of emails a day.

Recently, Epsilon took RTM a step further by partnering with AOL’s Platform-A ad-serving platform. Combining our capabilities, we were able to send advertisers’ messages in real time when AOL email users log in – delivering emails to the top of the email inbox for greater visibility. In this case, the activity trigger was the user log-in and the targeting integrated demographics, geography, behavior, roster/list match and life stage factors.

The benefits are numerous and include improved deliverability, centralized customer email communications for better management and execution, detailed reporting, and increased open and other response rates. When we tested the effectiveness of RTM, a Platform-A advertiser sent a traditional batch mail to select AOL users and a Partner Email utilizing the RTM mechanism to another group of users. The results proved that RTM truly does work. Open rates increased by 132% with RTM, click rates improved by 182% and the net response/conversion rate increased by 129%. While real time messaging campaigns deliver half as much email, they generate more orders than batch campaigns.

It’s clear that RTM works but marketers may wonder how difficult it is to implement. The process for setting up RTM messages is straight-forward. For example, message templates are created in the email platform and XML posts trigger the email specifying which message template to use for each triggered event. Marketers can incorporate personalization and dynamic content to further customize the messages. Then the RTM platform accepts the request, processes the specifications and deploys the messages — all while applying the requested tracking and providing delivery and response reporting. Often, reports can be viewed in the email platform or exported to an internal database. For Epsilon’s clients, the email platform automatically handles bounces and other inbound email replies.

As the online economy grows, an increasing number of transactional messages are being sent, creating new marketing opportunities for businesses that leverage this technology. Transactional messages have become a vital part of the consumer dialog online. They have the highest open rates of any type of message.

Marketers may want to consider bolstering their transactional sending infrastructure, or partnering with a marketing services provider who can provide this transactional messaging capability. They can also include revenue generating mechanisms such as ads and offers in these messages, and centralize the ownership of the enterprise’s transactional messaging efforts. Such tactics are essential to driving ancillary email revenues and providing additional insight into understanding and optimizing customer engagement.

It’s becoming clear that RTM offers a significant opportunity to create a revenue lift by leveraging an under-utilized communication channel with consumers. The immediacy of the RTM message as well as the higher response rates attributed to transactional messaging can combine to provide marketers with a “sweet spot” revenue opportunity. For the B2B marketer, RTM’s immediacy is even more valuable as transactions tend to be of greater value as the quality of dialog with the B2B buyer can be even more elusive. In the current economic climate, everyone is trying to get the most bang for their buck and RTM can give marketers that edge.

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