Evolution of behavioural email

I’ve been asked to write a piece for a magazine about the future of behavioural email and as any good historian knows, before you start writing about the future you need to understand the past. So I thought I’d write down a few lines about how behavioural email has evolved over the last 10 years (it really has been around that long). 

The first genuine example I can find of behavioural email (that’s email driven off behavioural information not simple transaction confirmation emails) was William Hill in 2001 with a registered and not deposited email targeting users that were warm (registered but had not deposited any money).

Within 6 months this evolved to include language variations, splits based on any errors people had experienced on site and had moved onto a deposit and not bet program. What this shows is how quickly, even in the early days, behavioural email was able to grow from one simple idea into double figures within a short period of time. 

Within 12 months, finance sites were starting to understand the benefits of this growth area and it was the AA who took this and developed it further. The AA was the first to really test the genuine value of behaviourally based emails by splitting cells and seeing if those not receiving the emails were still coming back. I was lucky enough to carry out this particular study myself and we were able to prove those receiving the emails were 78% more likely to return to the site and buy than those not receiving the emails.

It was around this time email started to move much more towards being a key retention tool and less about pure acquisition for a number of reasons. Chief amongst them was the issue of deliverability and how ineffective pure acquisition based email was becoming. The average user was getting savvier to spam and there was a clear need to improve the targeted nature of email. Along with a greater use of segmentation, behavioural email was the best way to achieve this.

So let’s jump forward to today, where despite most sectors having caught up with gambling and finance by introducing behavioural emails, it’s fair to say that it still has a long way to go before it’s a standard element of any email program. As evidence of this you only have to look at the recent e-consultancy email marketing census report stating only 12% of respondents use vendors for behavioural response marketing and only 31% for automated campaigns.

However the encouraging news is people know they need to start moving down this road. In the same study behavioural targeting based on web analytics proved to be the biggest area for growth in email marketing with 47% of people saying they plan to do it and 14% saying they already do it.

Ultimately, the future of email will be about sending less and making more – more revenue that is – from targeted emailing…but this is a subject for a completely different blog.

Now clearly, there is much more to the last nine years of behavioural email than I can fit into in a short blog, but hopefully that conveys a little about how this important area has grown and why it’s important for the future.

In the meantime, if you want help or advice to analyse your site and understand your customers please drop me an email at blog@redeye.com and please do follow my random musings on twitter.