Email marketing is a tricky business. You want to reach the greatest possible interest group, but you want to do that without creating email exhaust with your target customers. That can lead them to unsubscribe from your email distribution. You also want to avoid the costs of emailing those who are unlikely to buy.
That was the thinking that led hat retailer Lids to adopt Salesforce Einstein. Wendy Mudis said Lids wanted to get away from sending batch-and-blast communications to its full email list. Instead, it wanted to send more personalized communications to a more targeted list to get better program performance, according to the director of digital advertising at Lids.
Salesforce Einstein now allows Lids to do that. This solution employs artificial intelligence to automatically identify a list with the greatest potential to perform. That’s important, said Mudis, because Lids only has one or two people working on its email effort. It was cumbersome for them to pull lists, she said.
Prior to adopting Einstein, Lids did a test showing an email open rate of just 5.9 percent. Since adopting Einstein about a month ago, the company’s email open rate has grown to 27 percent.
Lids also experienced a 2.5x increase in average click-through rate, Salesforce said. With Einstein, the Lids marketing team also learned there were more loyal customers that were constantly engaging with emails than the previous data analysis showed. The team can now see which of its subscribers are the least engaged, helping it to take more proactive action across its customer base.
“Not only is Lids reaching its various email targets for the year, the insights gathered will help the team to drive more personalized content to subscribers, including identifying promotional offers to send and building a target win-back segment journey,” added Salesforce.
Lids, which uses Einstein within its Salesforce Marketing Cloud, is also now considering adopting the Social Studio platform, said Mudis. That’s the Salesforce solution for social media listening, engaging, and publishing. Einstein could also tie into that by optimizing what images, keywords, and messages are most likely to resonate in different scenarios, she said.
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