One of the biggest challenges of email is getting readers’ attention. Drowning in a daily sea of emails, consumers really just want to come up for air, deleting as many messages as possible on their way up.

RedEye is trying to change that – particularly for marketers trying to get their message delivered, opened and clicked on. RedEye is an email marketing provider that collects data on real-world, individual consumer behavior, then feeds that data into an integrated database with the ultimate goal of delivering what the company calls behavioral email. The highly focused data, when applied to targeted, automatic behavioral email campaigns, can achieve a 20 percent conversion rate on average.

Matthew Kelleher

In the below podcast, I talk with Matthew Kelleher, Chief Commercial Director for RedEye, about some of the ways marketers can deliver more targeted, personalized, behavioral based emails and thus increase conversion rates on their websites.

To help paint the picture, Kelleher says that unpersonalized, standard email sent out to a group of customers achieves an open rate of about 15 to 25 percent, and click-through rates (CTR) of about three to five percent, based on research his firm has done in the UK. When using personalization, Matthew says you should be getting the open rate up to 40 to 50 percent and the CTR up to about eight to 10 percent. And the good news is that it’s not hard to make your emails personalized, if they aren’t already. Personalization can be something as small as including a person’s name in an email, but it can be far more advanced.

For instance, if a customer is a frequent flyer of a particular airline, and recently took a flight with said airline, they might receive an email saying, “Thank you for flying with us last week.” But it can go far beyond that. What if it said, “You’ve taken ten trips with us this year, here’s a reward,” or, “We saw you went here last month, there the month before…have you thought about taking a trip here?” In other words, the personalization efforts can transition into behavioral efforts, where the airline starts to make suggestions to its customers based on past behavior. That’s the kind of thing RedEye helps deliver.

“This is about achieving relevance and having a conversation,” said Kelleher. A fact I so readily agreed with (as you’ll hear if you listen below!)

Kelleher also addresses the resources challenge that many of you have (or perhaps just think you have) on your marketing departments. He cites research from Forrester which stated six things that marketing departments need to do to deliver relevant, successful email in the digital age:

1. Technology
2. Database
3. Follow your own business rules
4. Content
5. Testing/optimization system
6. People – analysts to study data

Today, lots of marketing teams have conversion specialists, said Kelleher, which is a great way to go from a resource perspective.

Take a listen to the below podcast and get tips on how to make sure your emails are doing what they’re supposed to do and that you’re not wasting your time. (Because really, who has time to waste time these days?)