Email marketing remains a powerful tool for brands as they aim to deliver seamless, personalized experiences and value-driven customer journeys. Despite years and years of shiny emerging new channels, email still sits at the top of the channel food chain for its ability to track responses, drive conversions, and promote customer loyalty and advocacy. However, while traditional stand-alone email service providers (ESPs) have long dominated this space, the market is increasingly shifting toward comprehensive, AI-powered, end-to-end solutions with digital message delivery capabilities. As stated by Gartner® in their latest Market Guide for Email Marketing, “Stand-alone email marketing service providers are a vanishing breed in both the enterprise and midmarket spaces, as vendors expand to include capabilities typical of multi-channel marketing hubs (MMHs) and customer data platforms (CDPs).”
This transformation reflects the growing need for marketers to deliver relevant, dynamic content at the right time in the right channel – seamlessly across all touchpoints. In contrast, stand-alone ESPs limit marketers to a narrow, email-only focus, which restricts their ability to provide the kind of cohesive experiences that consumers now expect.
Real-time decisioning drives hyper-personalization
The foundation of dynamic personalization mentioned above is the ability to analyze and act on real-time customer data. The window of opportunity to connect with customers and prospects at the exact moment when they are ready is small. Consumers move rapidly through channels and devices, especially digital channels and are often on simultaneous digital journeys.
By combining AI-powered decisioning with real-time interaction data, brands can automatically adapt communications in real time based on customer behaviors, preferences, and engagement history across all channels. End-to-end solutions can facilitate that, unlike stand-alone point solutions.
Within the complexity of a brands’ individual Martech ecosystem, any tool that is not interoperable with the adjacent tools creates a data silo, eroding the accuracy of customer profiles and interaction history and disrupting the customer journey. Instead, platforms must automatically adjust to the next interaction and guide customers seamlessly to the next point whether the customer abandons their cart, opens an email, or clicks on an ad.
Drip campaigns and scheduled emails fall short in supporting complex, multi-channel, multi-step journeys. They struggle to manage customer interactions across different channels, limiting their ability to nurture relationships effectively. In this scenario, the disconnected messaging ends up being just more noise in the consumer’s over-saturated inboxes.
Better business outcomes with AI-powered message deliver
Brands can avoid email irrelevance with AI-enabled message delivery, which improves the efficacy of the channel by an order of magnitude. For example, HSBC, a global banking institution with over 40 million customers, has seen an increase in the effectiveness of their email channel by adding centralized, AI-powered decisioning. The bank wanted to shift from reactive to proactive customer interactions by providing personalized, relevant recommendations. However, they faced challenges with disconnected channels and conflicting global and local priorities. Using Pega Customer Decision Hub™ with its AI-powered decisioning, HSBC implemented a real-time, centralized decision engine to unify their inbound and outbound channels. They increased their click-through rate by 3.5X and realized a 200% boost in email open rates.
Pega Customer Decision Hub acts as a single, centralized AI-powered brain that connects experiences across inbound, outbound, owned, and paid channels. And within our newest release, Infinity 24.2, we’ve added integrated email message delivery capabilities with Pega Message Stream. This new offering ensures that email provisioning is simple and straightforward, and that our clients can always deliver email messages “in the moment.” This means that users can:
- Deliver emails whenever a next-best-action message is triggered, using our always-on service.
- Monitor the performance of those email pushes/treatments.
- Control cost and complexity by eliminating hand-offs, coordination, and contracting with third-party ESPs.
- Ensure compliance by managing the email process inside of the Business-As-Usual process, using Pega workflows.
- Execute an end-to-end email campaign completely from within Pega Customer Decision Hub.
As the marketing landscape continues to evolve and consumers demand personalized, seamless interactions across all digital touchpoints, this level of comprehensive functionality will be required to stay competitive. While stand-alone ESPs have been instrumental in the growth of email marketing, their single channel limitations are becoming increasingly apparent; marketers need a more omni-channel, intelligent approach.
End-to-end solutions with AI-powered decisioning offer a way forward. They provide the dynamic cross-channel personalization, data integration, advanced automation, and privacy compliance that stand-alone ESPs simply cannot match.