As a busy digital marketer, your role has changed a lot over the years. Gone are the days when engaging a customer was as simple as reaching them. Today, it’s about cutting through the noise – speaking to the customer with a cluttered inbox in the language they’re ready to hear, and keeping them hooked before, during, after and between purchases.

Email marketing is an enormous industry – valued at US$7.5-billion in 2020, per marketing research firm Statista – and it’s estimated that in 2022, more than 333 billion emails were sent and received every day. Yet, with mass scale comes the risk of losing connection with the customer, not to mention staying relevant and providing value in a rising sea of competition.

Jonathan L. Simon, director of marketing & communications at the Telfer School of Management and a professor in digital marketing at the University of Ottawa, has been working in email marketing since the early 2000s. He remembers the early days of trying to send emails over mobile (“The Blackberry Days,” he calls them fondly). He saw the transition of fully text emails to HTML, and single opt-in to double opt-in sign-ups.

Simon admits early email marketing was spam-centered. “There weren’t a lot of rules and no one really cared about the user, or how the user felt,” he says. “[Then] there was a huge shift toward providing valuable content in email... [getting] the user to want to get things.”

“What it’s forced people to do is really segment the user base properly – ask for permission,” Simon says. “Users will give you permission if you provide something they can’t live without. They’ll say, sure, have access to my data, have access to me. I’ll do what you want because it’s so valuable to me.”

Still, there are growing accounts of email fatigue. In December, the Washington Post reported on a woman who considered her inbox “abusive” after receiving 86 promotional emails in 25 minutes a few days before Black Friday. Another account describes customers “giving up on Gmail” entirely due to “an explosion of spam.”

That’s why, Simon says, focusing on value is so important. Providing value is more than just sending a timely message to spark a sale. The most successful emails aren’t just relevant to the customer, but also anticipate their needs, and offer them something they can’t get anywhere else.

Jamal Miller, senior director of product marketing at Intuit Mailchimp, reiterates that value and relevance are top concerns for customers today. Tackling this problem starts with narrowing in on the customer journey, Miller says. “What are those key points where your customers are stuck, indecisive, or when they need more information, or an incentive to get them over the hump with a transaction?”

Mailchimp alleviates some of these concerns for email marketers with data-fueled automation tools. The email marketing software offers a large library of templates – or “pre-built journeys” – for several common use cases, like engaging customers who’ve abandoned carts, re-capturing those who purchased once and need to be drawn back to shop again and reaching loyal customers with feedback surveys.

When added to a journey, customers enter a funnel based on their behaviours or interests; they then receive a series of targeted messages that guide them to a desired outcome.

Combining automation with personalized content is a great way to make your campaigns “feel organic and in the moment,” Miller says. Abandoned cart emails are a good example of this: “[Customers] can see the context of why you’re engaging with them, and what they were looking at when they last engaged with you.”

Data from brand research consultancy Brand Keys, as reported by the Washington Post, supports this claim, with one survey finding users were more likely to engage with personalized content, especially if it offered “good news” like a discount or refund.

Other automation tools like dynamic content help users create multiple versions of the same email, tailored to different contacts. The Content Optimizer takes it one step further, offering data-driven insights into which variations work best for each audience, and how content can be improved.

These conversations don’t need to be transactional, either. “Sometimes, it will be just making sure that your customer has everything they need to be successful with the product that they purchase from you, or the service that you offer. Sometimes, it will be getting feedback from them,” Miller says. “Yes, you want to drive revenue, but it’s also about building a relationship.”

Looking forward, Miller predicts email marketing’s consensual, first-party data model – in which a customer’s information is collected from them directly, rather than through a third-party – will remain well poised to fit into a more privacy-centered future.

“One of the great things about email is it’s permission-based, and it has been since the beginning,” he says. “As we think about the increasing costs of media for customer acquisition, more and more marketers will be looking at tools like email to drive loyalty and retention.”

Simon, who notes that he was one of Mailchimp’s first customers in 2009, adds that advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will help marketers take this existing first-party data a step further. “We used to market to people based on what they did before. With AI, we’re moving towards a future where we can predict behavior based on trends and what other people are doing.”

“We no longer need past behavior to predict future behavior,” Simon says. “Ultimately, it comes down to providing as much value as possible. I keep going back to that. I think that’s the only way we stay ahead.”

Advertising feature produced by Globe Content Studio with Mailchimp. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.