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Cartier and Burberry lead the email marketing stakes

The majority of luxury brands are failing to recognise the potential for effective email marketing, a new study claims.

According to research carried out by customer engagement specialist ContactLab in conjunction with Exane BNP Paribas, many brands are overlooking the need to customise content and integrate email with e-commerce functions.

For the study, called ‘The Dawn of Luxury CRM: Email do’s and don’ts’, ContactLab produced an ‘Email Competitive Map’ showing which areas of email marketing luxury brands do well.

Cartier and Burberry scored the highest, while overall there was good performance on email localisation (key languages) and structure (composition, visualisation).

However, the research showed that there is still little integration of emails with e-commerce and cross-channel services, and the contact plan being quite unbalanced (too commercial) and insufficiently segmented.

Marco Pozzi, author of the research, said that emails remain an integral part of any marketing strategy and should be carefully designed and distributed in order to cater to the needs of the consumer.

Digital does not only include email marketing but this is one aspect of the whole ecosystem and must be considered, since the impact of digital engagement can translate into a 40% increase in revenue for fashion and luxury brands, he added.

“Brands need to be more strategic in their use of email marketing and recognise that consumers are more demanding than ever,” he said. “If content does not cater to their needs, their impression of a brand will be lowered and will eventually unsubscribe. Email marketing offers the opportunities for brands to receive large amount of traffic through portable devices like smartphones and tablets.”

The report shows that Cartier leads the way in cross-channel services, Cartier and Ferragamo tie for the lead in actual Segmentation of contact flow, and Hermès with the most balanced contact flow mix (branding / commercial / store-focused).

It said that overall there was very poor exploitation in email marketing apart from a ‘Link to Store Locator’ option. Only Cartier included a ‘Book an Appointment’ tab and only Burberry included ‘Collect in Store’.

“The fact is that luxury brands have a lot more work to do in engaging their customer through email. Achieving customer segmentation will always be a challenge but there remains a lot of room for luxury brands to differentiate in their emails and create more personalised campaigns,” said Pozzi.

“Simply sending generic content and treating all customers as one does not build a relationship with customers. Customer shopping habits have changed and they expect an integration of different channels as part of the Omni channel experience. ”

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