What making sense of your unstructured email data will do for your client outreach

“Data visualisation, all by itself, can lead to some fascinating discoveries. Any tool that can pull together data from various sources in visually enlightening ways puts a business ahead of others immediately.*”

The state of email usage today

Back in 2010 marketing experts were predicting the decline of email marketing, touting dropping email engagement rates and the rise of chat systems and social channels as the precursor of a big shift in sales outreach strategies. However, here we are in 2019 and according to the Direct Marketing Association, ROI of email marketing has never been so high at 31.28%, up two percentage points from the previous year and on a continuing upward trend. Indeed, this Regalix Research report entitled “The State of B2B Content Marketing” details that 87% of marketers used email marketing to generate new leads. Clearly, email outreach still holds the most value where client engagement and lead generation are concerned. However, there is no denying that customer behaviour and expectation has evolved since 2010. This Selligent & StrongView report confirms what we already know about the sales and marketing environment today: successful sales outreach and account management relies on accurate personalisation of email content and segmenting your outreach according to industry, company and stage in the sales cycle. In other words, in order to generate and convert sales leads in the current environment, sales professionals need to be delivering the right content, to the right person, at the right time.

Get ahead in an increasingly competitive sales environment

The average sales professional can generate 1,000s of data points from their email activities per day. However, legacy CRM methodologies will only capture the manually inputted data, meaning that all of the most detailed, highly nuanced interaction data remains unstructured, out of reach and valueless. By structuring your unstructured data you convert something that is currently out of reach and valueless, into something that is highly valuable and actionable. Additionally, despite the fact that mobile devices account for over 41% of email opens and you might therefore assume that emails are becoming more accessible and more frequently engaged with, the average buy-side asset manager, for example, opens less than 20% of the emails they receive. At Relata, we see this challenge as a huge opportunity and are driven to deliver sales enabling, revenue-generating insights from all the unstructured data generated by your client communication channels. Synapse empowers sales professionals with the data they need to deliver personalised content to the right client at the right time and through the most convenient communication channel.

Moving forward with AI

This Forbes Insight report (surveying 387 senior executives in June 2018) states that 78% of executives see AI driving a high degree of performance improvement across their overall business. The report goes on to say that AI will have most benefits in eliminating repetitive processes (51%); streamlining the decision making process by providing relevant information (33%) and delivering new insights (31%). On this last point, one of the executives was quoted saying: “data visualisation, all by itself, can lead to some fascinating discoveries. Any tool that can pull together data from various sources in visually enlightening ways puts a business ahead of others immediately.” Another compelling study commissioned by Forrester looked into the risks that arise from “knowledge workers” (employees who regularly perform ‘nonroutine’ problem-solving tasks as a fundamental part of their job) relying on “incomplete or less-than-relevant information” which can result in them making suboptimal business decisions, or no decisions at all.

Conclusion

These sentiments are behind Relata's core value that superior data results in superior business decisions. That’s why our clients benefit not only from a sales enabling, client insights dashboard, but also from direct access to their Relata data lake. Relata’s data APIs allow our clients to access, organise and draw reports from all their client interaction data. With Relata, there is no longer any need to rely on subjective, incomplete and inaccurate data to guide important business decisions.