I have to admit, as a marketer I love demand generation tools like PPC, email, affiliate, retargeting, etc. I’ve realized great lift from them in the past, and have worked with many fantastic brands that have enjoyed that same success.

But as hard as I try, I’m seeing the yield on these tools go down just when ecommerce needs them to work better. I see demand generation decelerating rather than accelerating. In my next few posts I want to talk about accelerating the success of your demand generation tools versus trading them out.

Let’s start with email. If you can’t get to the website visitor “in the moment,” then take all of your learnings to serve relevant email content as the consumer is opening the email message. I’ve  seen up to a 30% increase in click through rate when this is accomplished. Also keep in mind that according to our new Ecommerce Quarterly (EQ2 2013) report, website visits and conversion rates from email have decreased year over year.

Your first reaction might be to walk down to your demand generation folks and tell them to send more emails with a different message. After all, the email had to just not have been the best message, right?

Only half of that theory is correct. What if I told you that you could send a different message, but actually email less while making even more money? That’s the path to follow with open-time personalization of your email campaigns, a brand new personalization tactic that dynamically changes the content of an email based on context, behavior, and other factors known about each recipient at the time he or she opens the message.

Here’s an example: You send an email on Friday announcing an end of the week sale to your best customers. What happens when one of those customers opens the email on his iPhone inside your store on Monday? The sale is over, and you didn’t take advantage of knowing that he’s standing inside your store. Your email was a waste.

The growth of your company will depend on how you can accelerate the process of changing how you email. Stop accepting the same answers from your teams or your email service providers about their ability (or lack thereof) to deliver the right content at the right time to every person on your email list.

I’d love for you to reach out to me so I can tell you how to make this happen. Feel free to email me (jhealy [at] monetate.com) so we can set up a time to chat.