Since Apple and others have started caching images this means some of the techniques that the likes of Movable Ink, NiftyImages, Zembula, Campaign Genius and Reignite (for disclosure that’s my platform) don't work in the same way as before.

Does this mean this part of the industry is dead?

Spoiler alert: No. But I think this also tells us something about problem solving: the email industry is wise to remind itself of.

What is ‘Real-time Email Personalisation’?

To give those who haven’t come across these types of tools a bit of background: these solutions put a special image tag in your email. When the customer opens the email they calculate from a whole host of live data sources what to show and generate the image in real-time. Recipients wouldn’t see anything different to the normal emails as these services are super fast and render the images in fractions of a second.

That gave marketers all sorts of use cases that were not possible before with content that otherwise couldn’t be anymore live than the time it was sent. This could include:

• Countdown timers to the end of the promotion
• Weather targeted content based upon where the customer is right now
• Promote different app stores based upon the device they opened on
• Product recommendations that take into account live inventory and pricing

Some of those options haven’t been available for a while as the likes of Gmail blocked device and IP address information that location, weather, and device was reliant upon so using first party data was the only option here.

But then came along Apple who started pre-fetching images before the customer opened the email killing the timeliness aspect. (Although in reality the majority of these images are still fetched close to the actual open time, its those that don’t open who tend to have images fetched late at night).

It’s never been about ‘real-time’

So you heard all the doom merchants come out and say it's the end of this niche in the email marketing space.

But they are wrong. Although this is called 'real-time email personalisation' it was never really about 'real-time'. Sure, the real-time aspect was a ‘wow’ moment when you could show a marketer an email being updated after it had been sent.

But the use cases tended to be gimmicks that didn’t deliver any real value. A countdown timer or a weather forecast is at best a marginal activity - the email world can live without them.

Why these companies still exist, and many thrive is they solve much bigger problems marketers have:

• Streamline production saving hundreds of hours through making it easy to automate the production of content from various data sources, allowing them to send more campaigns and/or save on build costs
  
  
• Simplify integration for advanced personalisation by easily pulling the personalised content into any ESP without waiting for tech or ESP resources enabling higher performance of campaigns - potentially even doubling CTR and conversions

What the email industry should learn from this

Whatever we should call these platforms it’s clear they have become established because they solve real and significant problems. No one buys anything just for bells and whistles.

And that I think is a key learning the industry should take away as we enter an era where every day I see some new piece of functionality or tool that promises to do amazing things with AI.

In reality most of these are like the early part of the real-time email industry - lots of wow moments but boil it down and do they solve a real problem? Is much of it AI for the sake of using AI?

A lot of the ESPs should stop their AI development because their customers aren’t actually asking for most of it and get on and fixing the gaping holes in their platforms that make it slower to use, difficult to run effective personalisation or take most of the week to pull the numbers for internal reporting.

As an example of one I saw a while ago instead of “AI automatically builds your journeys” when let's be honest the components take a few minutes to put together, how about use AI to solve that nightmare of testing & proofing all the different paths in a journey someone could take to make sure there are no gaps in your rules and monitors the ongoing numbers to ensure they are working correctly in the future?

We don’t have to go too far back to see capabilities launched with much fanfare that disappeared without a trace because they didn’t solve a problem. RSS from email. Or social share buttons inside your campaign. Or that tool that allowed you to turn an image into a HTML table mosaic if images were blocked (OK, maybe we do go far back on some of these - 2007 only seems like a couple of years ago!).

Yet those of you who remember the pain of email editing back then would all say it was an obvious problem that needed solving. After a few good efforts a range of platforms like Beefree and Stripo came along and knocked that out of the park. Now it would be far quicker to say which ESPs haven’t embedded one of these tools into their UI than those that have.

The obvious problems are the best ones to solve.

The Future

So is real-time email dead? No, but it's about time it was called something else.

But what this really highlights is how the industry needs to stop the AI arms race for the sake of it and step back and think about what marketers really need.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash