Unless you’re living off the grid, you’ve likely experienced programmatic advertising in your daily life. Programmatic is a fast-growing marketing channel that’s only going to get bigger this year, especially in the B2B world. In fact, according to several recent surveys, the vast majority of B2B marketers are not only currently buying or selling advertising programmatically, but they also plan to increase spend in this area in 2018.

What’s also on the rise in 2018 is the combined use of programmatic advertising with email campaigns to provide a one-two punch when targeting B2B prospects. With these campaigns, the ad and email content is driven by the prospect’s online behavior. Here are a few examples:

• Webpage visits: Programmatic technology can be used to create personalized email content to your prospects based on the pages they visit – or products they’ve viewed – on your website. For example, if a prospect visits one or more of the product pages on your website, an email can be automatically generated that focuses on those specific products.

• Engaged content: Relevant emails can also be sent to your prospects depending on the content they’ve engaged with. This might include videos viewed, webinars registered, e-books downloaded, newsletter subscriptions, etc.

• Re-targeting following email engagement: When your email campaign recipients open your email messages or, even better, click on any of the links, they’re demonstrating some level of interest. Responding to their engagement with a retargeted ad allows you to get in front of them again to remind them of that interest. Typically, we recommend serving each prospect with three to five ads over time.

• Abandoned cart: Similar to advertising, if your shoppers select some items and add them to their purchase carts, but fail for whatever reason to complete their transactions, an email can be generated, reminding them of their items, and perhaps an additional incentive (e.g. a coupon or discount) can also be offered to encourage them to complete their purchase.

Due to the relevant content that your prospects should recognize, response rates for programmatic emails are much higher than standard B2B emails. Programmatic technology vendor Criteo claims that these personalized emails increase open rates as much as four times and click-throughs by up to five times that of standard B2B emails.

Email is ideal for programmatic campaigns for a number of reasons:

• Email scales across multiple devices: People typically access email on their mobile device, iPad or laptop -- anywhere and on the go.

• Email is safe: Email offers a secure, login-required environment in which users provide their credentials, making fraud difficult. As a result, programmatic emails deliver authentic clicks from real people.

• Email provides data: As consumers and professionals use email for everything from subscribing to newsletters to joining rewards programs, the inherent data can often uncover the prospect’s interests, behaviors, and demographics. Marketers can track individuals with engagement, purchases or signups, and leverage this data to optimize future email campaigns.

• Email gathers more attention by viewers, especially compared to online banner ads. After all, by providing their email address, your prospects are committing to receiving your offers or communications, and are more open to your messages.

While B2B marketers continue to make progress in leveraging programmatic technologies, growing pains remain. Challenges abound when it comes to targeting the right audiences, generating metrics and applying measurement, and understanding best practices.

This is where our team at OMI can help. Combining quality prospect contact data with the latest email automation tools creates a powerful approach to making emails more relevant for recipients, easier to manage for our clients, and helps in delivering them more new customers and incremental revenue. Ask us how we can help you take advantage of programmatic technologies to improve your email campaign results.

Have you used programmatic technologies to bolster your email campaigns recently? If so, tell us about it!