Despite the ever-growing number of communication channels at our disposal, one remains the dominant platform for e-commerce businesses—email. From order confirmation, shipment tracking, and general business communication, your customer’s inbox is where most, if not all, of your customer communication occurs.
Email contains valuable and real-time data that, if harnessed, can provide deep customer insights that help e-commerce businesses enhance their customer’s purchasing experience. The best way to tap into this data is with high-quality inbox parsers.
In this article, you’ll learn how you can use email parsing software to extract context-rich insight that will help you build better, stickier customer experiences. A more engaging CX will help you improve customer retention and loyalty, increase engagement and conversion, and accelerate your gross merchandise value (GMV) growth rate.
The good news is that email inboxes are treasure troves of information. A customer’s email contains important data and insight into their buying behavior. This data is more context-rich, real-time, and direct than data extracted from web analytics and third-party research. Insights from such sources are passive and don’t necessarily reflect the intent of your customers. Data found in analyst reports is, at best, already a few months old and tends to reflect broader themes in the marketplace.
A customer’s inbox contains highly valuable data such as shipping and order details, tracking numbers, email headers, and contact information. Tapping into this information can help your business build more engaging purchasing experiences that will help drive repurchases and keep acquisition costs low.
The bad news is that email data is unstructured, meaning it is very difficult to extract value from. And it can be especially challenging to stand up the custom integrations you need to flow this data into your product, your analytics stack, and elsewhere. To be able to handle these challenges, you need email parsing software.
An email or inbox parser is software that can extract unstructured email data and turn it into categorized and structured data. You can then use parsed email data to enhance your end-to-end customer experience.
Utilizing parsed email data allows you to provide a more engaging experience throughout the purchasing flywheel. It’s useful in every stage of your customer journey, starting from pre-purchase all the way to your customer’s support experiences.
By providing highly engaging experiences, e-commerce platforms are well-positioned to maximize customer retention, brand loyalty, engagement, and conversion. These companies can harness customer data to implement business processes that accelerate GMV growth rate while keeping customer acquisition costs low.
To integrate communications data into your flywheel, you need access to your customers’ inboxes. And the best way to secure customer buy-in is by building features that make their lives much easier. Before implementing inbox parsing technology, consider the benefits you can offer to your customers:
For a flywheel to function correctly, it requires movement. In the case of your purchasing flywheel, this means smooth movement throughout all stages, from acquisition to retention and engagement. To ensure this, you need to identify any friction throughout the journey and address it. Email data offers insight into these pain points and helps you take the best courses of action.
Here are some indicators of friction in your customer journey to look out for and how email data can help reduce them:
Inbox parsers are the best solution for extracting customer email data. However, finding the right parsing tool provider can be tricky since parsing quality can vary significantly from one platform to another.
Building your parsers in-house is a costly endeavor. And to get the most out of your in-house built inbox parser, you’ll need to train them with high volumes of real, representative email data. You’ll need to train your parsers using the following processes:
Additionally, customer purchase data quickly becomes outdated, which means it requires constant updating. As your data set grows, you’ll need to handle monitoring, quality assurance, and updating existing algorithms within your software.
The Nylas Neural API offers inbox parsing solutions that allow you to build a data-driven e-commerce powerhouse. Our parsers rely on economies of scale to process massive quantities of representative data and ensure a high level of precision without the exorbitant costs of building your own solution.
Leveraging communications data from emails can empower you to create a frictionless customer journey to maximize repurchases, retention, and gross merchandise value. For a more in-depth look, read our full ebook, Improving the End-to-End Purchase Experience to Maximize Gross Merchandise Value.
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