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Before we can talk about pros and cons of using navigation bars in marketing automation, we must first clarify what they are. The nav bar is the area immediately after the preheader in an email. It usually contains multiple links to different areas of your site for navigational purposes, hence the name.

Pros

There are some obvious advantages to having these categories front and center in an email. Any time marketers can direct potential purchasers to their specific goals – to “kitchen goods,” for example, rather than the homepage in general – they put them that much closer to making a purchase, and lower bounce rates. Nav bars also mean that even specific emails which hold no appeal to a particular customer still have a chance of gaining click-throughs or even conversions, since they are reminded of other things offered by the same brand...

Digital marketing has long been cursed with attributing conversion to the last action a user took. For example, if a customer arrives at your site via organic search and then makes a purchase, most platforms (including Google Analytics) attributed this credit solely to SEO success. While this does tell you that the person ended up converting because of your SEO strategy, it doesn’t show you the complete picture.

Were you one of the many children who saved cereal box tops, hoping to mail them in for a “free” prize? Those free prizes never came free, though; you (or your parents) had to spend money on the cereal in the first place, then include $X shipping/handling…eventually, the costs added up to the point where you were essentially paying the original cost or possibly more than the value of the prize itself. But that’s not what you – or today’s modern consumer – saw. What grabbed your attention then, as now, was the concept of “free”.

"Hello Account #XYZ, thank you for clicking/calling/writing..."

Form emails and letters are a personal pet peeve for many people. The format is rote and clearly interchangeable among recipients. Even referencing a specific topic of interest would go a long way towards winning them over. But in the modern world how can a company possibly do this with so many clients and so little time? As paradoxical as it may seem, using automation to personalize services actually does make logical sense.