One of the most challenging tasks that marketers face is connecting with current and potential customers. While email is frequently viewed as the most productive means of communicating with them, the tricky part is deciding what to say.
Subscribers and customers have grown to expect – and demand – customized emails that are relevant to them. With the rivalry for the Inbox at an all-time high, you’ll have to do everything you can to stay on top. That’s where the importance of email personalization becomes clearer.
But what is email personalization, and why is it so necessary? We’ll address both of these topics in this article to help you create relevant, tailored emails that please your core audience.
What Exactly Is Email Personalization, and Why Is It Essential?
Everything you see on Facebook, including recommendations for pages you’ve never even ‘liked,’ Instagram advertisements, and LinkedIn articles, is customized for you and determined by multiple factors.
Instagram offers you ads based on your Instagram and Facebook behaviors, as well as your general online involvement – people you follow, websites you browse, and subjects you’re interested in. Essentially, Instagram creates a profile of you, learning what kind of material you enjoy and then serves it to you.
Instagram advertisements are a perfect illustration of how personalization has reached its peak in the contemporary digital realm. Just as Instagram carefully tailors its content according to your preferences, these advertisements utilize a wealth of information about you. They examine your interactions on Instagram and Facebook, along with your general online activities, to craft a delightful and distinct encounter just for you. This approach to data utilization shares resemblances with personalized email marketing and underscores the growing importance of tailored content in the ever-evolving marketing industry.
At its most basic level, customization includes analyzing your consumers, understanding their patterns, and using this information to deliver tailored content that you know would pique their interest.
In email marketing, personalization refers to the process of adapting your messages to a specific group of clients and attracting them with customized material. That could be anything from a subject line with the user’s name to a promo code on a specific group of things they’ve previously purchased or a recommendation to check out a retail outlet near their place.
In 2019, 60% of B2B companies said they aim to invest in personalization by 2022, and 77% of marketers consider customization a critical component of a successful marketing strategy. Despite that, a solid amount of businesses crash and burn when it comes to email customization.
Why?
Companies have no idea how to gather the necessary information to personalize their emails. Or, if they do, they have no understanding of how to put the information to good use.
If you don’t have the required knowledge, relevant data, and a suitable email personalization approach, personalizing emails will produce disappointing email marketing outcomes.
Although personalized content does not guarantee good performance, it does increase the likelihood of converting and boosts open and click rates.
What Can You Personalize in your emails?
Nearly every aspect of your email can be tailored using professional email marketing solutions – like some of the most popular email services – that allow you to implement strategies that vary from simple to complicated.
It’s reasonable to start with the basics and work your way up to more advanced strategies as time goes on. The objective is to leverage personalization to provide value to your consumers’ experiences in significant and small ways.
Subject Lines: To stick out, the subject line has bolder, stronger lettering on most devices. Because of its visibility in the Inbox, your subject line is bound to have a significant impact on open rates. Campaign Monitor’s research suggests that putting the recipient’s first name in the subject line can raise open rates by 26%.
There are a few general principles you can apply to make people more aware of subject lines. Though techniques differ, incorporating the following elements into your emails will significantly boost the results you get from your online marketing campaigns.
- Keep it short: Subject lines of 50 characters or less are expected to have a 12% higher open rate and a 75% higher CTR than subject lines of more than 50 characters.
- Offer something of worth: The most effective subject line carry the promise of value. That means that your subject line must persuade the reader that the email contains data that will benefit them.
- Catch their attention: Subject lines must be intriguing and original. Avoid power words and repeated terms and clichés. Aim to deliver your audience a bait that sparks their curiosity and encourages them to click the email to learn more.
“From” Name: When your message lands in your subscribers’ mailbox, one of the first things they notice is the “From” name. This section features larger text and bolder font on various desktops and smartphones to help consumers identify who the email is from before they read it.
Given its visibility, it’s no surprise Campaign Monitor reported that 68% of Americans say the “from” name influences their decision to open an email.
To connect with your clients and prospects and get more of them to view your messages, you can tailor the “From” part of your emails so that different recipients see different names. A popular approach is delivering promotional activities from the specific salesperson or account manager in charge of the client.
Sending business emails from a real person gives your company a personal touch, which you can use to boost the efficacy of your email marketing campaigns.
Crafting personalized email messages with a human voice establishes rapport and makes customers feel valued, anchoring the efficacy of email campaigns. Though automated emails have their place, inserting personalized touches and sending one-to-one messages from real employees reminds subscribers they’re interacting with human beings behind the brand.
Weaving personalized details into email body copy forges connections that motivate engagement better than generalized mass messages ever could. Prioritizing personalized outreach within email strategy strengthens relationships and multiplies return on marketing investment more than broadcasting impersonal content to the masses.
Source: Sendinblue
Now, let’s look at a few tips to enhance your email personalization results.
6 powerful email personalization tips
1. Quality Over Quantity Content
In two aspects, quality over quantity is imperative. It is more important to have a high-quality subscriber list than a large one. It is more important to focus on the quality of the email content rather than the amount.
To put it in numbers – it’s more beneficial to have 100 high-quality subscribers who click 50 times each month for 5,000 valuable visits than 5,000 poor-quality subscribers who click once a month for 5,000 non-worthy visits. In this case, high-quality clicks result in increased conversions.
Ensure the best email quality by sending targeted messages to appropriate subcategories of your email subscriber list. Companies can reduce the number of emails they send by segmenting and targeting specific consumers and, as a result, improve the quality of their communications.
Make sure to limit the number of sections or topics your receivers are exposed to at any given time. You don’t want to bombard your prospects with too many emails, and you don’t want to overload yourself with too many elements to keep track of.
To avoid flooding your receivers’ inboxes with dozens of emails, test which emails they respond best to.
2. Make Use of Dynamic Content
In relation to the previous step, dynamic content helps you deepen personalization. You can tailor particular aspects of your campaign, such as the message, imagery, and/or CTA, relying on the data provided by prospects/clients.
This dynamic content is generated and changed based on variables. A variable is a piece of content that changes depending on the data you have about the receiver. First, you add a variable. Then, you collect information from users that is relevant to this variable and adjust it accordingly.
Pictures, GIFs, drawings, and graphics are all significant visual aspects of any email marketing strategy because they strengthen the email copy. Adding customized visuals that your core demographic can relate to can give your campaign a more personal touch and raise your click-through rate by up to 29%.
According to Neil Patel, CTA is the turning point between conversions and bounces. When compared to a generic CTA, personalized CTAs convert almost 200% higher.
Companies that use dynamic email content deliver a more tailored experience to their users. Nowadays, in exchange for a customized online encounter and product suggestions, many customers are willing to share personal data with marketers. This strategy could help your company beat the competition, develop long-term relationships with your audience, save time, and improve income.
3. Use Hyper-Personalization
With a population in the billions, It makes no sense for companies to market to all of these free-thinking humans with an all-purpose approach.
Hyper-personalization is rapidly becoming the norm for converting leads to customers and customers to word-of-mouth advocates. It is a significant advancement over the basic personalization techniques of yesteryear – it takes your brand even closer to every lead or customer.
The team at classic gaming platform Solitaired , would send out an email encouraging users to play their solitaire game of the day. When they started including personal gaming stats and where the user stood on the leaderboard, they saw click-through rates increase over 36% as a result of the email’s relevancy.
To effectively personalize, reduce the formality of your email message. Email copy should be welcoming and approachable, regardless of industry. Whenever possible, avoid jargon. Use humor – it’s a great way to lay the first stone in any situation, including emails.
Personalization in emails should feel natural. If it comes across as stretched, your audience will notice. The main objective is to make it easier for you to interact with your followers on a more personal level. It will also make creating emails faster and easier – but use it only when suitable.
4. Focus On Behavior
Behavioral email marketing sends tailored, scheduled, and ultra-relevant emails based on customer service data. You can monitor user behavior across all channels, including your website, email marketing, social network accounts, etc. When someone does or does not take action, an email is sent to the person responsible for that specific activity.
Transactional emails induced by a user’s behavior have an open rate of up to 8 times higher than promotional emails. For example, a SaleCycle infographic shows that cart abandonment emails sent precisely an hour after visitor leaves without making a purchase have a conversion rate of 6.33%. That’s twice as much as those sent within an hour (3.14%), and those sent 2-4 hours later (3.2%).
Source: SaleCycle
Also, 81% of surveyees claimed that receiving emails based on their previous shopping activity would encourage them to make additional orders. Start with yourself and what you would expect if you were on the other end of the channel.
Did you register? You’ll get an email stating that you’ve been accepted. Did you buy something? You’ll get a notification when you’ve made a purchase. Have you ever put anything in your cart and then forgotten about it? You’ll receive a cart abandonment reminder. These are all the types of emails that consumers expect, click, and read the most.
Behavioral email campaigns help you deliver a compelling message to the right person at the perfect time, which is what marketing is all about.
5. Watch for the Creep Factor
Personalizing your emails is a great technique, but there’s a lot of people who’ve had emails arrive in their Inbox shortly after they’ve viewed an item. Subject lines like “We saw you reading…” or “We detected you clicked on ____” are also inappropriate. This level of customization makes you feel as if your privacy is being violated.
Leave time for someone to see an item before sending an email. If not, email personalization becomes the absolute opposite of its essence, with more than half of consumers believing that downright creepy customization is enough to cease buying from a business and spread the word about how (they feel) their data is utilized.
That’s why getting personalization right is so crucial. Your audience is much more likely to recognize your efforts if you impress them and provide the service they seek. Not to mention the steps you’ll have to take to earn back your prospects’ trust.
Reckless personalization strategies and questionable data collection methods will eventually decrease your prospects’ desire to contact you, which means goodbye to interaction, brand recognition, and virality.
6. Post-Sale Emails Are a Must
To continue a seamless interaction with your customer and promote brand loyalty, send a post-sale email. It is well acknowledged that gaining new clients is more complicated than making repeat purchases with regular clients.
A post-sale email is an essential component of the client lifecycle as it enhances personalization. It makes people feel more cherished and looked after, which sends the whole user experience to another level.
There are a few types of emails you can leverage to strengthen customer relationships:
Thank You / Bill Email: The first email your consumers get following a purchase should contain a thank-you note and transaction details.
Source: Clutch
Delivery Notification Email: A shipping notification is a straightforward email that lets your consumers know you’re working on delivering their order. It also helps attach proof of shipment, such as a track-and-trace number from a shipping company.
Information Emails: A part of your consumers will require assistance in fully utilizing your goods or services. They may believe they know all the details at the moment of purchase, only to discover afterward that they don’t.
Serving your consumers with relevant content that points them in the proper direction is always a good idea. Even if clients do not require assistance, these emails are usually well-received.
Reminder Emails: A reminder email is a simple message that advises customers to complete a task related to their purchase. You could encourage them to consume the product, care for it, follow your instructions, or place another order.
Review Request Emails: Feedback is a vital part of your post-sale strategy because 93% of shoppers rely on internet reviews to make purchasing decisions. 91% of 18-34 year-olds trust online feedback as much as firsthand referrals.
Customer reviews can also provide information about your products and services. They will be able to show you what has to be altered or fixed in order to provide better service to your clients.
Conclusion
Email customization is not a new concept, and it has the potential to significantly improve brand loyalty, profit, and customer engagement. Thanks to the rise of big data, marketers now have everything they need to become more personal with their consumers. The trick is to deliver unique, necessary details with a personal approach that is difficult to ignore, and implementing these tips can help you do just that.
Andrej is the creator and the one-person owner of the InterCoolStudio. As an experienced marketer, he is driven by turning leads into customers. His goals always include White Hat SEO. Except for being a boss, he is a real team player with a great sense of equality.
