Five Strategies You Can Use Right Now for Better Email Marketing Personalization

Guest post by Jerusha Carolin.

Most consumers are inundated with marketing emails on a daily basis. Generic “spray and pray” messages are, usually, quickly deleted (and possibly sent to spam). But highly relevant, personalized messages are much more likely to be read and acted on. Here’s how to make your messages stand out and grab attention.

Personalized email is much more than simply auto-inserting the recipient’s first name. To create highly relevant, high-impact email messages, you’ll need to collect and use more information from your prospective customers.

Here’s a deep dive into the benefits of email personalization; strategies for personalizing your messages; and noteworthy examples from leading brands.

What Exactly is Email Personalization?

Email personalization is a strategy brands use to generate customized emails for each recipient on their email list to increase open rates.

Detailed personalization is possible only when you can collect as much data as possible from your available resources.

The Importance of Email Personalization in Marketing

Benefits of personalizing your email marketing messages include:

• Higher open and click-through rates;
• Greater engagement with your email content;
• Increased conversion rate of prospects to buyers; and
• 6X higher transactional rates.

Five Trending Personalization Strategies to Skyrocket Your Email Results

1. Segment your subscribers.

Building a carefully segmented list is essential for a brand to improve audience targeting and increase sales. These lists help the brands group recipients by important attributes (age, location, work role, preferences, etc.). By categorizing subscribers, brands can easily send relatable emails to each type of user.

Every popup, feedback form, subscription, and newsletter signup form is valuable for collecting data to help segment your customers based on their activity, demographics, psychographics, and professional characteristics. Marketing automation platforms can help with segmenting users based on different criteria.

With the help of marketing tools that provide advanced segmentation features, you can efficiently perform customer segmentation. However, email marketing tools such as DirectIQ and Mailchimp have a slight learning curve, so you may want to look at Mailchimp Alternatives.

2. Customize subject lines.

Customizing subject lines using user data can increase open rates. It’s very important because using personalization in subject lines can increase open rates by 22%. Personalized subject lines can be developed when you’ve collected rich data on subscribers.

Subject lines can be personalized based on a person’s lifestyle, hobbies, work role, or interests. For example, if the user is a movie buff, choosing a famous bit of dialogue as the subject line can increase the probability of opening an email.

3. Customize your email messages based on the user’s activity or interests.

At the most basic level, all business messages should be personalized with the user’s first name. Going further, customized email messages should be developed based on the subscriber’s activity and interests.

To expand your customer data set, you can use tools that will pull insights from their social media accounts and other online activities. (Just be sure to do this in an above-board, permission-based way that doesn’t cross the line into being creepy.) After collecting this data, all these pieces of information can be put together to prepare a personalized email for your users.

A person might be interested in fitness, a healthy lifestyle, fashion, travel, food, music, cars… These are the hints people leave behind as a form of data on Youtube, Instagram, or Facebook. This data helps brands to deliver targeted advertising on social media platforms. After this, the targeted audiences can be sent personalized emails by segmenting subscribers under applicable categories.

4. Send behavior-triggered emails.

Behavior-triggered emails are personalized emails sent based on the activity of a visitor on a particular website. That visitor may be a new prospect, a loyal repeat customer, or someone who abandons a cart. All these footprints left by the visitor can be noted with the help of Email Marketing Agencies. They help businesses to grow by helping them with the customers’ data.

Examples of triggered email messages:

• Welcome Emails
• Pop-ups for newsletter subscription
• Signup forms
• Abandoned cart recovery emails
• Order confirmation email
• Customer review email

5. Integrate your martech apps.

Integrating data from different applications helps marketers to get to know their customers better. Integration involves using multiple email platforms or marketing software applications. These tools help email marketers craft more effective personalized email content.

For example, a business may use different email tools to promote its products and provide customer service. By integrating these two tools, a richer set of data can be collected, helping brand marketers to better understand customer behavior on their website. After segmenting the data, personalization can be taken to a deeper level.

Integrations can help you understand your target audience better and can assist in customizing your emails accordingly. These integrations can be synced with your eCommerce platforms and email campaigns to help craft more relevant, carefully targeted messages.

For example, if the goal is to increase sales from abandoned carts, personalized email messages can be sent out to determine why the shopper left the website and test different incentives to get them to complete their transaction.

Four Essential Personalization Factors for Your Customized Emails

Psychographics: Psychographics reflect an individual’s thoughts, beliefs, opinions, preferences, and interests. By collecting a subscriber’s data, messages can be personalized based on their lifestyle, hobbies, ideologies, societal class.

Demographics: Demographics focuses more on a person’s intrinsic characteristics and major life choices. These factors include age, gender, occupation, language, religion, ethnicity, and geographic region.

Birthdays and Anniversaries: Remembering your customers’ special days gives you a great reason to send personalized messages. When a brand sends out a special birthday or anniversary coupon, that customer may feel that the company is a part of their life journey.

Personalized subject lines: Personalizing subject lines can persuade recipients to open those messages. Here’s an example of Pinterest’s personalized subject line. When a subject line includes our name, we tend to show more interest. This is one strategy marketers use to personalize their email messages to add a personal touch while promoting their products.

Examples of Effective Personalized Email Messages

1. Personalizing First names in Subject Lines

Personalizing subject lines can get recipients to open an email.

2. Birthday/ Anniversary

Personalization messages can be created for special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries. Take a look at Nike’s way of personalizing their customer’s birthday month emails.

3. Personalized Messages Based on Psychographics and Demographics

Mango targets women who are obsessed with denim. As a part of their summer sale, the customer’s styling data enables Mango target them with this personalized outreach (below) based on the recipient’s favorite products.

4. Abandoned Cart Recovery Emails

An abandoned cart can be recovered by personalizing emails according to the product left behind by the customer. Here’s an example from the brand Move, an online store for undergarments and sportswear.

Note they start with the customer’s first name. Then they discuss the coupons applicable to their cart and added the products waiting in their cart.

This can increase the recipient’s curiosity and interest in buying their favorite products.

Email Personalization Statistics

• A Statistica study found the open rate for e-mails with a personalized message was 18.8%, while without personalization, the open rate was 13.1%.
• Experian shows that personalized email delivers 6x higher transactional rates.
• Statistica conducted a survey of U.S marketers on the leading benefits they saw from using personalization. According to the study, 63% of survey participants saw increased conversion rates, and 31% cited increased e-commerce revenues as the main benefit of this approach.

Jerusha Carolin is a Content Marketer at TargetBay, an eCommerce Marketing Cloud used by thousands of online stores across the globe. She loves researching and writing content on email marketing strategies and other alternative organic hacks to increase open rates. She is a lisztomanic who loves to listen to music to keep herself lively and optimistic about life. Connect with her on LinkedIn.