Marketing wiz Seth Godin famously said, “People don’t want email, they want me-mail”. This makes sense, considering that getting an impersonal email is about as exciting as receiving a letter addressed “Dear Occupant” back in the snail mail days.
In both cases, the sender’s shown they don’t care about you. So why should you care about them?
Now contrast those dismally impersonal experiences with the great feeling you get when a sender’s taken the time to personalize their message. They might greet you by name, showcase products you might like, and maybe even send a coupon for that item you had your eye on the last time you visited their website. In other words, you’re an individual – not just an email address.
Sounds a heck of a lot more compelling, right? Strangely enough, it would seem people like to be treated like, well… people.
So in today’s blog, we’re going to go over some quick tips that’ll take your email personalization game to the next level.
Personalization in email by the numbers
If you’re wondering whether investing in email personalization is worth the effort, check out these data points:
- Marketers have experienced a 760% jump in sales when using personalized experiences via segmented email campaigns.
- There’s a 30.5% greater chance people will respond to emails with personalized subject lines than those with generic “To” and “From” lines, and a 32.7% greater chance they’ll respond to emails with personalized messages!
- Enhanced customer acquisition: Fitness company Nuffield Health increased their conversion rate from 1% to 8% by personalizing their emails (an 800% increase!).
But, you have to do personalization right
It can be challenging to build a strong customer profile with segmented information in order to implement ongoing personalization in email — especially when you might not have access to developer expertise. But thanks to advances in email marketing platforms, it’s easier than ever to foster meaningful relationships with prospects and customers.
Let’s look at how you can differentiate your email marketing efforts by employing savvy strategies that speak directly to your audiences.
Powerful personalization strategies
Some companies call it a day once they’ve inserted their recipient’s first name into an email greeting. That’s good news for you, because it creates a huge opportunity for your personalized messages to rise above the noise and get noticed. Try implementing some or all of the following strategies:
- Personalizing subject lines dynamically based on specific buyer criteria to create interest and increase your click-through rate.
- Showing a “From” line with a person’s name rather than a company name: 68% of Americans say the sender’s name plays a big role in their decision to click on an email.
- Automatically triggering tailored emails at specific buyer journey milestones. For example, if ‘subscribed’ is true for a recipient, then they’ll get a specific greeting. Those ‘not subscribed’ get a different greeting.
- Showing customer suggested items based on purchase history or interests, which can potentially increase sales.
- Referencing a recent purchase or interaction to stay top-of-mind with customers and lead them back to your site.
- Reminding customers about their wishlist items to encourage engagement.
- Including personalized invoices as a convenience factor for customers.
- Adding personalized loyalty information, resulting in increased customer retention.
As you’re probably starting to realize, this is just a partial list. But hopefully you can imagine how personalized emails can be used to benefit your own business.
Putting Theory Into Practice
Let’s consider a couple of simple use cases:
Say you’re a real estate company looking to reach out to customers searching for rental properties. Using their customer histories, you can touch on saved searches, locations, and budgets to showcase similar properties they might be interested in or missed out on before.
Or maybe you’re an online retailer that offers customer loyalty programs, and you want to engage your customers by showing them what they can get with the loyalty points they’ve accumulated. That extra personalized push in an email can be exactly what’s needed to get them active and involved again. And if they’re not already a loyalty program member, personalization increases the likelihood that they’ll respond to a program sign-up CTA.
Win-win.
OK, OK — personalization sounds amazing. Where do I start?
Hopefully you’re convinced by now that personalization can transform your email campaign results. But how do you go about putting this strategy into action? Right this way…
Invest in a great CDP. A customer data platform (CDP) is a central component of email personalization. This type of packaged software, such as Segment or Tealium, creates a ‘hub’ of customer data points that goes beyond your regular CRM. CDPs can leverage diverse customer data — from transactional and behavioral to profile and product data — to create an accurate and unified customer profile. And marketers can use that info to reach out to people, based on where they are in their customer journey.
Don’t try this at home. A CDP is a great start; now you need to learn how to effectively use these juicy customer insights to create a highly personalized experience in your email campaigns.
Here’s the thing: If you try to hack together a solution, things will get messy fast. And if you’ve ever tried to build an email template from scratch, you’ll know it’s a crazy amount of work. From designing and coding, to testing and troubleshooting, creating personalized emails is not a quick process by any means.
Plus, the more personalized you get, the more time and resources it takes. And what if down the road you want to make more edits based on insightful data that could increase sales? There goes another month of waiting for a developer to edit the code while you potentially lose out on revenue.
So, what’s the solution?
Let someone else do the hard work. Look for an email production platform like Dyspatch that lets you update templates with personalization in a flash. Ideally, the platform should allow you to add variables and conditionals via markup language built into content ‘blocks’ that are easily swapped out in a visual editor, or with only a few simple changes to the code. That way, you can focus your time on higher-value tasks like creating personalized and dynamic content.
In short, your email template platform should make it easy to focus on creating the standout content your target audience will love.
Ready to start personalizing your emails?
Dyspatch makes it simple to build sophisticated, highly personalized emails without using custom code. Thanks to its powerful DML markup language, you can create dynamic email content just how you want. Book a demo to start reaping all the amazing engagement benefits email personalization has to offer.
