Eleven Email Personalisation Techniques to Boost Engagement
In this age of hyper-targeted marketing, consumers expect you to know who they are. They want you to provide them with content they care about. If your emails aren’t relevant to your subscribers, they’ll end up in the trash or marked as spam. This will bring down your deliverability, hurt your ROI, and possibly get you penalised under the GDPR.
In this article, we will delve into the role of personalisation in email marketing and discuss advanced strategies. These are powerful tactics that you can use to connect and engage with your customer base.
If you're new to email marketing or the possibilities of dynamic content, we suggest reading the following articles first:
What Is Email Personalisation?
Email personalisation is when you use customer data to create a personalised marketing experience. By understanding user behaviour, you can deliver content that seems tailor-made for the individual customer. It allows you to deliver the right message directly to the email accounts of the right people, at the right time.
In today's competitive B2B marketing landscape, relevancy is key. This is especially true of email marketing. To be truly successful, you need to write your emails as though they’re addressing an audience of one.
What Are the Benefits of Personalisation?
Marketers have reported a 760% increase in email revenue because of using segmented campaigns.
The average email open rate is 20.81%. However, emails with personalised subject lines generate 50% higher open rates.
Revenue is 5.7 times higher in emails that use personalisation than those that don’t.
50% of marketing influencers have reported that message personalisation is the most effective email marketing strategy.
These stats are just an example of why personalisation is so important for email marketing. Relevant messages allow you to communicate on a personal level that is more attractive to consumers.
In their 2019 Trends in Personalization report, ResearchGate International and Evergage, Inc. found that marketers:
“...overwhelmingly agree (98%) that personalization helps advance customer relationships, with 70% claiming it has a “strong” or “extremely strong” impact. And 85% state that their customers and prospects expect a personalized experience.
When asked what drives personalization within their own organizations, marketers cite delivering better customer experiences (88%), increasing loyalty (59%) and generating measurable lift/ROI (50%) as top motivating factors.”
Email personalisation helps to establish a connection between you and the email recipient, increasing their willingness to engage.
How to Personalise Emails?
Creating personalised experiences depends on effective data collection and analysis. You need to understand your audience and take action based on their behaviours to create relevant email campaigns.
A marketing platform such as our partner, SharpSpring, will help you do this more effectively. It helps you make full use of consumer insights to create relevant marketing messages. It allows you to automate your email messages to deliver targeted content that meet your customer's needs. For instance, you can easily set up trigger lead nurturing campaigns based on a prospect’s content consumption and interests.
Marketing automation is how you can run personalised email campaigns at scale.
Advanced Email Personalisation Tactics
Here are some ideas and techniques you can use to personalise and improve your email marketing.
Audience Segmentation
We can not stress enough the importance of segmentation. It allows you to tailor content so that each person receives emails that speak to their specific needs and wants.
Track search behaviour, social media presence, location, and other digital activities and use this information to segment audiences. Also, use your email sign up forms to capture audience information. Ask them questions or give them the option to show their areas of interest when signing up.
Once you have this information, you can decide how you segment your list to deliver relevant content. You can, for example, segment by interest, industry role, active vs inactive subscriber, by location, etc.
Include an option for changing preferences at the bottom of every email you send. Doing so can help fine-tune segmentation and reduce your unsubscribe rate
To learn more about segmentation, check out our article Audience segmentation with marketing automation.
Email Delivery Time
Personalisation isn’t just about what you send in an email; it is also about when you send it. Analyse the times when target individuals have previously opened and engaged with your emails. If your business operates internationally, think about what time zone their in.
Customise your campaign send time so that emails arrive when recipients are most likely to engage. This simple step can help improve your email open rates.
Personalise Subject Lines
As marketers, we obsess over subject lines. This makes sense, considering that 35% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line alone. An excellent subject line is a digital equivalent to foot in the door with a potential client and the key to improving your click through rates.
Try to go beyond using the recipient's name to personalise a subject line. For instance, consider their location, their browsing habits, buying history or demographics. Use this knowledge to craft a short, concise subject line that will grab their attention and start a conversation.
Personalised Product Recommendations
Customised recommendation emails are great for showing your customers you understand their needs. Do this by leveraging data about products they have browsed on the website, the content they’ve consumed, their purchase history, etc. These types of personalised suggestions can go a long way to show your customers you care about their needs. Studies have found that 96% of people would like brands to help them discover new products since it saves them time.
Personalise Promotions
Personalising your promotions is a simple way to boost click-through rates, conversion rates, and further customer engagement with your brand. Rather than sending out generic discounts or coupons, make sure that your offer is always relevant to the user. Consider the customer’s spending patterns, if they’re a loyalty scheme member or a VIP customer. Also, make sure you are promoting products or services you genuinely believe they’ll find useful.
Post-purchase Emails
Improve your customer’s post-purchase experience by sending them personalised emails related to their purchase. Pre-empt challenges they might face. Sending FAQs, video demos and useful tips will help your customer make the most of their investment.
You can also cross-sell by suggesting products relevant to what they just bought. You can even create custom email addresses so that the message is from your customer service team. It’s a subtle way to reinforce that your goal is to help them, not just make another sale.
Abandonment Emails
Browse and abandonment emails let you reach out to customers who have viewed a product on your website without converting. For instance, try inserting the name of the product they just abandoned in the subject line to get their attention.
You can further personalise content by noting how many of the items are still available. Or offer suggestions for alternatives or upsells they might like better. Another option is to send a personalised alert when a sold-out item they were interested in is back in stock.
Replenishment and Renewal Emails
Adding a personal touch to your customer service bumps people’s impression of your brand from good to great. For instance, track their reorder frequency so you can reach out to customers when you suspect they’re running low on something. If you’re a subscription-based or SaaS business, you can send customers a personal reminder when they need to renew. You could even make a recommendation based on their service usage to help them get the most from their subscription.
Matching Personalised Landing Pages
Pair emails and landing pages to further enhance the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. They should have a consistent look, copy, and feature the same calls to action.
Using something like SharpSpring’s dynamic content tool makes this easy. Essentially, you only have to draft a single landing to go with your campaign. It can then update dynamically with tailored content based on the email people clicked through from. It can even handle details like image personalisation.
This allows customers to enjoy a consistent, streamlined experience which will make them more likely to convert.
Mark Anniversaries
An anniversary email is an example of using something as simple as a date to provide a standout experience. You appreciate it when someone takes the time to remember your anniversary or birthday. In the same vein, your customers appreciate it when you remember their milestones.
Besides birthdays, you can note special occasions such as an anniversary, for example 365 days since they first subscribed. These are exceptional opportunities to offer a special treat or promotion to make their day just that much more enjoyable.
Request Feedback
Ask for feedback and reviews. You’ll find that taking a personal interest in your customer’s experience is an important facet for long-term relationship building. People appreciate being given the opportunity to share their thoughts. According to SmartInsights, adding the word "review" in the subject line boost open rates by over 28%.
This feedback is an important source of information for how you can improve your service and products. Positive third party reviews can help drive more business. They provide social proof that can encourage prospective buyers to give your brand a try.
Get Started With Email Personalisation
We hope you find these tips and tactics to be useful. Pairing excellent strategy with automation to create a personalised experience is what will take your email campaign to the next level.
If you’re looking for a marketing automation platform, we recommend SharpSpring. It provides several brilliant tools that make it very easy to apply these advance techniques. For instance, their dynamic email content feature or their behaviour-based email tracking technology.
To learn more about digital marketing strategy, contact the experts at 1827 Marketing!