14 May Email personalization techniques
We are big email marketing advocates here at Sussex. While digital marketing is expanding, and social media is making it easier to advertise, we recommend including email in your digital communications strategy. After all, it has the best return on investments than any other methods of digital marketing.
In a previous post we questioned if email is dead. Since it’s not, we want to share a few tips to increase open and click-through rates through personalization.
What is email personalization?
Personalization in email marketing is creating an email campaign that is designed and tailored for a specific subscriber or a group in your distribution list. To personalize these emails, different segments of your audience needs to be created in order to provide them with timely and relevant content.
Segmentation can be by age, gender, location, and interest. But to create these segments you need data. You can collect this data by different means including newsletter subscription, product purchased, log in to a platform, app download, eBook download, etc.
Email personalization can be very basic, using the subscriber’s name, to very complex, changing the content in the body of the email to meet the need of that one reader.
Personalizing email campaigns has been proven to increase engagement rates and return on investment. The one reason we advocate email marketing is because of the possibilities to optimize the content to the need of the reader, which is rather difficult to do with social media, where everyone gets the same message.
Tips to personalized marketing email
1. Subject lines
A personalized subject line will entice subscribers to open the email. Use their name and avoid reusing generic headlines. This way your email stands out from the rest.
Some companies will use emojis to grab attention, but the best way to stand out is by using their name with a unique subject.
2. From field
The name in the from field in an email is the most dominant element that is displayed in your readers’ inbox. They will decide whether to open an email or not depending on the sender.
In this case, do not use a “do not reply” or “no-reply” in the from field. Instead, it should be your company’s name or the name of an employee who sends the email (i.e., Jane from X Company).
Using the company name creates a sense of trust and your email doesn’t come across as spam.
3. Email copy
Once the subscriber has opened the email, ensure that the content is relevant to them.
The email can be personalized by gender, location, services, or interest, and you can choose parts of the email to be personalized, including:
- salutation
- ex. Hello Jane
- types of products
- ex. books, clothing, service, etc.
- imagery
- ex. dynamic images, gif, static images, or video
- call to action
- ex. See my offers
- birthdate
- ex. Happy birthday, Jane
4. Re-engagement emails
When a customer has engaged with you, but didn’t complete the user journey, use email personalization and automation for re-engagement.
You can use this tactic for when a costumer browed your website and didn’t complete a purchase or to inactive users by soliciting their feedback.
With personalization and automation, you can send your customer product recommendation based on a complete or abandoned purchase or browsing history. This technique is great for retailer and e-commerce sites as these emails can be created in real time.
Summary
Email personalization is great method to deliver audience-specific content. It improves user experience and journeys. The costumer feels valued as you take the time to tailor content that is timely and relevant to their interest.
Contact us for a consultation on how to optimize your communications strategy with email marketing.