8 personalized email examples to help you stand out

In 2019, “personalization” was called the marketing word of the year by the Association of National Advertisers. Since then, personalization has continued to be an integral part of modern marketing.

The customization of emails from brands is a particularly hot trend and a key aspect of marketing personalization.

Your organization can more effectively connect with its target audience by using personalized email marketing. Personalized emails can generate more leads, increase conversion rates, and boost sales.

In this article, you’ll learn about the importance of email marketing personalization and see examples of successful companies that use personalized emails to market effectively to their target audience.

What is personalized email marketing?

Email marketing personalization is the use of various pieces of customer data to create tailored messages. Personalized email marketing leverages customer data such as age, location, and shopping habits to create unique messaging tailored to each individual.

At the most basic level, personalized emails include little more than the recipient’s name in the body of the content or the subject line. More powerful email customization tools allow you to create highly targeted content for every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Like other marketing and advertising trends, the widespread adoption of personalized emails in the business world is fueled by consumer preferences. Modern customers prefer personalized emails and want them to include sales material.

According to Insider Intelligence, 47% of consumers in the United States would like emails to contain promotions and deals from the brands sending them. In addition, nearly 60% of people said that a suggestion based on their past purchase history would likely encourage them to make a purchase.

Personalized emails are an important marketing tool because customers want them, and they produce results. Offering personalized emails will help your organization remain competitive in the incredibly saturated ecommerce space.

While some businesses have caught on to the importance of making emails personalized, many others have not. By adopting this strategy, you can expand your market share and drive business growth.

Eight personalized email examples

There are many ways to make emails more personalized. Here are eight common tactics:

1. Use a team member’s name

When sending out marketing emails, many brands simply use their generic email address to distribute the messages. Recipients can quickly glance at the “sender” section and see that the email originated from a company. Many will then decide that the email and its contents are not worth their time.

According to Statista, consumers spent an average of just 10 seconds reading brand emails in 2021. This means that most brand emails are skimmed through and never looked at again.

If you want your target audience to make it past the sender and subject line of the email, you should try making the content more personal by using a team member’s name. This simple step will encourage more recipients to actually read all of the content you worked so hard to create.

If the individual customers have worked with a specific team member in the past, you can use that employee’s name. If they have not, you can pick a member of your sales or leadership team and use their name. Either approach is effective.

Customizing the sender is one of the more rudimentary forms of email personalization, so it’s most effective when combined with other, more advanced tactics.

2. Customize the subject line

In an email, the subject line is your hook. It should serve a similar purpose to a title or opening sentence in a blog article. Without a good hook, recipients may never even open your email, much less act on the CTA you included.

When customizing this line, it’s vital that you keep things concise. Remember, at least some of your target audience is probably reading emails from a mobile device. If the text is too long, part of it will be cut off.

At a minimum, the subject line should include the user’s name and some other attention-grabbing information. For instance, let’s say you are sending an email to a consumer named John. You could craft a subject line that reads, “John, here’s a deal just for you.” The message is simple, intriguing, and to the point.

3. Craft personalized email copy

If you encourage the recipient to read past the subject line, you’ve won half the battle. Now is the time to wow them with a personable, well-crafted email.

The body copy should include a personalized greeting. Something as simple as “Dear John” works just fine in many instances. After the greeting, reference their location, business, or some other piece of personal information.

If you’re messaging them to offer a deal in honor of a special occasion (like a birthday or anniversary), include this in your body copy as well. You could wish them a happy birthday and then transition into your offer. The offer could include something like a 5% off coupon or free shipping on their next order.

Personalized copy is the cornerstone of a great email marketing campaign. The copy, as with every other aspect of your email, needs to be concise and to the point. Remember, you have mere seconds to capture the reader’s attention, get your message across, and deliver your call to action.

4. Insert relevant images

The old adage “A picture is worth 1,000 words” still rings true today. It even applies to your email marketing campaigns.

If you’re looking for a surefire way to capture your audience’s attention, throw in a captivating image or two. It’s critical that the image aligns with the body copy in terms of tone and subject matter. The image should also be relevant to the recipient’s purchase history, location, and other interests.

Including images in your email marketing content serves multiple purposes. Not only does it keep the reader’s attention, but it also reinforces your brand messaging.

One goal of personalized email marketing is to increase brand awareness and product familiarity. According to recent data, relevant images paired with written information helps nearly two-thirds of consumers retain information.

5. Include tailored offers

If you want to maximize the effectiveness of your personalized email marketing content, you need to include tailored offers. These offers should be based on what you already know about the email recipient.

For example, you can display new arrivals in men’s clothing to male recipients. Alternatively, you can suggest that the recipient purchase products related to items they have bought or viewed in the past. You can leverage lots of different information you’ve gathered on customers to personalize the offer.

When personalizing offers, make sure to use cross-departmental advertising. You can suggest items that would pair well with previous purchases or products that the individual has already included in their cart.

6. Focus on re-engagement

Re-engagement refers to any marketing tactic that revitalizes the interest of a past customer or quality prospect. A prime candidate for retargeting is a customer who hasn’t purchased anything in a while. This individual may have enjoyed your product but simply lost sight of your brand. Sending this person an email could remind them how much they liked their last purchase and encourage them to make another.

Alternatively, you could re-engage a previous subscriber who recently hit the unsubscribe button and has been inactive. You could target this individual with relevant blog content or send them news about your latest deals and sales.

One of the most popular types of re-engagement involves targeting prospects who either viewed an item or added it to their cart but didn’t make a purchase. You can track these prospects with first-party cookies and send them follow-up emails. You could even incentivize them with a coupon or discounted shipping.

7. Salvage those abandoned carts

Abandoned carts represent one of the best uses for personalized email marketing. Customers who have made it almost to checkout are highly interested in your products. They have also provided you with plenty of information you can use for email personalization.

Put this data to use to salvage those abandoned carts. The customer might have just gotten distracted and simply need to be reminded of their pending purchase.

Sometimes, a lack of free shipping or other price-related issues might have spurred cart abandonment. This gives you the opportunity to make the sale happen by sending the prospective customer a tailored deal for the product they were interested in. It also helps you learn more about how to improve the customer experience and buyer’s journey.

8. Send “back in stock” alerts

Few things disappoint consumers more than deciding they want to purchase a product only to find that it’s out of stock. The good news is that you can turn their disappointment into a positive experience with your brand by allowing them to sign up for a restock alert.

When you receive new inventory, you can promptly notify interested customers so they’re able to make their purchases. Consider highlighting other deals and related products in the same message. The recipient will already be excited that the sought-after item is back in stock — why not capitalize on their happiness by upselling or cross-selling them on other options?

Email marketing personalization strategies

If you want to launch an effective email marketing personalization campaign, you will need to leverage these strategies:

• Segmentation. This means collecting data from customers or visitors to your site about their age, birthday, or profession so that you can customize emails based on those traits.
• Automation. Contacting all your customers at every stage of their journey without automation would be impossible. Automation involves outlining every decision your target customer might make and when you’d want to trigger an automatic email based on their actions.
• Integration. To properly personalize email, you not only need to collect data — you need to be able to integrate that data into email.

In order to use these strategies, you need to adopt a modern campaign management solution.

Personalize your next email campaign

Hopefully, these examples have inspired you to personalize your next email campaign. Doing so can elevate your email marketing efforts and help you build strong connections with existing customers and emerging prospects alike.

If you’re ready to start creating personalized, powerful email campaigns, you need the right tool. Adobe Campaign is your email personalization solution. A powerful, all-in-one marketing campaign management platform that makes it simple to visualize and connect personal customer journeys across every channel, Adobe Campaign will revolutionize the way you communicate with your target audience.

Watch the demo video to learn more.