The competition for customer attention and engagement is difficult with the continued expansion of digital marketing channels. People receive dozens of emails every day, but only a small fraction are opened. So, how do you ensure your emails stand out from the rest?
The answer — and the solution to your moribund metrics — is email personalization. Personalized emails are one of the easiest ways to ensure your message captures recipients’ attention quickly, enticing them to open it as soon as it arrives in their inbox.
Consider this your guide to understanding what email personalization is, why sending personalized emails is important, and the best strategies to help you increase engagement and foster stronger relationships with your audience.
Email personalization is a strategy that marketers can use to provide subscribers with email content tailored to their specific interests, creating a more customized and memorable interaction.
Personalized emails use subscriber data — such as name, company, location, age, or gender — in dynamic fields throughout the creation process to ensure the email’s content appeals to the recipient. That way, each recipient feels like the sender created email content just for them.
An effective personalized email should include relevant information that your recipient will find interesting. It should also be timely, arriving just when the recipient needs those suggestions, offers, or other information the most.
A notable example of a timely email is an abandoned cart reminder that is sent out soon after a customer adds an item to their online shopping cart but then leaves the site without making a purchase. Timely emails like this have the greatest chance of creating meaningful connections with your subscribers by providing relevant content and tailored suggestions now when a customer is most likely to act.
Email personalization benefits.
Email personalization can significantly strengthen your company’s brand and the relationships you have with your subscribers. Although there are many benefits to using personalized emails, here are some of the most significant ways personalization can enhance your email marketing efforts:
Increasing open rates.
It is a simple fact that personalized emails are opened much more often than non-personalized emails. According to industry data, emails with personalized subject lines have an open rate that’s more than 20% higher than those with generic or static subject lines.
Strengthening customer engagement.
Not only does personalizing emails get recipients to open them more often, it also increases the likelihood of them reading your email content and clicking through. Personalized emails have been shown to produce a 139% increase in click rate compared to static one-time sends.
Improving customer relationships.
The primary purpose of sending personalized emails is to make customers and subscribers feel valued and important. When done correctly, personalized emails should encourage your subscribers to view your business in a more positive light and increase their loyalty to your brand.
Creating strong relationships with customers raises brand awareness by increasing the likelihood of subscribers recommending your company to other potential consumers, and it also makes it easier for you to target and personalize content to your current customers. When customers have a good relationship with your business, they are more likely to be willing to share their data. The more data you have access to, the easier it will be to further personalize the content delivered to each person. Customers increasingly want personalization in every business interaction.
Increasing revenue.
Not only does personalization improve open rates and increase engagement levels, but it also leads directly to higher revenue. Data shows that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened than emails with non-personalized subject lines. This is a natural outcome as engagement with your content increases, leading to higher conversion rates and a greater number of purchases made compared to non-personalized emails.
Customers want to feel that a company values them before they make a purchase. Personalizing emails and their content to fit your audience are small changes to your email strategy, but they can have a major impact on your total revenue and the overall success of your email marketing efforts.
How to gather data for personalized emails.
To successfully personalize emails for your customers, you must be able to access their personal information easily. There are several ways to gather personal data from your customers.
Here are three of the most common methods.
Improved email subscription forms.
Improving your email subscription form is a quick way to gather a little more basic data about your subscribers. Rather than asking customers to enter an email address to subscribe to your content, expand your form to include additional data fields, such as their name, birthday, location, and other non-invasive questions that they would be comfortable answering.
Keep in mind that these additional questions should be relevant to your brand and the content you are planning to share via email. For example, asking someone if they are a student can help you target them with discounts and other promotions on products that are particularly appealing to students.
Below is an example of a relevant email subscription form to help give you an idea of the types of questions you could ask on your own subscriber forms.
Browser tracking.
Another great way to gather data is through browser tracking. This method of data gathering uses cookies to track a customer’s behavior while on your site, which provides you with large amounts of behavioral data that can help you determine some of their interests and preferences. Once you know some of a customer’s current interests, you can provide hyper-personalized product recommendations and use targeted emails to cross-sell similar products and avoid cart abandonment.
CRM integration.
Integrating your email marketing with a customer relationship management system (CRM) or ecommerce platform will instantly give you additional data on your customers, as well as access to professional tools that can help you better manage that data and perform deeper analyses.
When it comes to managing customer relationships, Adobe Experience Cloud has a robust suite of products and services. It allows you to manage the entire customer experience from start to finish easily.
One of many products offered within Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, includes management and analysis capabilities that are usually limited to IT departments. It can help you collect and standardize your data, creating customer profiles that automatically update in real time.
Real-time CDP is suitable for both B2C and B2B businesses, enabling you to gain actionable insights into your audience and respond to customer events in a timely manner. Nailing down the timing of communication will help you create personalized, relevant experiences for each customer on your subscription list.
Email personalization marketing strategies.
Now that you’ve gathered all the customer data you need, it’s time to put it to work to create personalized and memorable customer experiences. Here are a few of the best strategies for effectively using customer data to personalize your marketing emails:
Segment your audience.
Segmentation is an important tool for refining your marketing strategy. It’s also a crucial first step to sending effective personalized emails to your customers.
To get started, separate your customers into distinct groups that share a common characteristic. The actual groups you use will vary depending on your business needs and marketing goals. However, some common examples that can be used to create these potential target groups include gender, age, location, and industry.
Dividing your customers into these groups will help you identify which specific factors to target in your email communications. It will also help you decide what content is most relevant and which dynamic fields should be utilized in your email copy.
Use dynamic content.
Dynamic fields are specific fields in your subject line or email copy that can be changed automatically based on the person receiving the email. A great example of this is a dynamic first name field, which ensures that every recipient sees their own name written in the subject line. Using dynamic content prioritizes sending relevant content to customers rather than the old-school, one-size-fits-all emails that businesses used to send.
Segmentation and gathering as much data as possible from your customers are key to utilizing dynamic fields and content in your emails. Without segmentation, you wouldn’t know which fields are most likely to resonate with your chosen audience. Without data to fill those fields, your efforts to create personalized emails will fall short. That’s why both elements are so important.
When these strategies are used effectively, you can personalize emails tailored to specific audiences.
Personalize the subject line.
If you could only make one change to your current email templates, it should be to personalize the subject line of your emails. Although it’s a minor change, this adjustment is one of the most effective personalization techniques — and it often has a significant impact on the recipient, as this is the first element of your email they will see.
Personalizing the subject line could include adding a dynamic name field, using specific language tailored to your audience, or even changing the “sender” field to show as being sent from a specific person instead of the company or brand name. When the sender is a specific person, it helps customers feel valued — and they become more likely to open the email and engage with its content. After all, someone at the company took the time to reach out to them personally with suggestions and offers.
Personalized emails are the future of email marketing. Not only do they improve many of your performance metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, but they are also an effective tool for fostering stronger relationships between your customers and your brand.
Send triggered emails.
Triggered emails are a must-have in email marketing. These automatic emails are created with a built-in alert that triggers them to be sent in response to specific customer actions. Some common trigger actions are leaving items in the cart, signing up for an account, or subscribing to your email list.
You can also use trigger emails to remind customers when their subscription is about to expire, allowing them to reactivate it, which is a great way to stay on top of renewals. Many companies will also use triggered emails to provide additional suggestions to customers based on their browsing history or after a purchase when there’s an opportunity to cross-sell similar products they may like.
Remember anniversaries.
Another easy way to build relationships with your customers using personalized emails is to send a birthday or anniversary email celebrating the customer’s special occasion. Sending these celebratory emails shows them that you care and can endear you to customers as they see that you took the time to remember their special day.
Create personalized email content.
This strategy seeks to make the entire email appealing to the recipient. It goes beyond creating subject lines that encourage customers to open the email and takes it a step further by ensuring that, once they do open the message, everything within that email is relevant to the customer and tailored to their interests or preferences.
A few ideas for how you can personalize the content of your emails are:
Sending specific product recommendations based on browsing history
Calling out something customers may be looking for or interested in based on their browsing behavior on your site
Creating images that include the recipient’s name or the city in which they live
Referencing the industry or current conditions in your content (for example, a travel company could send a vacation email out to all its customers who are in a city where it’s currently raining, highlighting the rest and relaxation that can be found on a warm sunny beach)
Be creative and utilize all your available resources.
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 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.
Salvage those abandoned carts.
Abandoned carts represent one of the best uses for personalized email marketing. Customers who have almost reached checkout are highly interested in your products. They have also provided you with plenty of information you can use for email personalization.
Utilize this data to recover those abandoned carts. The customer might have just gotten distracted and needed 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.
Get started with email personalization.
Personalized emails are the future of email marketing. Not only do they improve many of your performance metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, but they are also an effective tool for fostering stronger relationships between your customers and your brand.
If you’re looking to improve the effectiveness of your emails through personalization, the first step is gathering sufficient data to be able to appeal to customer needs, preferences, and desires. To do this effectively, you need a platform with the tools to personalize the entire customer journey from start to finish across channels.
