6 Simple Ways to Personalise Emails and Why It’s Important

Is Email Personalisation Even Necessary?

In many cases, segmenting your audience and sending them targeted emails can drive traffic and conversions, but that does not happen in all cases. People want to know what is in it for them when they open your email. They want the email to feel personal, and this feeling is what makes them feel connected to the message, which in turn drives conversions.

Brands are constantly working to make their audiences feel this way, and new businesses struggle the most. This is because they are yet to establish customer and brand loyalty and do not have a stable customer base. For these reasons, the first thing they need to do is cultivate good customer relationships.

Personalisation is a powerful tool for building customer relationships, known as lead nurturing.

If you are not convinced about email personalisation, maybe knowing that personalisation can increase email open rates by up to 18%, improve sales by about 20% and boost revenue by many orders of magnitude if used in tandem with segmentation strategies.

How to Personalise Emails

You can use many tools and tips to personalise your emails. Let us break them down below.

Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is important because it helps you send targeted emails to the right audience segments. Asking questions such as why a visitor has visited your website, has become a subscriber, or bought a product can be incredibly useful in helping you know what types of emails to send them.

Based on the answers provided, each customer, user or visitor is placed into one of the email funnels you have created. Sending highly targeted emails to those in these funnels can yield excellent results, with companies like Paper Style reporting a 200% increase in email open rates and a 161% increase in click-through rates.

Location and Time Personalisation

Every marketer understands that they must send emails when those on the mailing list are more likely to open them. For example, some people might love getting and reading your email while commuting to work; some will wait until the end of the day to catch up on what’s inside their inboxes.

A/B testing will help you determine the best time to send your emails.

However, you need to dig even further because things are not always this simple. If you have a global audience, you must consider when people in other time zones will receive your email. You may want them to receive the email at 10 AM, but sending it at that time in your local time might mean some people receive the email in the middle of the night.

You need to dig into your customer and email data to fix this. Find out when your customers will most likely open your email using the data you have collected. Then segment your audience, so they receive them at the optimal time regardless of time zone.

You can go down further and use metrics from individual readers. Analysing their open histories and then sending an email at the optimum time. You can automate this process but do know it can be challenging to do so if you have lots of readers.

Always Use The Lead’s Or Customer’s Name

Once you have your audience segments and know the optimal time to send out your emails, it is time to start thinking about the content in these emails. People respond very well to their names because seeing or hearing them alters them that something is being addressed to them, making them feel important.

Using a customer’s or lead’s name is one of the easiest ways to personalise your emails; thus, you should do it with all your emails. In most cases, using their first name is enough, but you might want to use both if the email contents are essential.

Personalise The Subject Line

Because of how crowded inboxes have become, marketers should know they are always fighting other marketers for a reader’s attention. Subject lines provide marketers with a great way of doing so.

Using a customer’s name in the subject line captures their attention just like it does when used inside the email’s body. Once you catch their attention, you can remind them of previous engagements with your business, what the newsletter is about, or even tell them something that hooks them so they read the rest of the email.

Create Trigger Emails

In most cases, you will send highly relevant and targeted emails with valuable information that is helpful to your audience. You might also offer a coupon code or discount to entice a sale or let a customer know about a new product. All this content should be determined by the segments we discussed above.

Another way to ensure highly personalised emails is to use trigger emails. These are emails sent when someone does or does not take action. For example, you might notice that someone has not opened your emails in quite a while. That lack of action can trigger an email to re-engage them.

Because that email speaks directly to their actions, it will come off as personal as you will be talking directly to them.

Personalise Your Calls To Action

Many mailing lists and email automation services let you use subscriber tags. These tags allow you to tag your subscribers based on various actions. For example, you can tag them for clicking a link in your email or visiting a page on your website.

Once you have this data, you can use it to personalise emails and add personalised calls to action. These calls to action will be enticing because you already know what the people in the segment receiving the email are interested in.

For example, instead of using the CTA “Learn More”, you can use “Click To Learn 5 Amazing Gardening Hacks”. The second CTA is a lot more enticing and in line with an audience’s interest (in grey composite decking in this case, for example), leading to higher conversions.

Why is Email Personalisation So Important?

Personalisation helps establish an emotional connection with your audience. We connect with and respond to our names very strongly, which is why using them in emails helps establish an emotional relationship. Additional data collected on specific readers can help you adjust your tone and message for a stronger emotional connection.

Shaping Customer Journeys and Addressing Their Needs

Every audience is different. These differences can manifest as differences in priorities, traits, and personalities. Because of this, your audiences can have other behaviours and interests. Every business should establish a great relationship with its customers, leading to a high retention rate.

Establishing these great relationships can mean providing customers with the best experience while also focusing on and addressing their needs. Personalisation helps you do without necessarily pushing sales.

A segmented audience will help you figure out what different audiences are looking for and what type of messaging would resonate with them best.

Personalisation Helps Build Trust

Think about this, who will you trust between someone who calls you your name and someone who uses a generic greeting? The latter does not build trust from your first interaction, making it harder to listen to what they have to say beyond the generic greeting.

This principle also applies to email marketing.  Businesses, physical or online, must create trust to communicate with their audiences effectively and ensure their message is received well.

In an era where everyone wants to feel seen, treating them as an anonymous entity in your email list will yield less than stellar results.

Get a Competitive Advantage

With the competitive business environment, you cannot afford to be lost in a sea of similar businesses and competitors. Standing out and getting a competitive advantage will be challenging, but you can impress your customers and audience with personalised content.

Personalisation helps you sidestep cold emails and ensure maximum ROI for your email marketing efforts.

Conclusion

The point of having an email list is to generate leads and stay in touch with an audience that will eventually turn into paying customers. Before that happens, you must guide them on their path to becoming customers. Email personalisation can play a significant role by helping you address potential customers’ pain points and build trust so they eventually convert.