Your Guide to Email Personalization

Jun 21, 2022
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On average, people receive around one hundred and twenty emails each day. Unless they have lots of free time, chances are that not all of these emails are going to get opened and read.

Customers and email marketing newsletter subscribers will usually pick the marketing emails that mean the most to them to pay attention to. For email marketers, this means making sure to create emails that are actually meaningful and interesting to customers. One of the main ways to do this is to use personalization.

What is Email Marketing Personalization?

In the context of email marketing, personalization involves the act of targeting an email campaign to specific subscribers by making use of the information and data that you have on them. This could include information such as their first name, the previous products that they have purchased from you, where they are located, or how often they log into your website or app. Personalization is quite a broad term, and email personalization can vary a lot in terms of sophistication. You can easily add basic personalization strategies to an email by using tactics such as adding the subscriber’s name to the subject line, for example. Or you can do it on a more advanced level by changing the content of the email based on things that are unique to the subscriber such as their location, age, gender, or the last product that they bought from you.

Personalizing email marketing campaigns is a proven way to improve your open and click-through rates. Using personalization in emails can have a measurable impact on your revenue and ROI, with studies finding that emails that have personalized subject lines are more than twenty percent more likely to be opened by those that do not. This is because, ultimately, personalized emails are more relevant to subscribers and as a result, are going to be more meaningful and interesting to them compared to receiving a campaign with generic messaging and offers. Instead, personalization means that your subscribers can receive emails that are directly targeted at them, includes their name and other personal information, and provides information on offers or products that are relevant to their interests and needs.

Benefits of Personalized Email

Email personalization could be the key to achieving consistently high open and click through rates from your email marketing. Studies by Deloitte found that simply including customer names in your email marketing messages could boost open rates by more than five percent. And using further personalization strategies could increase open rates by anything between eleven and fifty-five percent. Customers tend to appreciate receiving personalized emails; studies found that more than eighty percent of people who received personalized emails from businesses said that they would be more likely to purchase from those businesses again. While the statistics show just how important personalization is for email marketing, only a handful of marketers are actually using it in their campaigns.

Examples of Personalization in Email Marketing

If you are struggling to introduce personalization into your email marketing campaigns, here are a few ideas to consider:

Add Personalization with the Customer’s Name

The simplest way to make your marketing emails more personalized is to include your customer’s name. When a customer sees that you have included their name in an email, they immediately feel more engaged by your company. They know that they are engaging with a company that is likely to have a better understanding of them and their needs. Customers are also more likely to notice your email in their full inbox when you include their name in the subject line.

Personalized Emails with Location

You can also add more personalization to your emails based on where your customers are located. For example, you can include information about your closest store to your customer, which will increase the chance that they will shop in store and take advantage of in-store sales and promotional offers. It also ensures that customers are aware that you have stores located close to them.

Use Customer Buying Habits to Add More Personalization to Email

You can also use customers’ previous buying habits to inspire more personalization in the marketing emails that you send. This demonstrates that you care about what your customers are interested in buying and notice their behaviors, which in turn can encourage them to make further purchases. For example, you might want to send emails that include product suggestions based on items that your customers have previously bought, or items that they have looked at on their website. A powerful way to use buying habits to personalize emails and drive sales is to send abandoned cart emails to remind your customers about something that they may have been planning to buy but have not yet gone through with the sale.

What Do Good Personalized Email Campaigns Include?

Using the recipient’s first name is one of the most commonly used personalization strategies for email marketing campaigns. However, personalizing an email goes much further than simply addressing the subscriber by name. If you are considering getting better results from your email campaign by adding more personalization strategies, it’s important to know what exactly a personalized email contains. There are three main elements that should always be included in any personalized email.

Personalize Email with Relevancy

Relevance is the main thing to consider when putting together a personalized email. These days, our inboxes are often filled with clutter and the average person gets over one hundred emails per day. Quite often, most of these emails are going to address the recipient by name, since this is one of the simplest and easiest personalization strategies to put in place. To take your email personalization further and make sure that it grabs the attention of the recipient, don’t stop at just adding their name, but also offer relevant content that they are likely to be interested in. If you are not sending content that has a direct impact on your reader, then there is a higher chance that your email is only going to be ignored or deleted.

Timing Personalized Emails

Another factor that must be in place when sending personalized emails is timeliness. You should start gathering enough data about your subscriber to get a better idea of what kind of content they are going to need at certain stages of their customer journey with your business. By doing this, you can gain insights on what they need at this point in time, for example, by learning more about what they have been searching for on your website or what they have been reading on your blog. This allows you to put together and send the right email at the right time.

How to Personalize Emails from People Rather Than Businesses

Finally, it is worth sending your emails from another person rather than from the business, since people are more likely to relate to and put their trust in emails that come from another individual rather than a company. You can do this by using a person’s name in the ‘from’ field and using a photograph of that person instead of your business logo. However, it’s important to approach this properly as the last thing that people want is to get emails from people who don’t actually exist. You can have emails come from yourself as the business owner or from members of your marketing team, but make sure that they are coming from real people.

Advanced Email Personalization Strategies to Consider

Going above and beyond the basic personalization strategies of addressing your customer by name is important to get the best results from your campaign and reap all the benefits of personalizing your emails. These are some advanced strategies that you can use to get better results:

Product Recommendations

You can leverage customer behavior to create more relevant and more engaging email campaigns to boost purchases by integrating recent browsing history or purchases into your email campaigns. This involves cross-selling and up-selling product recommendations that are tailored to each recipient in your email list based on what they’ve purchased or what they appear to be interested in through browsing history.

VIP Offers

One example of advanced personalization that many companies use is to set a spending threshold that gives customers VIP status, ultimately unlocking marketing emails that include special offers that are only available to their best customers. This strategy allows you to provide offers that are tailored to the behavior and habits of each subscriber.

Cart Abandonment

Every online retailer knows that just because somebody has added an item to their shopping cart, it doesn’t always mean that they are going to purchase it. In fact, the cart abandonment rate of online shoppers worldwide is almost 75%, which translates to around just one in four carts actually being checked out. Using email marketing and automation puts you in with a better chance of getting your customer back to complete their purchase.

With people getting over one hundred emails in their inboxes every day, it has never been more important to focus on sending emails that are personalized and relevant to each individual recipient.

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