Go beyond the “FName” – 6 Advanced Ways to Personalize Emails
Let’s be clear, no one likes receiving irrelevant and generic marketing communication. Most marketing or sales emails are met with a swift action: Archive or Delete.
That’s why, as marketers, it’s our job to provide an experience where customers feel like we are addressing their individual needs. Every communication should contain a value for customers.
When it comes to email marketing, it’s almost necessary to personalize the complete experience for every customer or potential prospect. But how does one personalize email exactly? It’s not just including the user’s name in the subject line or at the start of the email body. A reader should feel that you really care about them—that’s personalization.
Here are a few advanced ways you can master email personalization:
1. Create user personas
In order to create a personalized email experience for your customers or prospects, you first have to understand their background and behavior. The characteristics of the people you’re targeting will provide you with a clear goal and refine your approach.
When you’re defining user personas, think about your ideal user demographic information. Job level, specific pain points, interaction level and goals. You might find out that a small fraction of your customers are the best ones you have. Use their information to build personas, as they fit perfectly into your business model.
Here is an awesome article by folks at Buffer on “How to Create User Personas”.
2. Ask the right questions
A part of implementing user-based personalization is about asking the right questions from your customers or prospects.
Asking customers the right reasons before they sign up would provide you with insightful data, helping you create personalized email content.
Let’s take a look at Crew’s signup process. Crew is a web design outsourcing firm based out of Montreal, Canada. They have an interactive detailed signup form that works effortlessly and asks the right questions.
Due to their form optimization, they are able to run email campaigns that address their prospects’ pain points, and this results in seamless communication between Crew and its subscribers.
3. Make use of Time and Location
It’s no secret that different people interact with brands at different times. Some might interact with you in the morning and some might check it out late at night.
Instead of sending emails at a specific time-frame, monitor your users and look at times they are most likely to open your emails.
Once you have the data, look at time-zones and highest opening rates relative to it. Segment users based on it. Here is one brand that saw an increase of 11% due to time-based targeting.
4. Set up behavioral based email targeting
Behavior-based emails are real-time emails based on your customers’ activity with your website or product.
Some of the most popular behavior-based email targeting is by Google and Facebook when you log in with a new device.
You are instantly notified via email and your other active devices that someone logged into your account from a new device. It serves two purposes, first, it lets you know that your account has been accessed. Second, if this was not done from your end, you can instantly take action and secure your account.
These type of emails, although automated based on triggers can be used in various situations. For instance, upselling and cross-selling, educating a user who starts using a new feature, recovering cart-abandonment, increasing web engagement, etc.
You might also Like: 5 Amazing Advantages of Behavior targeted emails
5. Use a real “reply-to” email
The most annoying part of transactional and marketing emails are the [email protected] part. If you’re communicating with the customer, give them the option to reply to the same email. Instead, most brands still use no-reply email addresses to communicate with their customers, which creates a bad impression.
Using a real person’s name like [email protected] will not only help to make your emails more recognizable and credible, but it will increase your open rate and also make your email feel more personal.
6. Keep track of open and click rates
Tracking open and click rates does not only allow you to measure your email marketing efforts, but it also gives a powerful indication of what sort of emails your customers are interested in. If you can track opens and clicks for each email that you’ve sent to your prospects, you can easily start targeting definite types of content each prospect is interested in receiving from you.
Get started with Personalization
As you can see from the points above, personalizing emails go a long way. It brings your brand and your customers closer together.
It’s a fairly attainable marketing strategy for any business. Focusing on serving the right information to your prospects and customers is crucial for your business to succeed.
Here is a bonus, you could talk to us if you want to learn how AI helps out with email marketing and email personalisation.
