Guide to Personalized Email Marketing

by Jasmine H. Email Expert

 Personalized marketing which involves 1 to 1 marketing is an increasingly common tactic that marketers are using to effectively connect with their prospects and customers. In email service terminology this means that segmenting your data into different categories according to your customers (like male, female; UK, US residents etc.) so that you can provide a tailored content ensuring greater connectivity with your recipient.

In this article we aim to provide you some tips to segment and personalize your email customer contact list there by ensuring increased recognition and connection of your brand in your customers. . Using any of the prominent email delivery service shall ensure you that the emails you deliver does reach the inbox of your customers and is not going to the trash. But even for this to work you need to make sure all or many of these tips are followed to ensure you get the full benefit out of email marketing.

Some best tips for personalization:

1. Gathering all available relevant information

The primary step is to find out more information about your customers. To ensure that the content you are delivering is relevant, it’s very important to know who exactly your customers are and how you can serve them efficiently - and the best way for this is simple! You need to ask them!

But you must keep in mind that you must not ask for too much information overwhelming them, instead you need to choose a few specific questions that will help you serve your customers better.

2. Segmenting your lists

After you have gathered your data, the next step involves you to divide your contacts into different buckets representing your customers; it can be done on variety of segments, say for example demographics, customer type, location etc. It also helps you to have a well-segmented list if you are using any email service providers as they would require you to have an authentic contact list for them to efficiently deliver your emails.

For example, female customers receive lot more emails from apparel business including photos of items they could imagine themselves wearing thereby triggering them to check them out! Another subtle but neat personalization strategy business use these days are almost all models in these advertisements are women as they get more influenced by these pictures.

Hence Gender is one important way to segment your emails, to serve your customers more efficiently.

3. Ensure quality over quantity in your content

Always be careful to check how many segments are included in your email each time. We don’t want to overwhelm our recipients bombarding them with too many emails or make it harder for you to keep a track of these emails to different segments.

You can test which segments respond more positive to your emails in different stages ensuring you don’t fill their inbox with your emails! Bulk email sender these days provide you with a variety of options to ensure your emails reach your recipients effectively.

4. Lookout for the creep factor

On one hand personalizing your customer emails are a wonderful strategy, but many a time you might have noticed of getting mails about items you just viewed! Now, this level of responsiveness is pretty unsettling! Also phrases like ‘We noticed you looking/clicking on..’ can creep out your potential customers.

This can backfire as customers might feel their privacy is invaded, hence it’s always advisable to give some time and space to your customers before sending such mails so that it results in bringing your customers back to your website rather than scaring them off! Or let’s say - wait for the cookie dust to settle!

5. Name is just a start

When you hear about personalization, a lot many of you might be thinking of including your recipient's name in the mail, yes that is a good start. But don’t just stop with that! It is only one element that is at your disposal that you can leverage to connect with your customers.  Also, since so many companies have started to use this tactic, the inclusion of name has become somewhat a common-place or a necessity if one may say these days! You need to do more than that to gain your customer attention.

6. Focus on behavior

Another way you can personalize your emails is to focus on your recipient’s behavior. Designing different strategies for those that are heavily engaged partially engaged or not at all engaged is a very effective way of organizing your email campaigns and helps you to reach out to those that are really interested in what you offer.

Now let’s look at some examples of email personalization to give you a better understanding of segregating based on your customer type, location and their behavior.

What they clicked

You can send an email to those customers who had visited your website and had clicked on some of the items present there. Including the items in the email that they have clicked is a great way to remind your recipients of the items that they had viewed and might want to view again to buy. Another important thing to keep in mind, in this case, is that to include the link of the product that you are including in your email so that it takes the customers straight to the product page and not to the website homepage which can be pretty frustrating. Hence always remember to have this extra persuasion by adding the product link or else you might lose on your potential customers by just taking them to your homepage.

This can be pretty effective for Anthropology. By taking your customers to the correct product that they had browsed before can lead to a potential sale, rather than to your landing page and not being too upfront in your approach.

On Customer type

If you are in service providing company, you can opt the more practical and useful way of personalization by including the recipients current plan or what they have now and possibly convince them to upgrade their plan for more options. Rather than including flashy designs or long verbose in your email, making sure you include the important information can lead to positive relation with your customers.

It’s such a ­­­­______ day today!

There isn’t a more relevant way to our day to day life than the weather and you can sometimes use it to model a personalized mail for your customers. Remarking about the climate or the location thereby connecting to your offerings makes a more connected feeling in your recipients and prompts them to explore more. Examples include, Quilts for the winter, warmth of a duvet, something cool for the summer etc. Personalizing emails through location is always a great way to connect with those living in those climates and also makes your content relevant for your recipient.

Happy Birthday wish!

It’s proven that wishing someone on their birthday is one of the most efficient ways of connecting with them. Thanking your recipient for being such a good customer and maybe go as far as providing them with some discount or coupons as their birthday gift certainly provides a great deal of connectivity.

By segmenting your customers to identify your VIP customers helps you in providing above and beyond for these customers which in most cases will result in happy customer experience and retaining those special customers for future.

Reminder about your cart!

Sometimes it can so happen that your customer might have added items into cart, but haven’t gone further from there. By sending a gentle reminder, like ‘Thanks for checking us out’ which is a subtle push for the customers that they are forgetting something, rather than trying for a push to sell email which might end up in  your customer losing interest because you are being too pushy!

The year/month in review

This is an ultra-personalized way of email, where in you send a recap of the previous year/month for the customer. Although its not possible for all business, if you can do it, it will certainly result in some deep connection and providing some happy memories for your customers. And if you are able to make a smile in your customers face, then there is a high chance that they will visit you.

A monthly recap is an excellent way for you to keep up the connectivity with your customers, ensuring constant contact with them. This constant contact increases the chances of positive interaction and also you are bringing them in by providing them with a happy memory or recap of the past. But as always keep in mind not to overwhelm them with this and check their reaction before sending too many.

Getting personal

At the end of the day, personalizing your emails helps in strengthening your relationship and nurturing new connection with your customers. As you get to know your recipients more, you can send more targeted emails and can continue to engage with them more. But always remember not to let your content go stale and to change it up once in a while so that you are giving a fresh impression for your customers.

Hope you liked it!

Thanks for reading.

 

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Created on Apr 9th 2020 11:42. Viewed 300 times.

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