Did you know people check their emails on average 4 times per day? I know I check mine a lot more - between my business and personal emails it's definitely much more than 4 times per day.
Personalized emails deliver 47% higher transaction rates than classic emails but 70% of brands fail to use them as an integral part of their digital marketing strategy.
Email marketing is not a new trend and has been around for more than two decades but in 2017 it is still the quickest manner in which to reach customers with critical information about your brand and services.
In this blog, we are going to look at a few strategies you should be applying in your email marketing to make it more personalized. According to digital trends, 73% of customers prefer to do business with brands that make their marketing more personalized for their target audience. It makes their experience with you more relevant and contributes to you building a relationship with them.
Check out some tactics below that you can use in personalized email marketing.
1) EMAIL SEGMENTATION:
Slice your email marketing for better list segmentation and to better improve the personalization of your email marketing. By segmenting your email lists you are targeting your customers more directly in regard to what they want or need from your business. Each customer is different and has different preferences, interests and tastes. There are a number of creative ways you can segment your email list to help run innovative and effective campaigns to target your customers. However, to do this you need to collect information about your email recipients, such as interests, geographical location, age, gender, industry and so on. The more information you can collect, the more opportunities you have to tailor your emails to resonate with them and in turn get them to take that step to connect with you one-on-one.
You can collect data by encouraging people to fill in forms, and surveys and answer questions about what they are looking for from your business. You can also use past purchases to gather information on customer interests, buying frequency, and purchase cycle to enable you to identify upsell opportunities, the best time to promote certain products and reward frequent shoppers with a loyalty program.
Now that your list is segmented make sure you provide develop dynamic content for each segmented list and include a clickable call-to-action to your website to take that email to the next level and help you generate more customers.
Segmented email campaigns have an open rate that is 14% higher than non-segmented campaigns. So what are you waiting for – start looking at ways you can segment your email lists today.
2) INDIVIDUALIZED EMAIL MESSAGING:
Now that your email lists have been segmented according to each criterion you've set out, you can start to personalize individually each email you send out to each customer. This shows that you are paying attention to them, who they are and what they care about the most.
36% of customers will read your email in its entirety if they are called by their first name. That is why it is really important to include their name in the subject line to grab their attention directly in your email campaign. You can also create content like images or videos including their name as well as in your storytelling content.
3) BEHAVIOR-TRIGGERED EMAILS:
You can set up automated behavioural trigger emails for your customers which are real-time reactions to how your customer is using your product or your service. For instance, when Facebook emails you because you haven't logged in for 5 days, or your beauty salon sends you an email because you haven't visited them for three months and provides you with a special offer, this is a behaviour-triggered email. I received one of these yesterday and guess what – I booked myself in within seconds to take advantage of the deal being offered.
Trigger emails have a 152% higher open rate compared with classic emails. This means behavioural email marketing is a beneficial tool that allows you to cultivate lifelong customers. Behavioural emails are very effective because they are triggered based on a prospect's behaviour or actions that they initiated when interacting with your business. The decision you must then make is which user actions to react to.
This kind of personalized email marketing is also easily automated and can be used for multiple actions such as birthday offers and welcome emails, transactional emails confirming a download, re-engagement campaigns such as the example mentioned above and so on.
In your email start a conversation with your user based on the behaviour and when setting up the email make sure you are creating a highly personal experience.
4) RESPONSIVE EMAIL DESIGN:
Just like responsive web design your email should also be responsive and the appearance of your email must be attractive to catch your audience's attention. Just as people form an impression within seconds about your brand from your website, the same happens with your email.
If it does not look good and displays optimally on mobile devices, they will quickly click on your email and it is not the reaction you want. If your customer also can't easily open or read all the content in your email, they will leave.
You need to take into account many factors such as the size of the email, the layout, the fluidity, etc. Responsive design also plays a part in personalizing your email marketing because you are adapting to different devices and the context of the person who will receive your email. A good example of adaptive content is to mention "click" for a computer, and "tap" for a smartphone and a tablet.
54% of emails are now opened and read on a mobile device.
5) INDIVIDUALIZED LANDING PAGES:
One of the most valuable strategies is to match personalized emails and landing pages on your website to target your customer more effectively. The aim is to have the same personalized call to action for the customer and have a unified experience to convert them more easily.
Your landing page must be directly related to the content of your emails as well as to the interests of your segmented list of customers. It helps readers to see the next step and learn more about what you are promoting.
Using this kind of strategy, your campaign can have an increase of 8% conversion rate from the usual email marketing campaign. Customers respond more to a personalized and targeted email campaign across all areas. So get your email marketing and landing pages working together and get some awesome results.
6) LOCATION-BASED EMAILS:
With so many consumers on the go today and never far from their mobile devices, geo-targeting location-based emails enable incentives to be delivered at the right time and the right place to your target audience. Long gone are the days when one-size fits in email marketing and even making minor adjustments can improve your results dramatically.
Location campaigns can also help you utilize real-time data and even help you to pinpoint a contact's precise geo-location which means you can market to them directly about any offers or promotions you have on at that time. This can increase in-store traffic and help boost sales through impulse purchases.
You might, however, be asking yourself why emails are compared to push notices or SMS messaging. Yes, text messaging can do the same job, but has rarely ever delivered the same results.
Push alerts and text messages are still considered annoying, especially if they arrive at the wrong time, and they demand the consumer's attention at that moment, which is one of the reasons why some industries have an opt-out rate of 60% when using push alerts.
When you send an email it can be read on your target audience's own schedule and even if the message gets there a little later it is overall less annoying to the person receiving it, which is probably why email opt-out rates are significantly lower to push notices, and is usually around 1 to 2% after each email delivery.
Just in the past year alone, location-targeted emails have increased by 38% compared to non-location-based emails. So why not give it a go yourself, you've got nothing to lose and possibly a lot to gain.
7) SELF-MANAGED PREFERENCE CENTRE:
Having a customer preference centre is a key tool to helping you manage your email marketing and your subscribers.
It allows your customers to control their personal information and can help boost retention and strengthen their relationship with your brand. The data and information they provide you are in their hands as they choose what they want you to know about themselves and they can adjust this information whenever they want to, as well as how they want to interact with you.For instance, some customers will be more interested to receive emails on certain topics and at different frequencies and a customer preference centre can allow them to set these options.
Strong engagement, retention, and monetization don't come from you forcing your message on them; it will come from you reaching your customers in ways that appeal to them and having a preference centre will make that much easier. Customer satisfaction will automatically increase and you will be able to collect new data to help personalize your email marketing as well. It shows you are building a successful customer/brand relationship on give-and-take.
An effective email marketing strategy is all about automation, segmentation and customization. Even if email personalization can seem a little challenging for some marketers, using the right email marketing and automation tools can reduce your pain points and make this process much easier.
If you need help with your email marketing
get in touch today to chat with one of our marketing consultants.
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