Email marketing is a constant quest of making people feel exclusive!
Especially when we have abundant personalization tools handy, it is time that we utilize those to up our marketing game. Though email personalization started with just incorporating the first name of the subscriber, we have come a long way to instill a lot more than that. It is an era of hyper-personalization, and if you expect more from your email marketing campaigns, you might as well consider sourcing and using data that can offer highly relevant 1:1 personalization. Before we jump on to the techniques, let us first examine the impact that email personalization can yield for your business.
How Personalization Can Propel Your Email Marketing Efforts?
- 74% of marketers vote for targeted personalization to be the driving force for improved customer engagement – Campaign Monitor
- 71% of the consumers admit to open and read a brand email if it is backed by personalized experience – Forbes
- 70% millennials don’t mind for brands to track their browsing and shopping behavior in exchange for a better shopping experience – SmarterHQ
- Personalized emails deliver 6x higher revenue and transaction rates – Backlinko
These numbers are a testament to the rewarding impact email personalization has. It is time that you shift towards more advanced personalization techniques than just the first name tag. We have a list of five email personalization techniques that you can incorporate in your email campaigns to drive better, targeted user experience.
5 Advanced Email Personalization Techniques
Despite the benefits, only 5% of companies report being on the advanced level of email personalization. Let’s discuss how you can get a hang of it for better email marketing ROI.
1. The Use of Segmentation and Micro-segmentation
Email list segmentation is one of the most result-generating tactics in email marketing. By asking the user preferences or tracking their interactions with your brand, you can collect data that can help you customize their user experience. Make use of basic as well as advanced segmentation elements like demographics, geographics, purchase history, browsing history, sales lifecycle stage, order value, and more.
The segments created with this information will let you target different groups with ultra-personalization. You can have a look at Airbnb’s email template examples below. The brand curates user locations and sends customized emails to different subscribers based on their geography.
2. Make Use of the Features Like Merge Fields
The email service providers (ESPs) today are feature-rich to support email personalization to the core. As said earlier, going beyond the name tag is the need of the hour, and advanced features like personalization strings in Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to add next-level customization to each subscriber. Gender, name, year of account activation, subscriber’s email type preference, dynamic content, and the list goes on. These tags create a one-on-one conversational experience for the end-users. Take a look at the following example.
This email by Fitbit is highly personalized as if designed for each user differently. Elements like daily usage statistics, name tag, personalized dashboard link, date strings, and more can help your brand provide an exclusive user experience.
Another example by Uber in one of its B2B email campaigns depicts how data can be sourced, stored, and used for special occasions like anniversaries and long/short term associations. These kinds of emails are highly useful for retention and bonding purposes.
3. Behavioral Triggers
When setting up email automation or drip campaigns, personalization plays a major role. Especially when we talk about cart abandonment emails, from the email template design to body copy, CTA placements, and product recommendation as per the past purchase or browsing history is possible only when advanced personalization is in action. Here’s an example.
This cart abandonment email by J.Crew has all the cart items in display with individual Buy Now links and product images. With proper email personalization, you can create such triggered campaigns with so much ease and fewer efforts.
4. Dynamic Content Marketing
Curating the entire email’s copy as per the user dynamics is an unmatched capability that personalization offers. Right from the subject line, preheader, salutation, preference-based content, till the sender’s name, you can add everything you wish to, in order to create as personalized an experience as possible. Relevant emails are the future, and the feature offers just what is needed. Check out the below examples.
These emails by Better Settlement Services and Canopy have to and from name tags, powerful preferential appeal, and recommendations. These emails directly talk to the users as opposed to those regular promotional emails.
5. Curated Occasional Messages
This one is the most common of them all but not less important. In the quest of making your prospects, subscribers, and customers feel special, the agenda behind is always to establish meaningful connections. Personalization in emails works as a bridge between your promotional emails and the users to bond well over some non-salesy or less salesy email exchanges. You can set up email campaigns for birthdays, anniversaries, and milestones that can keep your brand on the top-of-the-mind to your users while they celebrate special days. Adding a generous offer that can help them celebrate better is like a cherry on top to get a win-win.
This birthday email by Runtastic is the perfect example of how you can design an interactive HTML email template to grab the subscriber’s attention and strengthen the bond.
Pro-Tip
However enticing these advanced email personalization techniques may seem, the most first and important factor to consider is the choice of an abled ESP. If you wish to enable these advanced features, your ESP needs to have these facilities to help you do so. Secondly, when it comes to ESPs, every platform operates differently. You need specific guidance from experts such as Mailchimp specialists or SFMC email experts who can bring your personalization express on the right track.
Wrap Up
Harnessing the power of advanced personalization techniques into email marketing is a sure-shot tactic to yield results. Start using the mentioned techniques to up your email game if you aren’t already, because, now is the time!
Author Bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies that specializes in professional email template creation and PSD to HTML email conversion; they are Marketo certified experts. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
