How to Personalise Email Marketing Campaigns

Personalisation at a very basic level isn’t enough to have an effect on both your customers, or your business. The expectations of customers have increased significantly when it comes to how they are engaged with. This rise in expectations has come with an increase in difficulty as well. Developing a deeper understanding with customer data platforms has been a help to businesses.

It can be difficult to know where to begin when it comes to thinking up strategies. There is a lot to think about before going ahead and reaching out to customers. 

With so much customer data to go through and analyse, it can be intimidating to put it all together. But you must remember how important this is in order to create meaningful customer experiences. 

However once you have it all together you can use it to inform your messaging to ensure it’s relevant to the receiver. Putting in the hard yards beforehand will be rewarding for all involved.

Understand Your Customers

Personalisation is rooted in having an understanding of your customer data. Creating campaigns for customers that you know nothing about will not return good results. You need to demonstrate you know them.

The days of “Dear customer” are long gone. When someone receives a message from a company they expect it to be personalised and relevant to them. 72% of customers say that they don’t interact with messages that aren’t aimed directly at them. So you have to make the effort to understand your customers, or they won’t engage with your business.

Customer Data

You need to ensure that your data is of good quality as it influences the level of personalisation your campaign will have. Consolidation of your customer data and a deep understanding of them leads to a high level of quality. This is down to the fact that you understand their behaviours, wants, and needs on a deeper level. Your campaigns will also be far more relevant to the receiver.

There is a variety of different data you can include to build your campaign. The more customer data you include, the better your campaign will be. Using demographical, behavioural, or transactional data to build your customer profiles for your campaigns makes for a richer experience.

Segmentation

Using segmentation for your email campaigns can lead to a 760% increase in revenue.

Segmenting your audience per campaign is more important to driving results than you might think. You need to make sure what you’re sending is relevant to the customer, and segmentation is important to ensure this.

One campaign does not fit all. Segmentation is where you can identify a particular group to target with a certain message or offer. Sending an irrelevant campaign will have a major effect on your engagement rates for that particular promotion.

Not to mention annoying your customer base.

Define Your Objective

Customers will click away from your message without a moment’s thought if your campaign isn’t relevant to them. Generic messaging won’t appeal to a lot of your customer base and will underperform. This makes it far more difficult to drive meaningful customer engagement.

The purpose and content of your campaign should relate to the segment you are targeting. Examining your customer data will make this task easier for you.

For example, an abandoned cart campaign has a very defined objective. That is to re-engage a user who had put something in their basket but left your site without making that purchase. Everything you include in this email should remind them of what they could miss out on. 

Everything about your email should be cohesive. That means images, language, and even the subject line should be geared towards driving that conversion. This makes it far more likely that your email will get noticed and the purchase will be made.

If you don’t ask your customers to do anything in your emails, then they won’t. Your emails should require the customer to complete some sort of action. Essentially, there should be something for them to do with it.

What Does Personalisation Look Like?

The next step now is to go ahead and build out your campaign. You have your customer data at hand and you’ve analysed it to get the basis of your campaign together.

It can be hard to know where to start when you have all this information. Identifying where to use all that data in a way that is useful is tough if you haven’t had much experience.

Below are some examples of places you can start to introduce that customer data to provide a great customer experience.

Subject Lines

Your subject line will be one of the first things a customer notices about your email. Don’t underestimate how important they are. They could be the deciding factor on whether your email will even be opened or not.

Personalising the subject line can lead to an increase in interaction rates for your campaign. Using someone’s name in the subject line increases email open rates by 26%. Your customer data can always be used, regardless of where you’re using it.

Creating a sense of urgency can also prompt the customer to take notice. Catchy or direct subject lines and the use of emojis can also work in grabbing their attention.

You should be attempting to pique their interest or exciting them with aggressive offers. Ultimately the aim is to push the reader into taking action. However, what you don’t want is to come across too spammy. The purpose is to have them click through to the action you want them to take. Not scroll down to the unsubscribe link.

Images & Dynamic Content

Relevancy holds a lot of weight when it comes to increasing interaction rates. Of course, there are plenty of things you can do to improve your email marketing performance. The use of images and dynamic content can be deployed to your advantage here.

Visual media is a great way of drawing attention. With the use of images, you can show someone exactly what they left in their basket. Or, even show them other products that complement what they have just purchased. There are numerous ways you can use images in your campaigns. Dynamic content makes your campaigns far more personal. Transaction rates increase by up to six times through this type of personalisation.

Be Snappy

When it comes to the body of your email, don’t drag it out. People react best to snappy headlines and text. It helps if you can create a sense of urgency here too. No one spends that long reading their emails, so get to the point as quickly as possible.

Making your email exciting for the customer to read will only ever have a positive impact. They will come away from it enjoying the experience they have had with your business. So, even if for some reason they don’t act on your email, at least you’ve left them with a good impression for the future.

Always A/B Test

You can’t always be certain about what your customers will react to. 

A/B testing allows you to test our different messages and understand what works and what doesn’t. It can help you create better campaigns for the future as well. You’ll find that the more you analyse and refine your messaging, trust and sales will increase.

You should make testing different variations of your emails part of your campaign design. Remember, what works for some people won’t work for others. Understanding different elements that work well for your campaigns means that you can take this information to improve them in the future.

Reflect and Go Again

It takes time to get these things right. Even when things do start to work out with your email campaigns they won’t ever be 100% perfect. That doesn’t exist.

It’s important that you reflect on the things you have done and keep trying out new things. Introduce new pieces of data or start to include different media to get your customers’ attention. 

Email marketing works when done right. The idea that email marketing is a thing of the past is simply not true. Many businesses are seeing results to this day and with the right customer data and resources, so should you.

To learn more about how email marketing and marketing automation can help your business, get in touch with the team to request a demo.