This article will reveal to you the best methods of email marketing personalization that will yield amazing click-through and open rates. But before that, let's understand what email personalization is.
What’s Email Personalization?
Email personalization is a marketing tactic that aligns an email to a particular customer’s persona and based on research, personalization increases open rates by 26%.
Here’s an example of what email personalization looks like:
Now, let's see some of the best ways to personalize your email marketing:
1. Make Your Call to Action (CTA) to Stand Out
Having an outstanding call to action is a great way to execute email personalization. Instead of using the regular call to actions (CTA), you can make use of Smart Call to Actions.
Smart CTAs are tailored to suit each subscriber’s preference, the call-to-action will be determined by the other offers that the client has previously downloaded, the location of the user, the browser language, the newsletter which they have subscribed to, and where they were referred from.
Here’s an example from De Beers:
This allows you to show them the right call-to-action that will persuade them to take the actions you want them to take.
Research has proven that personalized smart CTAs increases conversion rate by 202%.
2. Personalize Your Copy
Personalizing the email you send to your subscribers can make a whole lot of difference. Instead of saying "Hey there" or "Hello", you can insert the name of the subscriber in the email.
A study showed that emails that have personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
Don't stop at just personalizing the shout-outs; also ensure you include the personal information in the content of the email.
3. Personalize Cart Abandonment Emails
A lot of businesses may not know this but a huge part of the revenue is lost due to cart abandonment. It has been revealed that $4 trillion in revenue is lost annually due to cart abandonment.
There’s a solution to this problem. Personalized cart abandonment emails sent within 60 minutes of the cart abandonment has an open rate of 40%.
So, if you can send personalized emails within 24 hours of the cart being abandoned, 65% of the abandoned carts can be recaptured.
So the earlier you sent an engaging email to customers who abandoned their shopping cart, the better your conversions will be. For example, Liftopia recovered $714,000 and reduced their cart abandonment rate by 15% during their winter season.
4. Personalize Your Product Recommendations
According to a survey by Freshrelevance, product recommendations increase sales by 3.5%.
Customers will not buy just anything you recommend to them, it’s therefore important that you personalize the product recommendations you send to them, as they will only pay attention to your recommendations if it’s relevant to their preferences and shopping history.
For example, Clinique's product recommendations that fit exactly to a buyer’s previous behavior.
By sending the relevant product recommendation, you will increase the open and click rate as well as boost your conversion.
5. Set up Automated Behavioral Trigger Emails
Behavior-triggered emails are emails that show real-time reactions to how customers use your product. This is the whole essence of marketing automation.
Bloominari is a San Diego-based Marketing Automation agency. Let’s help you set up automated trigger emails based on your customers’ behaviors. Get in touch here.
An example of behavior triggered email is when a website that you’re subscribed to sends you an email after a week of being inactive.
Sending automated behavioral triggered emails makes the customer believe that you care about them. It has been proven that trigger emails have a 152% open rate more than traditional emails.
6. Personalize Your Offers
Personalizing your offers increases click-through rate and boosts sales. It entails sending different content offers to different types of subscribers.
A recent Oberlo survey showed that emails with personalized subject lines had an open rate of 50%.
This email content can be personalized based on the gender, location and past purchase of the recipient/customer.
7. Make Use of Location and Time in Your Emails
It’s important to do an A/B test to ascertain the perfect time to send your emails to each customer. Take a look at the graph below based on a study -- it shows that you need to be time sensitive when sending emails, as open rates differ per time.
Every customer has a particular time that he or she deems appropriate to receive emails -- so getting the right timing and sending the emails at that time will increase the open and click-rate of the emails.
To be able to effectively do this, you need to segment your subscribers into different time zones; you can then send the emails to them at a particular time that’s ideal for them.
8. Personalize The Subject Lines Based on the First Name
Personalizing your subject line based on the first name is a very smart way of increasing open and click rate. This is because the email subject line gives the first impression about a brand --, especially to first-timers.
It often determines whether or not the recipient of the email will open and read it.
When you use your reader’s first name in the email subject line, it makes the reader feel valued.
The mention of their name in the subject line catches their attention. A report by Experian shows that personalized promotional emails have 41% more unique click-through rates and they have 29% higher open rates.
Personalizing emails by inserting the first name of the reader in the subject line will make your email stand out in the recipient’s inbox.
9. Match Personalized Emails and Landing Pages
A good combination of personalized emails and landing pages can boost the success rate of your marketing campaigns. Make sure your landing page is customized the same way your emails are customized -- let them have personalized call-to-action (CTA).
For example, Lyft’s landing page offers drivers the ability to calculate their potential earnings based on the city they are in, instead of random calculations and this has boosted their conversion rate.
This increases the rate at which leads/recipients convert into customers since your attempt at personalization will be more unified and have more effect on the customer.
10. Map Customer Personas Before Sending Your Emails
It’s important to understand the persona of your customers before sending emails to them.
You can build these personas by gathering multiple data on the customers, then you will be able to group customers based on the actions they take and their attributes.
Mapping customer personas before sending emails will enable you to send targeted emails that will appeal to each customer and this will increase the open and click rate.
For example, look at the map of a customer’s journey below. Having such data about a customer will ensure you ‘only’ send deeply personalized emails.
11. Personalize Your Visuals
Customize images you put in your emails based on the data you have about the customer.
This can be based on the location, personal preference, loyalty, weather pattern, and any other relevant information you have about the customer.
Doing this will increase the click-through rates and will also keep the customer interested in receiving your emails. Here’s an example of a Hummingbird email with visual personalization.
12. Personalize Your Email With Storytelling
Storytelling shouldn't be neglected when exploring email personalization. It’s a very potent way of increasing the chances of your emails being opened by the recipient.
When using the storytelling technique you deliver information to your audience by using ideas or facts that are capable of building an emotional connection between the customer and the brand.
Research has shown that 92% of users want marketers to make ads that feel like a story.
You can tell captivating stories that people enjoy and also stories that will make the audience to get engaged with your brand.
Storytelling is emotional, personal, and simple. Once your storytelling skill is good, many of your customers will always be eager to receive your email.
13. Use a Responsive Email Design
Having a responsive email design will improve the user experience. A huge percentage of web traffic comes from mobile phones, it is, therefore, important to have an email design that can be easily viewed on the phone.
Statistics show that email is first opened on a mobile device 50% of the time.
Having a responsive email design entails providing email content that is customized to suit the different kinds of devices used by your subscribers.
The template of such emails can always change to suit the screen of the device that it’s viewed on. That’s responsiveness!
This is important because the success of your email marketing is dependent on whether or not you pass across the desired message to your target audience.
If the audience can't access the information due to the design of your email then the effort is wasted.
Conclusion
By now it should be clear to you what email personalization entails and how you can execute it.
All the techniques explained in this post are very simple and require little or no professional assistance.
Combining two or more or even all of these techniques will make your emails irresistible to your subscribers. You no longer have to fear being marked as spam because your audience will not be able to get enough of you.
