Effective email marketing requires listening to what consumers want. If surveys are to be believed, personalization is among their top concerns.
Considering innovations like the rise of artificial intelligence in email, it is easier than ever for brands to personalize their email marketing in effective and engaging ways. In fact, customers have begun to even expect personalized email.
Of course, knowing what email personalization is important, but isn’t the same as knowing how to provide it. That’s why the following ideas are so valuable. If you’re looking for email personalization best practices and ways to improve your strategy, keep these tips in mind.
Email Personalization Examples
There are some basic tactics all email marketers can rely on to add a personal touch to their messages. One involves simply including a recipient’s name in subject lines. Doing so could boost open rates by as much as 50%.
Segmenting Your List
Another email personalization best practice is to segment email lists. After all, your subscribers won’t be interested in every single piece of content you send. Segmenting your list ensures they only receive content that’s relevant to their interests. It’s also worth noting that segmenting lists also has a positive impact on open rates.
A simple yet effective example of this is segmenting your list by birthday month. When customers sign up, include a section for them to fill in their birthday. Segment your list by month, and when it’s time, send out a birthday message and coupon that’s valid for that month. Subscribers will feel appreciated and recognized, plus this will boost brand loyalty.
Personalize Emails Based on Time Zone
Email marketers know that measuring a campaign’s performance is essential. By paying attention to key metrics, they can determine which strategies are working, and which need to be improved upon.
One important factor to measure is the best time of day (and week) to send emails. Learning when your followers are most likely to open content you’ve sent helps you schedule your marketing calendar more effectively.
However, you can take this strategy a step further by considering your followers’ time zones. If you find out that, for example, Wednesday at noon is the best time for you to send an email, it’s easy to forget that Wednesday at noon isn’t the same on the east coast as it is on the west. Remember to keep this in mind when segmenting your lists and enhancing your email personalization strategy.
Respond to User Behavior
There are many different types of “behavior trigger” emails worth including in your personalized email campaigns. These are simply messages that get sent automatically when an individual user takes a certain action. They may include subscriber welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, upselling content, and more.
Using them actively is another way to personalize email marketing. Your followers will be impressed when you respond directly to their behavior, instead of treating them like generic subscribers.
Include Interactive Features
Reviewing specific email personalization examples helps you develop your own strategies. When conducting such research, be sure to look at emails that boast interactive features.
Personalizing your email in this way can be simple. For instance, after customers stay at a room booked through Expedia, the company sends polls asking about their experience. Some airlines also send emails when users book flights allowing them to switch their seats.
Other interactive features are more dynamic. Jackthreads, for example, has included live shopping carts in emails, letting users select items to purchase in the actual email itself.
Adding interactivity doesn’t just make an email more appealing; it allows users to engage with it actively. This results in a more personal experience.
Make Email Personalization Feel Real
Personalizing email isn’t simply about treating your followers like real individuals. It’s also about letting them know there’s a real person behind your brand.
Thus, you may want to consider occasionally sending emails attributed to individual employees when doing so is relevant. Using the example of event promotion, maybe such an email should include personal information about the member of your company responsible for putting together an event. They can draft the email on their own, or coordinate with your team, creating something that reflects their genuine personality.
Let Subscribers Adjust What they Receive
A good way to ensure subscribers only receive content that interests them and personalize the email experience for them is to send a brief survey when they first sign up. In this, ask them to specify what types of emails they want to see.
That said, a follower’s preferences may change once they actually begin receiving your content. Prepare for this by frequently including a link in the emails you send that allows users to adjust their preferences whenever they wish.Of course, it’s also important to stick to general email best practices. That means A/B testing to improve campaigns, paying attention to your unsubscribe rate, and verifying the email addresses on your list before sending any content. By keeping these points in mind, and constantly looking for new ways to personalize your email marketing content, you’ll be much more likely to develop effective strategies.