A study by Litmus found that 91% of businesses view email marketing as critical for the success of their company. Yet despite its importance for business success, a lot of companies aren’t managing email marketing as effectively as they could be – often neglecting things that could improve results, like personalization.
Part of the reason some businesses don’t embrace personalized email marketing is that it seems too complicated.
But it really doesn’t need to be.
With the right tools and techniques, it’s possible for every business to benefit from including personalization in their email marketing.
In this post, we’re going to look more into the benefits of personalized email marketing and suggest some tips and techniques to help implement it for your business.
What is email personalization, and what are the benefits?
If you’re new to the concept of email personalization, you might be wondering what it involves.
Explained simply, personalized email marketing is when you tailor the content of your emails to each of your individual subscribers based on the data you hold about them.
So rather than sending generic emails to your entire email list, personalization enables you to deliver more relevant and targeted messages to your audience.
At a basic level, a good example of email personalization could be including each individual subscriber’s name in the subject line of your emails.
More advanced examples of personalized email marketing might be tailoring the content of your emails based on a subscribers’ browsing behavior on your website.
The main aim of email personalization is to make each subscriber feel like the email was created specifically for them, rather than them being just another address in your database.
Personalized emails can significantly improve the performance of your email marketing, in a number of areas:
Better email engagement
A study by Campaign Monitor found that personalized subject lines can deliver as much as a 26% increase in open rates compared to generic subject lines.
When subscribers see their name, or something that resonates with them in the subject line, they’re more likely to open and engage with your email.
And if you go as far as personalizing the main body of your emails, your subscribers are far more likely to read your content and click on your CTAs.
Drive more leads and sales
Personalized email campaigns can also have a significant impact on the leads and sales generated from your email marketing.
By including relevant content and offers based on subscriber preferences and behavior, personalized emails have been found to deliver a 760% increase in revenue compared to generic email campaigns.
Building stronger connections with customers
When your subscribers receive personalized emails that are relevant to them and their specific needs and interests, they are more likely to view your brand in a positive light, and be more receptive to your messages.
In a world where the average person receives more than 100 emails per day, you might be surprised to know that 62% of customers are actually happy to respond to relevant personalized emails.
This positive association with your email communications can lead to increased brand advocacy, with your subscribers building a stronger long-term connection with your business.
Top Personalization Tips and Techniques
Email personalization offers a range of benefits, from better open rates and engagement to increased conversion rates and stronger customer relationships.
But if you want to get the most out of personalized email marketing, it’s important to follow best practice tips and techniques when putting together your personalization strategy.
Collect valuable information
You’re not able to personalize your emails without accurate data about each of your subscribers.
The more information you have about each of the members in your email list, the more you’ll be able to tailor your emails to their specific interests and preferences.
A good starting point is to optimize your initial sign-up forms to collect as much valuable data about your subscribers as you can.
In reality, this can be a bit of a balancing act, as the more information you ask for in a form, the less likely users are to complete it. So, it’s important to find the happy medium, with research suggesting that you can still achieve reasonable conversion rates from your sign-up forms with up to 5 fields.
You might also consider implementing an email preference center, which allows your subscribers to provide more details about their preferences and the content they want to receive.
For businesses looking for advanced personalized email marketing, collecting data about the purchases each customer has made can also be helpful. With this information, you can deliver email content that relates to the items or services they have bought.
However, having all this data within your business is one thing. Being able to make use of it in your email marketing is another.
This is why it’s important to make sure your email marketing solution is able to communicate and synchronize data with your other business platforms, and has the functionality to be effective as an email personalization tool.
Segment your email list effectively
Once you’ve collected all your valuable subscriber data, the next step in your personalized email marketing strategy is to segment your email list.
When you segment your email list, you break it up into smaller, more targeted groups based on shared characteristics, behaviors or preferences
There are a variety of ways you can approach email list segmentation, including looking at variables like:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Interests and preferences
- Purchase history
- Site browsing behavior
- Email engagement levels
- Email subscription date
By segmenting your list based on the right criteria for your business and email marketing objectives, you can create more targeted and relevant email campaigns.
For example, a clothing brand might segment their email list based on gender so that females receive emails about womenswear, and males receive emails about menswear.
They might also consider segmenting these two categories further, breaking each gender list down into broad age groups.
This might mean that subscribers between the ages of 18 and 24 receive emails with more ‘on trend’ items – and subscribers between the ages of 45 and 54 receive emails that include more comfortable and timeless items.
Each of these gendered age groups could be broken down even further based on things like the type of products previously purchased, or the categories they have spent time browsing on your site.
It’s important to make sure that your chosen email platform is able to support granular segmentation for your email marketing, so you can get as relevant as possible with your email messages.
However, it’s equally important to remember that while granular segmentation can be incredibly effective, you need to strike a balance between tailoring your campaigns and keeping your email strategy manageable – the more segments you have, the more time consuming your campaign can be to manage and analyze.
Personalize with available data
Once you’ve segmented your list, you’re able to further personalize your emails by using the subscriber data you hold.
One of the simplest but most effective approaches to personalized email marketing is to address each subscriber by name. When a subscriber sees their own name in the subject line of an email, it immediately grabs their attention and makes them far more likely to open it.
With Simplelists, it couldn’t be easier to add subscriber names to your emails. All you need to do is enable the personalization feature and then use the $TO_FIRSTNAME variable in the body of your email, and it will automatically pull in the first name of each individual subscriber into your subject line or email greeting.
There are many other personalization variables you can use within Simplelists to make sure your email is as relevant as possible to each subscriber, such as:
- $UNSUBSCRIBE adds a unique unsubscribe link for each subscriber
- $CCID pulls in the custom ID of each contact
- $CEID includes the custom ID of the individual email address
- $TO_EMAIL displays the email address of the recipient
- $TO_SURNAME displays the surname of the recipient
- $FROM includes the full email address of the original sender, including their name
- $FROM_NAME displays the name of the sender
- $FROM_EMAIL pulls in the email address of the sender
How Simplelists can help with email personalization
Personalization can have a huge impact on the success of your email marketing campaigns – leading to better open rates, increased engagement, improved conversions, and stronger connections with your customers.
And while Simplelists is best known as a market leading group email solution, it’s also a great platform for email marketing – allowing you to implement many of the email personalization best practices discussed in this post.
With Simplelists, you can create unlimited email lists, making it easy to segment your subscribers as granularly as you need to.
You can even use our range of personalization variables to dynamically insert subscriber data into your emails – whether that’s including their first name in your subject line, or their email address and Customer ID in your email content.
And with our Zapier integration, you’re able to connect Simplelists to almost any other business platform you use – quickly and easily syncing subscriber data from your CRM, ecommerce platform, and social media channels.
With full support for HTML emails, and the ability to send emails from your own domain – Simplelists has everything most businesses need to manage their email marketing.
Want to find out how Simplelists can help you deliver personalized email marketing? Sign up for a 1-month free trial today.