Modern organizations are facing many challenges in building genuine relationships with their audiences due to shrinking organic reach and rising competition. Despite this, email marketing remains one of the few channels that companies have been relying on for years to keep their customers engaged. Unlike social media followers or paid ad viewers, email list subscribers have shown interest in what a brand is offering. By giving out relevant and value-packed experiences to them, companies are able to turn that interest into a purchase.
However, consumers are now demanding personalization in every interaction with a business. Companies need to change their custom email marketing approaches from providing generic emails to customizing offers and messages. By strategically using email personalization platforms and curating content for every individual, companies can build strong relationships with their users and achieve their objectives.
Significance of Custom Email Marketing
Email marketing is not just about sending promotional discounts and offers to lure customers; it is about building a strong rapport with customers and encouraging them to make repeated visits. Custom email marketing can help in this regard. However, the basic customization, such as including a person’s name in the subject line which is not sufficient to get today’s audience’s attention or keep them engaged.
Companies should adopt better personalization techniques. This includes curating the email content to a subscriber’s gender, location, or preferences.
With email personalization platforms, businesses can cater to the needs of their recipients and deliver meaningful messages. Rather than getting a message with broad deals and copy, they receive an email curated for them, which includes their name, and shares offers (items, discounts, etc.) that match their preferences. When recipients are provided with such personalized messages, it can improve open rate, increase CTR, and drive sales.
5 Best Practices to Ensure Email Personalization Effectiveness
Email personalization platforms can help businesses simplify their efforts to add a personal element to emails. They help in understanding their customers’ needs and preferences, and send emails that connect directly with them. However, there are still some tasks that companies need to do to ensure the effectiveness of custom email marketing.
Here are five of them:
1. Collecting Quality Data
Data is the base for any personalization effort. To create effective custom email marketing campaigns, companies have to put together large and accurate data sets about their customers. There are three different types of data that an email personalization platform can use to generate effective outcomes:
- Zero-party Data: This is the information that customers directly share with a company. Through surveys, polls, or order information, businesses can collect this data.
- First-party Data: It is collected from the act of the audience’s engagement which may be through browsing, past purchases, or social platform interactions.
- Second-party Data: Companies collect first-party data from trusted sources that which becomes second-party data. This kind of data offers additional insights about consumer patterns and helps in assessing competitors or performing analysis.
Companies should prioritize zero-party data and try to collect as much as they can. This helps the email personalization platform to create email content that grabs the recipient’s attention instantly.
2. Gaining a Deeper Understanding of Audience Preferences
Once an organization has secured the right data, they have to employ advanced analysis to segment audiences, find patterns, and extract insights about user behavior and preferences. This will help them to adjust their email efforts based on a customer’s position in the buying journey. Based on the performance data of the past emails and comparing them with the current data, companies can add variations in their email messages.
Email personalization platforms can help companies deliver the right message at the right time using behavior-based segmentation. That way, businesses can keep their customers engaged and encourage repeated visits.
3. Utilizing Dynamic Content in Emails
When designing a custom email marketing campaign, using live or updated content helps a brand stand out. Companies can use email personalization platforms to add in features that get subscribers excited to open the emails. These include:
- Engagement reports that display live click numbers to show what is trending or popular.
- Countdown timers and calendar alerts that create urgency for deals or offers.
- Live polls which allow users to see how they measure up to others.
- Scratch-to-reveal features, adding a small interactive game to show a product or deal.
Custom email marketing is all about finding new and interesting ways to engage audiences. Companies need to continuously improve their personalization efforts to keep people interacting with their messages.
4. Adjusting Email Frequency
Custom email marketing is not only about the information in the email; it is about the timing and frequency of these emails sent to the recipients. Businesses need to have a deeper understanding of their audiences to know the ideal time to send an email. This means sending messages when each reader is most likely to check them.
Companies can leverage email personalization platforms to analyze the open-rate data and make decisions on email timing and frequency. They can also further personalize reader’s experience by letting subscribers pick their email preferences, such as newsletter types, delivery pace, and timing.
5. Making Iterative Improvements
Businesses find email personalization difficult is because of the number of components that can be individualized in a single email. From subject line to sender signature, every part of an email can be customized. However, companies need to be careful on choosing the element that needs to be personalized.
They can use email personalization platforms to test and refine multiple variants of a single email to determine which campaign works best and ensure the effectiveness of customization efforts. With continuous tests, companies can make iterative improvements and optimize future campaigns.
Bottom Line
Custom email marketing has evolved from calling recipients by their first name. The rise of AI and big data analytics solutions have further speeded up this evolution and enabled marketers to engage with their audience in a more personal way. They powered email personalization platforms to deliver the kind of customer interaction that generic bulk email tactics can’t match.
Personalization of emails can be used by brands and teams across industries, from online retail to finance, to elevate the way they communicate with their audience. It offers a simple way to craft distinct, engaging email experiences that strengthen customer loyalty and lead to higher sales and conversions.
