What is Advanced Email Personalization?

Tired of receiving emails that have no relevance to you? Useless emails that fill up your precious email space and waste your time? Well, so are the rest of us, which is why we need email personalization.

People have limited time. They would rather read a book than a generic automated email. Of course, this generic email may have a great promotion inside it. But, your audience will never know. 

The solution to this problem is simple — email personalization.

Email personalization is using customer data to create email marketing campaigns that speak specifically to them. These campaigns target specific groups to boost company sales. 

The email personalization process utilizes four steps: 

• Collect Data
• Use that data to target specific customers
• Create personalized emails
• Increase customer/subscriber retention and interaction

The goal is to sell your product to someone who wants it. For example, you wouldn’t want to sell peanuts to someone who is allergic. Instead, you would like to sell your peanuts to someone who makes peanut butter.

The above example is a little simple. But, it’s proof that understanding your customer base is crucial to success. 

The Power of Email Personalization

Ten years ago, social media was a great way to get the word out about your company. That was especially true if you were targeting a local area. By buying social media ad space, your company could gain new customers and increase retention rates. And creating an overall brand awareness.

But things are changing. Technology is adapting. The new method of email personalization is taking the world by storm. 

Email personalization is inexpensive, and its results are impressive. For example, you could reach 40 times the people by personalizing emails instead of social media outreach. 

The potential for results and the inexpensive nature of personalized emails make it effective. Additionally, more than 40% of today’s marketers want to improve email personalizations. Email personalization improves customer retention and engagement rates, according to Influencer Marketing.

Goals of Personalized Emails

What goals should you set when creating your customized emails? 

Keep these three things in mind when moving toward email personalization: 

• Your customer will buy more
• Customer engagement increases 
• Convert customers at a higher rate

Ultimately, email marketing personalization is to increase engagement and conversion.

Mining Data to Create Effective Email Personalization

Before working out your strategy, you need the data to create personalized email marketing campaigns. We cannot stress enough how important it is to get the relevant data. So, how do you go about collecting information about current and prospective clients? 

The best ways to get this data:

• Information through Opt-In
• Surveys
• List of Purchases
• Questionnaires
• Location Metrics

These tools allow you to gain data relevant to each customer. This data enables correct customer segmentation, follow-up emails, and newsletters. 

When asking for information from your customer, explain why you need it. Only 37% of customers are unwilling to give personal data. So, we can deduce that up to 63% of people are willing to provide personal information.  

3 Email Personalization Strategies to Consider

Now that we know what advanced email personalization is, we need to focus on achieving a more personalized email campaign. 

There are three advanced strategies.

1. Segmentation

Segmentation is your bestie. We use it because it enables us to group our customers into categories. Therefore, segmentation is the first step in creating email personalizations.

By segmenting your customers, you create multiple customer profiles. These profiles help you separate customers into specific groups based on data. Divvying up your customers allows you to target a group with a personalized email to capture their interest. 

B2B Segmentation might include categories such as: 

• Location 
• Company Size 
• Industry
• Purchased Products 

B2C segmentation could include categories such as: 

• Location 
• Age 
• Identifying Gender
• Marital status 
• Behavior (such as cart abandonment, past purchase history, etc.)
• Lifestyle (such as hobbies, interests) 

If you segment your customers correctly, you can distribute information relevant to their needs and wants. Relevant content improves the rate at which customers click on your emails. Additionally, it provides an elevated user experience. They feel cared for on a personal level. This experience often leads to increased customer retention.

Customer segmentation also provides marketers with information to help determine:

• Which channel to communicate through
• Where you need product/service improvements 
• Where you need improvements in customer service and engagement
• Opportunities to cross-promote products

2. Dynamically Changed Individual Emails

Dynamic emails refer to the ability to update, switch, and target specific customers from campaign to campaign based on actions and behaviors. 

Simply put, dynamic email campaigns automatically personalize the content of mass emails. For example, if you collect location information from subscribers, you could use dynamic email marketing to ensure they receive information relevant to their location. After all, it is more likely that someone in San Francisco would attend an event in their area versus Austin. 

Providing information relevant to the subscriber’s location increases the open rate by 26%. 

VentureBeat collected data regarding the most widely employed data points. There are many options for the variables used in personalized campaigns. 

Ultimately, you hope to achieve a personalized content journey for your customers.

3. Subscriber/Customer Behavior

Customers are unique. They all have separate wants, needs, likes, dislikes, etc. Understanding their behavior can help you realize the next steps for your marketing campaign. The objective of this method is prediction.

A great way to predict future behavior is to review your customer’s past behavior. 

Understanding what the past behavior for your customers means helps you plan your next email campaign. The simplest way is to create surveys, read reviews, or deep dive into past purchases.

This information allows you to create personalized newsletters and promotions that accelerate engagement.

Another way to understand customers is recognizing why they aren’t consuming your content. Multiple factors could cause customers to disengage with a business. Lack of personalization is one of them.  

If subscribers no longer engage with your content, that’s okay. You can employ a re-engagement email to ask them if they still want to hear from you. Re-engagement emails also can take on different forms. They can request feedback, offer a special promotion, or thank subscribers for their business. 

Each customer is unique. Understanding their behavior is the advanced part.

How Content Journey Can Help

Personalized emails are a great way to connect with your customers. Not only do they improve engagement, they promote a friendly user experience. Therefore, email personalization should be part of your marketing. It will help increase sales, open rates, and conversions. 

Book a call with our team to learn more about how the right content can improve your business.