Personalizing your emails

As marketers, we’ve all been there. You put a ton of work into crafting that message and building and segmenting your marketing lists. You are a legitimate business sending meaningful emails. You think you’re doing everything right. But hey listen, because there’s just insanely high number of emails getting into one’s inbox each day, unless you are taking to your recipients 1-on-1, your email performance is going to suck.

“Hey there” and “Dear Customer” doesn’t mean anything, really.  The number of emails someone receives each day is enormous. An average American adult at a given time has 500 unread emails – just lying there as numbers in the inbox. If you are not personalizing your emails you’re setting them up to be thrown into trash folders and get marked as spam.

WHY DO YOU NEED TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAILS?

Everyone expects them: If you personalize your message and address your recipient by their name they are more likely to read your email.  It catches their attention, makes them feel important, and you don’t come across as a creep. Today, individuals expect personalized emails. They expect it in the subject lines as much as they expect in the body of the emails. Name is just one thing, but if you can personalize for more aspects that’s even better. Spray and pray tactics don’t work anymore. Your content should be relevant and be speaking to your audience. You can’t be taking a one size fits all approach and still expect your campaigns to be successful.

Online threats: Don’t personalize your emails and you’re making them think that it might be a spam. With all the online security risks and everyday phishing attacks, it is hard to expect any sort of engagement from your emails if they are not personalized. And because we get so many emails of a certain kind, think of it from the recipient’s perspective – it’s not easy to differentiate between the legitimate ones and ones with the creepiest of malware.  The reality is, no one wants to risk it.

Email performance: End of it you need to show the value. When you finally track those campaign metrics you want your open and click-through rates to make sense. The success of your business is critical, and if you use email as a medium for prospecting and customer engagement, you ought to personalize your emails. However cliché it may sound, ROI is still what a marketer’s efforts should focus upon. No pressure but the CFO is watching.

Statistics have proved that personalized emails can improve click-through rates by 14% and that they deliver six times higher transactional rates than regular email blasts.  It is thus no brainier that to set them up for success the emails must be personalized. Especially in an era where we have access to an enormous amount of data about our prospects and customers, not using this data to create defining customer and prospect experience is a missed opportunity.
SOME WAYS TO PERSONALIZE YOUR EMAILS

Relevant content: Your email should contain information that is useful and relevant. Again, take advantage of the data that is available to you. Put a process in place through which your team gets to understand your prospects and customer better – especially their pain points. This at an organization level will help you find ways to help your clients better. Once you are more aware and you understand the needs of your customers, you will be able to send them content that is relevant and important to them. Your emails then will get the attention that they deserve.

Segment your lists: On the basis of information that you gather about your customers segment them into categories according to their needs and build personas. This way you can address their needs in the best way possible. According to the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), marketers have seen a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns. Isn’t that phenomenal? If as a marketer you are able to deliver to people exactly the content that they want, you will very quickly see its impact on sales conversions and in turn revenue. In terms of executing on the segmentation strategy is to start by using the demographic data and overtime as you are able to collect the behavioral data, plug that into your campaigns as well.

Send time optimization: Let’s accept it, that if you are a marketer, most emails that you end up sending are promotional. Now that’s alright and is pretty normal. But look at it from the recipient’s perspective. For the receiver, it is non-critical communication and so if the timing is not right either your messages will keep sitting in their inbox or will quickly find their way in the trash folder. Because we get just too many emails entering in our inbox each day, it’s just not possible to pay attention if that email doesn’t pop up at the optimum time. So the question is what is a good time? There have been a number of studies to find out the answer to this when question. This particular study https://coschedule.com/blog/best-time-to-send-email/) summarized 10 such studies and found that in the B2B world, 10:00 am on Tuesday morning is the best time to send marketing emails. That said, if your list has people spread across multiple time zones or you do business internationally – which is very likely the case for a company which is above a certain size – you need to further classify your lists so to bring them in line with the time zones which are of your recipients. You don’t want to send someone an email at 3:00 am in the morning, do you?

Time optimize for the individual recipient: In an ideal world, you’d want to go even further and use the engagement data from your past campaigns and personalize email delivery for each of your recipients. That is to say that each person on your mailing list receives your emails at a time when they are likely to engage with your content in the best possible manner. It would prove helpful to even do an A/B test and see what’s really the best time.  It does take time and resource investment to be able to do that, but it definitely is worth given the results.

Review your campaign & proofread your emails: One last but critical step is to check and ensure whether you have taken care of everything or not — from the personal element to content, time, and location. Proofreading your emails is another best practice you should always have as part of your campaign process. No one appreciates bad grammar and spelling errors, and your emails wouldn’t come across as professional enough for people to pay attention to them. At the least it’ll make an ordinary impression, but even worse is that your prospect and customers may perceive your business as one that’s not serious with customer communication and that’s not great for your reputation.

These were just a few things that you can look at while personalizing your emails. Marketers all over are working to adopt a certain level of personalization — but the more the better. Statistics clearly says personalization is the solution to improve your engagement rates. 74% of marketers said that targeted messages and personalization of emails improves customer engagement rates.  https://econsultancy.com/reports/the-realities-of-online-personalisation-report

Let’s step towards personalization for better outcomes for your business. Happy personalizing!