5 Essential Steps for Upgrading Your Email Personalization

Email personalization isn’t a gimmick. It’s a simple yet effective way to cut through the noise and reach your customers on an individual level. 

You may already be using custom fields to personalize subject lines and welcome emails. But how can you take personalization to the next level? This guide covers the what, why, and how of upgraded email personalization strategies. 

What Is Email Personalization?

Email personalization is a marketing tactic based on using email subscribers’ data to personalize email content. At a basic level, this might mean using software that can automatically insert the recipient’s first name into the body of the email. At a more advanced level, personalization can allow you to tailor offers and content in your emails according to the behavior and interests of individual customers. 

Email marketers face different engagement challenges compared to in-person sales or contact center challenges. Making customers feel special and cared for is certainly harder over a cold email than a friendly call. Personalization, however, offers a solution to this. 

Benefits of Email Personalization

1. Improved customer engagement: Personalized emails can often yield better open rates and click-through rates — one report found personalization in the email body sees a 30.26% open rate compared to 26.55% for non-personalized emails. After all, your recipients are getting content tailored to their interests and buying habits. 
2. Higher conversion rates and ROI: With better open and click-through rates, your personalized emails can expect better conversion rates too. You can target customers with content or products based on their past purchases, for example. This means every email has a higher return on investment (ROI). 
3. Better customer experience: Email content tailored to your customers’ own interests will make them feel more valued and understood. This gives them a better experience with your brand and can boost customer loyalty too. 
4. Re-usable data: The data required for personalization, such as customer demographics and purchase patterns, can benefit all sorts of marketing campaigns, from website redesigns to social media strategies. 

5 Steps to Level Up Your Email Personalization

1. Collect Relevant Data

Personalization is about more than customer names. It covers a range of information that can be used when tailoring your marketing emails. This can include demographics and user behavior as well as more qualitative data like interests or even politics. 

You may feel uncertain about how to collect and organize this data. Here are some essential tips:

• Leverage sign-up forms: Include fields on your sign-up form that go beyond name and email. Consider asking for age and gender or even location, but be sure not to ask for too much, as this might put off potential sign-ups. Using a multi-step sign-up form can help you gather this information without overwhelming the user at once.
• Track website interactions: Your website is packed with user behavior data that can be leveraged for email personalization. Pages visited or products viewed can give you insight into individual preferences or customer needs. 
• Mine your CRM system: Another oft-forgotten site of customer data is your CRM system. This includes past purchases and interactions as well as a comprehensive view of each of your subscribers. 
• Use feedback forms and surveys: Especially with an incentive (like exclusive discounts), customers are often happy to tell you about their interests or needs via a survey. 
• Integrate social media data: Email marketing and social media marketing should be joint efforts and the data gathered and utilized by each should be shared. This can help you discover all sorts of interests, from preferred video content to favorite influencers. 

2. Create and test different segmentations

It’s fairly standard to recommend segmenting your customers as a way to personalize marketing emails. You may already have demographic segments to hand. But the importance of segmentation cannot be understated, and you should test different approaches. 

Don’t just segment by age or gender, consider the following segments so you have multiple routes for targeting specific customer types:

• Purchase history: This includes average order value and frequency as well as product categories.
• Engagement level: This can cover website interactions and email open and click-through rates.
• Lifecycle stage: Stages of the customer lifecycle might include new leads or subscribers or active versus lapsed customers. 
• Content preferences: Run A/B tests and gather data on what content gets the best engagement to segment by content interests. 

Consider using marketing automation tools that can create dynamic content blocks and segments that update automatically when more data is gathered or customer behavior changes. Then, combine multiple segments for highly targeted email campaigns. 

The key to segmentation for optimized email personalization isn’t to segment once and forget about it. Just as you might test and trial different tactics for improving your contact center connect rate or social media posting times, so too should you regularly test and improve your segmentation so you can perfect it. 

3. Create Unique, Tailored Content

Personalized email content shouldn’t be humdrum. Instead, focus your efforts on creating unique and relevant content that matches your customers’ interests. 

Some fun and unique types of content for promotional emails might include:

• Localized content: Using location data, create content that refers to the recipient’s location. This might include localized offers or content relating to local news. You might even collaborate with local events in areas where many of your customers are based. 
• User-generated content: Content created by real customers feels more authentic and trustworthy. Testimonials or video reviews offer great social proof and can be aimed at recipients who share demographic or purchase history features with the content creator. 
• Personalized images and GIFs: Why not incorporate the recipient’s name somewhere other than the email subject line? Including this or relevant, personalized content in an image or GIF can make your emails more fun and visually appealing. 
• Interactive quizzes and surveys: A simple yet delightful way to engage your email list is to embed links to quizzes or surveys into your email content. Not only does this encourage click-throughs, but it could also help you gather even more valuable data about customer interests for future personalization. 
• Personalized challenges and goals: Creating a community of customers who love your brand is essential to the longevity of any business. Get your email recipients to take part in challenges that might be related to fitness or personal goals. Include resources and guides, and think about how these challenges further your branding. 
• Anniversary emails: A classic email personalization strategy is to email customers celebrating a milestone. These include birthday emails but might also cover milestones like time since their first purchase. 

Email marketing campaigns don’t need to be dull. Your customers’ email experience can be a fun one that shows them your uniqueness as a brand. Being sure that the content is relevant to your brand and audience is almost the equivalent of finding the supply chain optimization tools that are more suitable to your ecommerce brand. 

4. Automate, Automate, Automate 

Even if you have a small email list, automation is an essential part of personalization in email marketing. It will save you time and even help you ensure your personalized content is up to date. 

You’ll need to use an email marketing platform that offers both automation and advanced personalization features, such as dynamic content blocks and custom fields. Many email service providers will help you segment your audience and send triggered emails like cart abandonment emails too. 

With automation, you can set up triggered emails as well as scheduled emails that contain relevant, personalized messaging. You can also optimize send times depending on when your customers are most likely to open and click through. 

5. Tell Your Brand Story

It’s all well and good to personalize emails and leverage customer data. But the fact is, customers receive lots of personalized, targeted emails day in and day out. How can you make yours stand out?

Each email you send should leave the recipient in no doubt about your brand story. Everything from those personalized subject lines to your visuals should contribute. 

Some simple ways to integrate branding with your email marketing include:

• Behind-the-scenes peeks: Your company is full of real people — tell your customers about them. Not only will this lend your brand authenticity, but it’s also a fun way to engage your customers.
• Celebrate your business milestones: Whether it’s five years since you launched or if you’ve just won an award, share milestones with your customers and include exclusive offers so they can enjoy it too. 
• Invite recipients to engage: You can include invitations to your customers so that they can get to know your brand even better via relevant or fun content. This might include webinars or community events and activities. 
• Follow-up with personalized messages: Thank you messages to customers after they make a purchase or engage with your brand in any way is a simple way to reinforce your commitment to customer satisfaction. 

Final Thoughts: Take a Strategic Approach to Email Personalization

Crafting intriguing and personalized emails can yield many rewards. But to truly engage your customers, you need a strategy. The above steps, from segmentation to automation, show how utilizing customer data for personalized emails goes beyond a tactical approach. Instead, you need a comprehensive strategy that can grow with your business and changing consumer habits.