Make your Email Marketing more effective with personalization

Everyday you must receive a number of emailers or you send in thousands. But how many of them do you read from your inbox or how many do your audience reads? If not many, then this article is for you to give you an understand how to make your emailer campaign more effective.
An emailer is a cost effective medium but it certainly takes your time to create and roll out one. Also, the main objective as a marketer for you is that each and every campaign of yours should meet its goal and KPIs, even if it’s an emailer campaign. But having database of email id (s) and sending emailer onto them won’t make any difference. Remember the key is to reach your target audience and not just their mailbox.
If you are a marketer, below are some of the tactics to make your email marketing more personalized in order to increase open rates, click thru rate and create more engagement. Obviously, apart from the email id, you should have more information about the users like gender, age, location, interests, behaviour etc. to personalize the emailer.
Subject Line – Usually the font of the subject line of email is little bigger, darker and in bold so that it get highlighted and grab the eyeballs of the receiver. Therefore, it is pretty evident that how important the subject line, so why not make it personalized in order to increase the open rates. As per the research by campaign monitor, using the recipient’s name on the subject line can increase open rates by 26%.

Sender ID or From Name – Apart from subject line, another aspects which get highlighted or usually the receiver seeks for is; who has sent the email? The ‘From’ name also featured prominently when your email arrives in the recipient inbox. In many devices the ‘From’ name also has a larger and bolder text which grabs the attention of the recipient. Therefore, you can personalize the ‘Form’ name while sending emails to your subscribes as it would increase the open rate. If you are well known brand, use your brand name. Besides, if you are sending it to your existing customers or clients it is better to use the name of the Sales Manager or Account Manager who usually interact with the particular customer or had interacted before as it would have a recall value and relatability factor.

Content – If you have the name of your subscriber or of the recipient whom you are sending the email, then you can easily use that in the email body copy. Addressing the subscribers with their names is a great way of personalization. It will act as a direct communication to your subscriber and they will resonate with you more. Like in this email, the user will feel that he holds some value and companies are actually looking for a talent like him.

Image – Another great way of personalization on your email campaign is the use of image. Have your customer booked flight tickets for two to Goa using your credit card during the holiday season? Then s/he must be looking for a hotel in Goa for the same dates. If you send him/her an email to book a hotel by using your card to get benefits, to make it more personalized use a picture of the hotel which would give the vibe to the customer and might also entice him/ her to go ahead and book the hotel as well.

Segment your database – The first question you should ask yourself whom you want to reach and what you want to achieve from your emailer campaign? You can segment your database as per gender, age, location, etc. For example, if you work for an online clothing merchant and the goal of the campaign is to market the latest clothing fashion for men or to give seasonal offer on men clothing you should develop your campaign in such a way that it should look like it is meant only for men. And it doesn’t mean that you would only send it your database who are men, the email should speak to the desires of men. Apart from this, the subject line, images, message, tone, etc. everything should be based on what your target audience (men in this case) are looking for.

Remarketing – You can use personalization of email marketing to your existing subscribers/ customers who have engaged with you before to visit again. For example, Duolingo automatically sends reminder email to its users if they haven’t used their apps for some days. Duolingo is an app from where you can learn foreign language easily by using their app and it is absolutely free.

Recommendation – You can leverage customers’ behaviour to create relevant and engaging emailer campaign to boost cross-selling and up-selling recommendation. You can simply do this based on a user’s recent purchase or browsing history (you can automate this by integrating browsing history). This practise is quite prevalent among ecommerce or online retail stores. This is also another way of maximizing your offline business into online sales. For example, a customer purchased a home décor item from your retail store, you can send him/ her a personalized email to entice the customer to buy furniture that you offer in your online retail store.

Communicate like a human – Now-a-days every business take leverage of email marketing as it is cost effective, even a small business can send out emails to their database. So, your customers’ or leads’ or prospects’ inbox is full of such emailers. Therefore, you need to stand out and grab the attention of your audience to whom you are sending emailers. Hence is very important to create a personal and emotional connect with your customers, they should feel a human is talking to another human. Speak your customer’s language. Use words and images that are friendly to your customers and avoid using heavy jargons or complex images. Reach out to them as a human and not as a computer, show them that you know what they need or what solve their problems, show them that you genuinely care for them.

Personalization of your emailer campaign will surely help you to target different segments of your target audience with relevant content which would result in increase of open rates and engagement. Therefore, if you practice the above ways of personalization in your emailer campaign, it will result in increase of ROI and revenue for your business.