How To Create Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns
Updated: Oct 24, 2019
Personalized Email Marketing does not stop at the address. In order to fully exploit the potential of emails, one should also rely on various contents.
Marketers achieve a high response with personalized mailings tailored to their recipients. The possibilities of individualization are manifold.
The e-mail marketing is the most successful channel in the online space, as studies repeatedly show. For example, a dealer survey conducted by Sendinblue has shown that e-mail marketing has both a high response rate and a high repurchase rate, making it more efficient than other channels.
Accordingly, e-mail is often used as a marketing tool and its effects are reflected in your own inbox. The flood of e-mails is on the increase - the competitive pressure for advertisers is growing. How do marketers manage to reach recipients during this flood of information?
Relevance is the key word
The marketer wins the recipient's attention with mailings that are tailored to the reader, addressed to him directly and respond to his interests. Personalized e-mail campaigns
convince with high opening and click rates. They strengthen customer loyalty and increase the willingness to buy.
In this post you will learn about the possibilities offered by professional e-mail marketing in order to personalize individual elements of the campaign and thus to target them according to the recipient. Personalization can range from simple individualized greeting to targeted content, right through to true one-to-one communication in the form of transactional email.
The first part of the post deals with the basics of professional personalization and explores which elements can be personalized.
Data - the basis for personalization
From simple, individual greetings to target group-controlled contents - the alpha and omega of personalization is valid data. The most creative and costly measures will not
work if the data is flawed or outdated. A flawed salutation such as "Dear Pattern Man" is even counterproductive here and so is little content that does not meet the interests of the subscriber nor strengthen customer loyalty.
The more recipient information is available, the more individual and targeted the response can be. Top offers, brand favorites, novelties or tips & tricks: How can you find out what the customer is interested in? The registration itself is the best time to learn more about the reader. Subscriber interest and activity levels are highest at the beginning of the newsletter relationship.
In addition to the e-mail address as the only required field, you can also request further demographic data when they register. For many companies it has proven useful to query the newsletter subscriber which topics and contents the customer would like to subscribe to.
Incentives such as coupons, discounts or free shipping are helpful. But beware: If there are too many questions, the interested party will probably quickly find their way back.
Information about the customer, which you need for personal dialogue, is usually distributed in several systems in the company. Linking CRM, shop, content management system and web analytics software with the e-mail marketing software ensures that editorial content, customer and product data are available for email campaigns.
Small effort, big impact
There are a few basics of personalization that do not require much effort but are not to be underestimated in their outcome. The personal greeting at the beginning of the mailing should now be standard. Because just "Hello!" or "Dear Newsletter Recipient" does not create relevance. The readers want to be addressed by their name. However, in all cases a correct greeting (and in the case of missing information a neutral form of address) should be used.
A personal greeting by itself is not enough for a campaign success. The name of the reader should be mentioned several times in the text, of course without exaggerating it. Individual call-to-action buttons or personalized text links increase their attention. The personal call to action conveys a sense of exclusivity and increases the incentive to click.
The sender e-mail address as well as the reply e-mail address can also be personalized. A personalization option is sending the newsletter in the name of the personal customer service representative: A personalized sender e-mail address in conjunction with a welcome text from the personal contact person in the newsletter creates trust among the recipients.
The subject line is crucial to assert yourself in the inbox. A meaningful subject line arouses the curiosity of the recipient. Personalization can further increase the incentive to open up.
But beware: By the constant mention of the recipient's name, the personal address may seem unbelievable.
Suitable occasions for a personalized subject line are, for example, discount campaigns as well as Christmas and birthday greetings. Generally always keep in mind: The subject line should not be longer than 50 characters, so that it is displayed in the inbox completely readable. For mobile clients, there are even only 30 characters.
The next step: to tune content to recipients
If you know the interests of the recipient, the content of the newsletter can be specifically tailored to them. An example of this is the newsletter of the cycling retailer Bike Sport World. For fans of racing sports the newsletter of the dealer contains information and offers around racing bikes. Mountain bikers, on the other hand, receive content that meets their specific interests.
In addition to their own content, newsletter senders can also include ads that are tailored to the recipient's interests. These can be, for example, manufacturer advertisements in the product newsletter or partner offers.
With advertising banners, text ads, "skyscrapers", coupons and native ads, newsletters offer a wealth of advertising formats. Since the ads are tailored to the profile preferences, the readers have added value. So they are not perceived as disturbing. At the same time, the target group-specific modulation of the advertisements in the newsletter avoids spreading losses, which makes them attractive for advertisers.
Birthday greetings, anniversaries, discount promotions, holidays
Word has gotten around that these are good occasions for mailings. They are still effective, it is only becoming increasingly important to differentiate themselves through creativity and special content. Somewhat more elaborate than a personalization on the text level - but all the more impressive - is the image personalization in the mailing.
The integration of the name in a picture can still surprise the customer.
The result: individually tailored to the recipient, newsletters with image personalization experience a longer reading time. They have higher response rates through more intense awareness and a high viral effect by sharing on social networks or redirects.
In e-mail marketing, personalized content cannot only refer to the newsletter itself. Via further links from the mailing, the recipient can access personalized country pages. There he finds all relevant information. This can be their own pre-filled profile data or even data and information related to an order or other action.
It is important that the optimization does not end with the email itself, but includes the landing pages. Various event organizers work with highly personalized landing pages. All relevant parameters are attached to the link from the newsletter and thus visible on the landing page, for example name of the event, event date and location or seat reservation. In addition, the landing page provides more information to enable the visitor to experience
the show: restaurants and hotels nearby, a route planner or a virtual tour of the venue.