We've seen a tremendous growth in the usage of email marketing in the last decade. No wonder—it's a relatively easy way to push out a message to customers or customers-to-be, and it can be effective when done right. However, you might notice that many people don't think it's all that effective anymore.
It's estimated that almost 20% of emails are now directly discarded by the recipient without even being opened. That's an astonishing number, significantly if you've invested time, money, and energy in creating all those email campaigns.
The reason? Seriously boring, spam emails. Nobody likes getting them—and even the most loyal customers are getting more and more sick of them.
For every company, personalization is the key to conversion rates. Research has shown that organizations with personalized email content enjoy higher conversion rates due to increased customer engagement and satisfaction. Customized emails are also more likely to retain customers over time because they feel valued by the business.
Are you still sending emails that don't get opened? Of course, you are. Here are effective ways to implement personalization into your email campaigns for better conversions.
What is Email Personalization?
Email is still one of the most effective channels to grow and maintain your business. You can't go on marketing for a week without hearing about the importance of adding your email address to your marketing material.
However, there is more to email than simply putting it on all of your branding and marketing collateral. To excel at email marketing, you need to understand how best to send such emails, such as personalized ones—email personalization.
Email personalization is the process of tailoring email experiences to each customer. These experiences may include product recommendations, incentives, discounts, and more!
For example, if a recipient has opened an email from your organization in the past, you can send them information that is more interesting to them than it would be to other recipients.
When the recipient opens your message, they will see the content that corresponds with their specific interests. This can lead to higher engagement and open rates for you, as well as fewer unsubscribes for them.
Why is Email Personalization Important?
Personalized emails are incredibly powerful for letting you be more relevant to your subscribers. They allow you to craft a message that is more likely to resonate with the subscriber, thereby increasing the following:
Increases deliverability
The main reason for implementing personalization is to increase the likelihood that each subscriber will receive emails you send. Deliverability is often the biggest challenge faced by marketers today. You must do everything possible to ensure that your emails get delivered without triggering spam filters. It's hard enough to convince subscribers to sign up for your list in the first place. You want to avoid sending off-putting or too many emails as ISP filters constantly look for spam emails.
Increases conversion rates
When you create content that speaks directly to your audience, they are much more likely to convert. Some e-commerce stores have seen up to a 25% increase in conversion rates by personalizing their email experiences.
Increased retention and satisfaction
Personalized email interactions are much harder to replicate. Customers are more likely to continue returning because your emails have made them feel valued and satisfied with their experience.
Increases engagement rates
With personalized emails, businesses can create a unique user experience for each customer which helps drive increased loyalty and increase time on site resulting in higher website traffic.
Start Sending Personalized Emails With These Tips
Personalized email campaigns are a great way to make a connection with your audience, and this is the best way to do it. But how does it work?
It's not enough to write one personalized email to everyone who visits your site. You need to write several versions of the same email.
The goal is to have every person who receives the email feel like you wrote it just for them. That means considering their name, where they live, what they did on your website or any other information that might make the email more relevant to them.
To get started with personalized emails, you need to start from the basics. By understanding the foundations, you can be sure that your message will come across in the best way possible.
1. Optimizing Your Subject Line
According to Campaign Monitor®, emails with subject lines that resonate with your target audience are 26% more likely to be opened. From a marketer's perspective, subject lines are a no-brainer, but for a non-marketer they may find subject lines as not important.
Your subject line is the first point of contact when a recipient receives your email. It is your only chance to persuade your recipients that your message is worth reading. This means, getting it right can make a huge difference.
Remember to use action-oriented words to entice your recipients. You must avoid having too long or two full sentence subjects. You need to remember that you also need to test and optimize your subject lines as it has a sizable impact on your open rates.
The goal of optimizing your subject line is to identify what variables or elements will make your audience view and respond to your email.
2. Using Custom Fields
When you're sending marketing emails, you're not just writing to one person—you're writing to a whole list of people. This means that your emails should be as customized as possible.
How can you do this? One way is by including custom fields in your email.
Hi @firstname, {first name} or [first.name] are just the beginning of using custom fields. Custom fields allow you to send different messages to different recipients based on their information. For example, if your product is a learning management system that offers content in different formats for companies and you want to use a recipient's first name with the fallback term "future game changer". You can definitely customize these fields with the help of your marketing and sales funnel software. Or if you need to send an email about a deal for new customers, and someone signs up to your site and buys a product, you'll want to thank them. If you use custom fields, you can include this personalized message for this purchaser without changing the rest of your email.
As you can see, custom fields are the holy grail of email personalization. They allow you to add tags based on subscriber field data. It also allows you to modify certain areas of your content to help you reach your audience more accurately. They allow you to get into specific segments of your contact list.
3. Offer dynamic content
People are busy, and if you can't get your point across in a single email, it's unlikely that they'll stay on the page long enough to read through your entire message. The more dynamic your emails are, the less likely it is that people will give up before they finish reading what you have to say.
Sending an email with links to multiple pages of content is not ideal because it's difficult for people to follow. You can make your emails more dynamic by using dynamic content in your email campaigns.
Dynamic content is used to send emails with links to different content based on a particular individual's unique profile. You can change sections within your email to make the entire campaign more relevant and more appealing to subscribers. Similar to the idea of custom fields, dynamic content offers will help you gain more opens and clicks.
An everyday use case for this is the example we mentioned previously. Let's say you're a clothing line, and right now, the campaign you're running is for father's day. Then you can change certain portions of your email to make it more relevant to fathers. By dynamically flipping the content of your email based on the demographic data—like male or female, you are sure that each saw the most appealing products that would persuade them to make a purchase.
Dynamic content allows you to send the customer an email with a link to view all father’s day offers available online in this customer's size and color preference. In addition, you could also include links for alternative products that might be of interest based on previous purchase history or articles that have been read by this specific person.
4. Don't forget the visuals
What is the first thing that you look at when you receive an email? Most likely, it is the graphic or image. This is because people are naturally drawn to visuals.
The truth is, including an image in your email is a powerful way of increasing click-throughs. Research shows 80% of people are more willing to view and finish reading an email with visuals. People are more inclined to read emails with images as opposed to those without.
Let's go back to the previous father's day example. So it's father's day, what are the usual father's day photos? Dads hugging their wife? Dads with beers? Well, it can go on and on in many ways. By making the images in our email campaign personalized to the subscriber's role during father's day, you are more likely to receive more clicks and sales.
Adding images to your emails should be standard practice if you want to optimize your campaigns. They show your readers that you care enough about them to include relevant information that they might find useful or interesting. It also shows that you have taken the time to design a personalized email for them.
Using personalized images has also shown to drive significant engagement. Because we process images 60,000 times quicker than text, when we include personalization in the image, it triggers a pattern interrupt. This generates more mindshare, and delivers that moment of wow.
Are You Ready to Wow Your Recipients with Personalized Emails?
Personalized email campaigns are significantly game-changing when appropriately used. It's important to remember that there's no one-size-fits-all approach to personalized emails. But once you get it right and find the right mix for your audience, you are likely to bring your business more opens and better relationships with your customers.
About the Author
Ahmad Benny is a London-born lover of technology, e-commerce, and digital marketing. He is passionate about learning, researching, and curating value nuggets to save you time, money and help you achieve your goals. You can learn more on his website: https://benguonline.com.
