5 Tips for Advanced Email Personalization

Everyone is aware of loads of opportunities that personalization brings. This comes as a boon to marketers and entrepreneurs to meet their goals and objectives. However, many companies restrict personalization to using a customer’s first or last name. If you are not able to use more information than the very basics, you are not using personalization to the fullest.

Here are five tips to take email personalization to the next level.

1. Customer Personas

Standard practices say that you have to “step into the customer’s shoes” to understand their need and sell your product. This still applies to current marketing trends.

As a customer persona presents you a model of an ideal customer and segments of audience, it’s recommended to create three to four personas. With proper personas, you can send emails that instantly appeal to people.

2. Subject Lines Are the Hook

When you put your subject lines to A/B testing to check which one works well for your campaign, don’t miss on the personalized content in subject lines.

You can include information such as the product name, events attended, and some other content. All of this can be used based on customers’ actions and behavioral patterns.

3. Data From Multiple Sources

More emphasis has to be put on gathering data from various sources. Don’t just stick to sign-ups and registration forms. Venture beyond them. This data can be analyzed to gain insights into the buying behavior of the web visitors. This requires a unified email platform that can be integrated with your website, CRM, and ordering system.

Using a real-time data monitoring tool, you can know the time spent by a customer on the website, the pages they visited, the abandoned carts, downloads, and site exits after few seconds. All these data points help you to understand the needs of a customer at a micro level. Perhaps someone watched an explainer video without initiating a purchase. Keep them on the list to send an email asking for any help.

4. Automation Rules the Day

Autoresponders and canned responses are used by companies to give a thank you note for subscribers. These common courtesies by the companies are not aimed at generating any revenue from the customer. In this milieu, few emails with advanced personalization based on behavioral analysis of customers may open possible cross-sell and upsell avenues that drive the revenue.

If you are smart marketers, you can setup automated messages based on the web visits. Even if they receive the email after leaving the website, it still gives a lot of recall value to your brand. You can even add personalization in transaction and confirmation messages by dropping a few suggestions on additional discounts.

5. Avoid Asking Too Much

Have a lot of data available to offer better personalization to emails. In a mad hunt for data, you don’t need to ask the customers more questions. You can get some information from sign-up forms and some through other inbound initiatives. Try to avoid asking too many questions to fulfill your data goals. The more information you seek from customers, the less likely they will be to complete the forms. So acquire your data with alternative means and focus on growing your relationship.

Email marketing is at the heart of every marketing strategy that aims to generate more leads. The mobile savvy customer is more inclined toward the social presence of the companies; however, email is still the standard to ask questions and get answers in a timely manner. Understand that the criteria to improve open rates and click-through rates is personalization, and give customers what they want at every touch point.