The days of spray and pray in email marketing are long gone. Today’s customers expect marketers to not just see them as individuals but also respect their individuality. How? By knowing, or at least assuming their needs, interests, and preferences. Here’s where personalized email marketing is important.
Personalized emails don’t just enhance customer experience but also deliver 6x higher transaction rates.

Over the years, marketers have employed email personalization in various forms - from a basic name inclusion in the subject line to customizations as per gender, age and locality. More sophisticated techniques involve evaluating behavioural data and the subscriber’s engagement with your brand to craft dynamic content. All this is to ensure that your recipients don’t just open that one email, but are so delighted with the communication, that it makes them look forward to more.

To keep them excited, interested, and ignited about your brand, here are a few well-tried email customization or personalization strategies you can employ:

1. Grab their attention with subject lines

   Subject lines are your first impression. Email subject lines that are tailored generate an average of 50% higher open rates. For any email to ace on open rates, the subject lines need to generate curiosity.

   • Using numbers is one tactic, as our brains tend to latch on to something distinctly different and specific such as numerics.

   • Speaking in the tone and language of your recipient is another useful method.

   • GDN helps to understand, create, manage and determine the progress of a campaign with the help of Google AdWords.

   • A trick that seems to have worked for most big brands is addressing their subscribers in the first person. Here are a few examples:
     “Happy Birthday Aditya – Surprise Inside!”
     “Reema, this is so you and it’s 70% off!”
     “Weekend treat for your friends (on us)”

   • Apart from this, make sure your lines are conversational as if you were one of their friends they generally catch up with.

   • Another approach is to talk about the pain points. The subject line could be upfront or rhetorical about a specific challenge or a common pet peeve.

   All of this requires knowing your target audience well enough, segmenting them, and using A/B testing to constantly test and fine-tune your strategy.

2. Use content personalized to your audience

   In the battle for Open and Click Through Rates, your content is your conversion weapon. To improve those conversions, personalization goes without saying.

   • Most importantly, content needs to be relevant. Using the data you gather about your customers, craft content that is beneficial to them, evaluate their purchase or transaction behaviors, customize your offers to their preference, and speak from a place of knowledge and influence, yet like an intimate well-wisher. 1 to 1 Marketing with targetted and personalised communication can give up to 101% Click Through Rates, fewer bounces, and fewer unsubscribes.

   • Employ humor that suits. Humor is an excellent way of breaking the ice in any situation - including in your emails, and making your communication feel more personal. A light-hearted tone will make your emails feel like they are coming from a friend. However, you’ll need to keep in mind the diverse sensibilities of your audience.

3. Send emails from a person

   Another winning personalization strategy is to send your emails as a real person, not a business. Research shows that people are more likely to read and find connect with an email signed off with a real name.

   This person can be anyone, from the customer relations head to a sales head or the CEO of the company. So the next time you shoot out an email campaign, sign off from on behalf of a prominent organizational personality. Including a bio profile picture instead of a logo or a monogram also goes a long way in creating brand resonance.
   For bigger brands with huge emailing lists, even a minor spike in the open rates mean a few thousand more clicks!

4. Automate response triggered emails

   When shooting out emails by the hundreds and thousands, personalization is not humanly possible. Enter email automation. As a brand, automation allows you to create potent email triggers calculated to deploy the moment someone signs up for your opt-ins. You can develop email response triggers for various stages and actions within a customer journey – from when they sign up, add to cart, abandon carts, save for later, download your resources, or simply search for something on your website.

   These types of emails serve as a great tactic for making your prospects and customers know that you truly value every engagement. Automation also allows you to stay time-and-location relevant to your audiences. It is also found that automated emails triggered by events generate 5-10 times higher conversion rates than non-trigger based newsletters. It is no surprise then why nearly 82% of companies rely on email automation.

5. Leverage dynamic content and targeted landing pages

   Dynamic content is one of the marvels of email marketing. This inventive way of crafting emails allows you to customize certain parts of your email body to resonate with different target segments. For instance, you can tweak your copy based on the gender and purchase history of the recipient to talk to their specific needs and preferences.

   Another way of driving home sure shot results is by having dedicated landing pages for every email call-to-action. This requires thinking through the recipient’s journey and designing a seamless and cohesive experience – one that will provide that extra nudge to take the desired action.

   Personaliation is a winning strategy in digital marketing communication with 96% of marketers agreeing that it has helped them advance their relationships with customers, and 88% saying they’ve seen a measurable improvement in their businesses with personaliation. Businesses that employ email personalisation strategies combined with the latest industry expertise are bound to see tangible improvements in their email success rates.

   Despite these benefits, marketers don’t use personalization as much as they should. Possibly because they don’t understand it well enough or have faced problems or find it to be cumbersome. That’s when having an agency partner who is experienced in email marketing personalisation comes in handy.

   Urja Communications helps leading organizations across industries create research-driven, customer-centric email marketing campaigns, that help convert leads into long-term customer relationships. To know how we can help you personalize your Email Marketing, connect with us.