With the scale of marketing and communication activities that we carry out, we have an abundance of data at our fingertips which can be harnessed to make emails more personalized, tailored and appealing.
Why is ‘personalization’ so appealing and so important? Because it builds relationships and it helps you connect with your peers, your customers! Then why aren’t you opting for ‘personalization’ in your emails? Did you know that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates? It’s astounding and yet 70% of brands fail to utilize it well.
There are emails and there are ‘Emails’. Which one is yours?
Your customers get hundreds of promotional emails every day and most them go unopened, unnoticed and the reason for this sorry picture is your emails just don’t cut it! Why? Because they are not personalized. Email Personalization is currently being incorporated only by a miniscule number of brands. As surprising as it sounds, email personalization is not new to marketers. Then why aren’t they using it? Because they don’t know how to.
Email personalization breathes life into your electronic communications. In today’s digitally-dependant world, a touch of personalization goes a long way in cementing long term relationships with your customers! Personalized emails have a 29 percent higher open rates and 41 percent higher click rates than emails without any personalization.
And it is not all that difficult. Trust me, you will knock yourself when you see how simple these techniques are!
1. Create Buyer Personas
Not all users are the same nor are their requirements. And so, sending a common email will only make them feel ordinary and just-another-one-from-the-crowd. Create separate, commonly observed buyer personas of your customers depending upon their browsing behaviour and buying patterns. Send tailored emails to these buyer personas with content pruned to their requirements. For eg: newsletters, blogs, white papers, Personalized Feeds.
2. Ask the Right Questions
Your customers do not have all the time and patience in the world to actually open your email and understand what you are trying to say. Use the subject line to ask the right questions upfront. For instance, if you are selling special Cake Jars for Christmas, your subject line could say,
“Visiting Loved Ones this Christmas? Carry one of these Goodie jars with You”
Some more examples,
“Trick or Treat! What are you going to be this Halloween?”
“Some handpicked local tours for this vacation, just for you”
3. Use Location, Time and Language
Regional personalization works really well when you have a wide variety of customers spread across different geographies. Use the local language, etiquettes, time and important events to schedule your emails.
4. Let them know that you missed them
Sometimes customers do not come back to your website for a very long time. Send emails to such customers, reminding them that they have come back to them. Your email content could be on the lines of:
“ Hey,
It’s been 5 days since you logged in last. Is it something we said or did? Didn’t our services satisfy you the last time you availed them?
What went wrong? Come back! We miss you!
Team XYZ”
5. Use Behaviour Triggered Emails
Behaviour triggered emails act like the ‘always there’ companion for your customers. Use them periodically as per customer’s browsing or transactional behaviour on your site. Like, shoot them an email when they sign up on your site or when there is a login from an unknown computer!
While you are at it, check out the free trial by Juvlon, which will help you with email automation techniques to send out your personalized email campaigns.