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8 Tips for Personalized Email Marketing

personalised email marketing

Emails that have the most effect on subscribers are usually very distinctive, personalized and engaging. Creating such personalized emails can improve the overall return on email marketing investment. Research shows that email campaigns that are personalized can improve email click-through rates by 14% and increase email conversion rates by 10%.

By going above and beyond to create email content that caters to the specific need of individual subscribers, brands not only increase sales but also build an army of loyal customers. If you would like help to create personalized email campaigns for your business, it is wise to get in touch with an email marketing agency. They will help to drum up your sales by creating email marketing campaigns that are unique to your business. Consider these eight tips for personalized email marketing campaign.

1. Understand the real interests of your subscribers

There is absolutely no point sending out emails to people who are not interested in the content you have taken time to create. From the moment you chose to collect their email address, you must know who they are and what they are interested in. An easy way to do this is by giving them a list of things that they might be interested in and asking them to select. Another method is by selecting two or three different target audience categories that the brand caters to. After this, you select the kind of content you would like to send them, then ask them to choose the category they fall into. This way, you can have an idea of who they are and what they want to read about. This would have a positive effect on the percentage of emails that are opened and engaged with. Ultimately, this will help the brand to increase sales through email marketing.

2. Experiment with timing

The timing of an email can determine how effective the email campaign would be. While some might enjoy getting emails in the morning, others might prefer it only on weekday mornings or weekend mornings. Some others might even prefer to get emails at night-time. The objective is to ensure that more subscribers open their emails. Having started with understanding who your subscribers are and the kind of content they would want to read about, brands can allow subscribers to indicate days of the week and times of the day that they would prefer to get emails. This can save you the stress of carrying out several tests in order to determine the best time of day in order to create optimal results.

If it is not an option to ask your customers directly, brands can carry out different tests by sending out emails at different times and days of the week to know the timing that gets the best response. It is also important to note the time zone of the country of each subscriber – this is particularly the case for brands operating across international communities. If you have a subscriber in a location whose time zone is different from that of your business, you must work with the subscribers time zone. This means ensuring that emails are sent to them at the right hours of the day. The goal of doing an a/b test with email campaigns is to understand the exact time that subscribers respond to emails sent, and ensuring that subsequent emails are sent within that time frame.

3. Use behavior-trigger emails

Facebook, as well as several other big and medium-sized brands, make use of behavior-trigger emails. These are very personalized automated emails sent to subscribers who have not interacted with their website in a long time period. This could be less than a week or more – depending on how frequent the business wants subscribers to interact with their websites. Top marketers like Neil Patel claim that behavior-trigger emails can increase the open rate to about 152% and convert online window shoppers to lifetime shoppers.

4. Content should always be personalized

Personalizing email marketing content goes beyond just putting the subscriber’s name in the email body or subject line. It is about being very thorough about the kind of content sent out to each subscriber. Subscribers should be grouped based on interests, and emails content should be drafted based on their interest also. Asides from interest, consider the locations of the subscriber and create supporting content like images and GIFs that reflects their location. This could be as simple as putting the national flag of the country as an icon somewhere in the body of the email.

5. Personalize offers and product recommendations

For brands that occasionally have offers, always personalize these offers based on the demography of email subscribers. This projects the brands as being aware of their target audience. People are less likely to interact with brands that create content that speculates on who their audience is.

6. Personalize email content based on gender

Even though the world is still wrapping its head around gender classification, brands can still make use of both main genders to create content that will appeal to each gender. The idea used is that even though two people of different genders might have the same interests, they are not likely to approach or view this interest in the same way. Examples include fashion or travel.

While females might be interested in gowns, tiaras, reception decorations for weddings, males are looking into suits, shoes, and cost-effective ways to have their dream wedding. By creating interest-based content that is streamlined to genders, brands can create more personal email marketing content to get better results.

7. Ditch generic company email addresses for personal ones

Reserve your generic email addresses for other purposes and use a more personal email address to send out email marketing campaigns. Using names of people like Sandy@ ,George@ is more likely to create higher responses compared to generic email addresses.

8. Bond over special days or huge milestone

This is a subtle way for brands to show that they do care about the subscriber beyond the information they wish to share with them. Bond with subscribers over important dates such as birthdays, anniversaries or public holidays. You could even go as far as creating a custom design when sending out birthday wishes to customers.