For years, email marketing has proven to be a very effective digital marketing strategy. There have of course been the emergence of other platforms like television, radio, billboards, website advertising, social media, and every other marketing channel you can think of.

However, 80% of digital marketers agree that email marketing stands out as the most effective marketing strategy.

In this tech-driven business world and with automation in place, chances are that marketers can fall into the temptation of setting and forgetting as it concerns email marketing. But the truth is that what you get out of email marketing depends on what you put into it.

In order to maximize your gains from email marketing, you need to synergize your marketing automation systems with a workable email marketing strategy that has the customer’s personal needs in mind.

Here Comes Email Personalization

Picture this!

You’re going down the walkway and someone is trying to reach out to you shouts “hey!”. Chances are that the person might likely not gain your attention. Even if they do, you will feel the disconnect and unfamiliarity between both of you. And there is a high chance 23 other strangers felt they were been called too.

However, if someone calls out your name from the park, you are keener to know who is calling and why the person is calling. This is because you feel someone who knows you is trying to reach out.

That’s how it is with Email personalization.

Email personalization is an email marketing strategy that uses customer data to create more personalized and targeted emails based on data gotten from customers. This has to do with customizing the content based on the customer’s specific and unique qualities like name, gender, location, birthday, interests, recent purchase histories, and much more.

Customers are wary of their inbox being flooded with promotional emails that have nothing to do with them, they are more likely to pay attention when they receive a personalized email. A recent study shows that personalized emails generate 2.5 times higher click rates and they ensure 6 times more lead conversion. In addition to that, 73% of customers are more likely to respond to emails that reached them on a personal level.

A good personalized email starts with the greeting. Instead of saying “Hello, Valued Customer”, you could say “Hello Travis” or “Hello Jane”, or whatever the customer’s name is. This can increase your transaction rate by 600%.

Taking it a step farther, you can customize your call to action (CTA) to something that will interest the customer. For instance, a movie actor and a movie director may have entirely different areas of interest, even though they are in the same industry. Using a unique CTA for these two distinct individuals is more likely to get them engaged with your email and more likely to convert them.

To do this involves a lot of segmentation of customer’s data. The various segment might be:

• Demographics: Information such as name, age, gender, job title, and any other information about your customer’s personality can help to segment and eventually customize emails that reach them at a personal level.
• Click-Through Rates: You can know which customer opens your emails, follows the CTA and eventually buys what you are selling, and the ones that don’t.
• Location: This could help you inform customers about an event happening around them which the customer might be interested in attending or in knowing the full details.
• Interests: You can segment customers based on their purchase history. Most top online stores utilize this segmentation strategy.

As earlier stated, talking about personalization without automation makes it more difficult to achieve set marketing goals. The world is moving at a very fast pace and to match its speed, you need automation tools. Below, we will highlight some tools that can aid in email personalization

1. Dynamic Yield

Dynamic Yield is an email solution that uses customers’ behavioral data to personalize the email. These data include email click patterns, purchase histories, and the activities a customer carries out on your website. It creates templates that contain relevant messages from the uniqueness of a customer’s behavioral pattern.

To get it up and running, you must specify certain basic parameters that will trigger this application to create and cascade emails. You can set the time you want the emails to be sent, the activities – newly published content, cart abandonment – that could trigger the app.

So, when a visitor to your site abandons a process during a browsing session, the app is triggered to send an email reminder to the visitor to complete the process alongside a short link to make the transition process easy for the customer.

2. Yoochoose

This is a tool that helps online retailers create a personalized shopping experience by sending personalized emails with product recommendations and newsletters.

These notifications are automatically prompted by the customer’s transactional behavior. With its behavioral algorithms, it can detect when a customer has recently made purchases or when the customer hasn’t visited in a long time. These behaviors prompt the app to send after-sale and reminder emails respectively.

These notifications are highly targeted as part of a personalization suite which also includes a personalized search and recommendation engine. The algorithms work effectively to decipher the identity of buyers who are frequent in order to offer personalized incentives to the customer based on the customer’s transactional behavior and preferences.

3. Recombee

This is a recommendation engine that uses a machine-learning algorithm to deliver recommendations within 200 milliseconds after the customer’s actions on your website.

This app uses a filtering algorithm to analyze customer behavior like purchases and areas visited and then sends a recommendation email tailored down to the customer’s potential needs.

For new visitors, it uses a content-based algorithm to collect behavioral patterns of a customer. As the customer further interacts with the website, it filters information about the customer for better recommendations.

Final Words

The combination of email personalization and automation has the propensity to take your email marketing to the next level by increasing your relevance, engagement, and drive more revenue for your business.