Take email personalization beyond first name

⏱ 5 minute read

Marketing master Seth Godin famously says, people don’t want email, they want me-mail. Getting an impersonal email is just about as exciting as getting a “Dear Occupant” letter back in the snailmail days. The sender has shown they don’t care about you, so why should you care about them?

Contrast that dismal experience with the great feeling people get when the sender has taken the time to personalize their message. You’re addressed by name, shown products you might like, and maybe you get a coupon for that item you had your eye on the last time you visited the sender’s website. Strangely enough, people like to be treated like, well… people.

Buy The Numbers

If you’re wondering whether investing in email personalization is worth the effort, check out these data points:

• Marketers have experienced a 760% jump in sales when using personalized experiences via segmented email campaigns
• There’s a 26% greater chance that people will open emails with personalized subject lines than those with generic To and From lines
• Enhanced customer acquisition: fitness company Nuffield Health increased their conversion rate from 1% to 8% by personalizing their emails (that’s an 800% increase!)

But Ya Gotta Do It Right

It can be challenging to build a strong customer profile with segmented information and create ongoing personalized emails — especially when you might not have access to developer expertise. But thanks to advances in email marketing platforms, it’s easier than ever to foster meaningful relationships with prospects and customers. Let’s look at how you can differentiate your email marketing by employing savvy strategies that speak directly and personally to your target audiences.

So, Just What Are These Magical Personalization Strategies? 

Some companies call it a day once they’ve inserted the recipient’s first name into their email greeting. That’s good news for you, because it creates a huge opportunity for your powerful personalized messages to rise above the noise and get noticed. The magic happens when you implement some or all of the following strategies:

• Personalizing subject lines dynamically based on specific buyer criteria to create interest and increase your click-through rate
• Showing a “From” line with a person’s name rather than a company name: 68% of Americans say the sender’s name plays a big role in their decision whether to click on an email 
• Automatically triggering tailored emails at specific buyer journey milestones. For example, if ‘subscribed’ is true for the recipient, then they’ll get a specific greeting, and if ‘not subscribed’ they’ll get a different greeting
• Showing customer suggested items based on purchase history or interests, which has the potential to increase sales
• Referencing a recent purchase or interaction to keep top of mind with the customer and lead them back to your site
• Reminding customers about their wishlist items to provoke customer engagement 
• Including personalized invoices as a convenience factor for customers
• Including personalized loyalty information, resulting in increased customer retention

As you’re probably starting to realize, this is just a partial list, but hopefully you’re imagining how personalization can be used in your own business.

Putting Theory Into Practice 

Let’s consider a couple of simple use cases. Say you’re a real estate company and wanted to reach out to a customer who is searching for rental properties. Using your customer history, you can touch on saved searches, their location and their budget to show them similar properties they might be interested in or missed. 

Or, maybe you’re an online retailer that offers customer loyalty programs and you want to engage your customer by showing them what they can get with the number of loyalty points they’ve accumulated. And, if they’re not already a loyalty program member, personalization increases the likelihood that they’ll respond to a program sign-up CTA.

OK, OK — Personalization Sounds Amazing. Where Do I Start?

So now you’re convinced that personalization can transform your email campaign results — how do you go about putting it into action? Right this way…

Invest in a great CDP. A customer data platform (CDP) is a central component of email personalization. This type of packaged software, such as Segment or Tealium, creates a ‘hub’ of customer data points that goes beyond your regular CRM. CDPs can leverage diverse customer data — from transactional and behavioral to profile and product data — to create an accurate and unified customer profile. Marketers can then use that information to reach out to customers based on where they are in the customer journey. 

Don’t try this at home. A CDP is a great start; now you need to learn how to effectively use all these juicy customer insights to create a highly personalized experience in your email campaigns. If you try to hack together a solution, it gets messy fast. And, if you’ve ever tried to build an email template from scratch, you know it’s a crazy amount of work. From designing to coding, testing and troubleshooting, creating personalized emails is not a quick process. Plus, the more personalized you get, the more time and resources it takes. And what if down the road you want to make more edits based on insightful data that could increase sales? There goes another month of waiting for a developer to edit the code while you potentially lose revenue. So, what’s the solution?

Let someone else do the hard work. Look for an email production platform — such as Dyspatch — that lets you easily update templates with personalization. Ideally, the platform should allow you to add variables and conditionals via markup language built into content ‘blocks’ that are easily updated in a visual editor, or with a few simple code changes. You can then focus your time on the (much) higher-value task of creating personalized and dynamic content. In short, your email template platform should make it easy to focus on creating outstanding — and standout — content that your target audience will love.

Are You Ready to Start Personalizing Your Emails in Half the Time?

Dyspatch makes it simple to build sophisticated and highly personalized emails without using custom code. Its powerful markup language allows you to create dynamic email content, just the way you want it. Visit us today and discover how easy it is to create engaging and effective email personalization.