Humans' ability to have selective attention is experienced in everyday life; if you were out in a sea full of people, the only way to get your attention would be for somebody to call your name. Another example of this is that the only way to grab your attention when scrolling through social media is if it is something that relates to you personally or has an emotional tie of some sort. This is transferred to email marketing as well. If there is a sea of emails in your inbox, the ones that stand out are the ones that "call your name." This is where personalized emails come into play, filtering out the clutter and gravitating towards emails that grab your attention. This can be seen through imagery, subject line, name personalization, birthday-specific emails, etc. There are many ways that personalized emails are integrated. A platform that uses a similar method is Instagram, and they discover what type of content you most interact with and then alter your feed to consist of more content that it thinks you would prefer. It not only catches the follower's attention, but Instagram also benefits from increased clicks and interactions. Similar to personalized emails, the company sending the email is taking products or your viewing history and altering your email to catch your specific interests.
What are Personalization Emails?
Email personalization is the ability to create a unique customer experience. Typically, it involves subscriber data to individualize emails based on previous preferences. Personalized emails can target specific customers with limited-time offers, relevant content, or product-related information.
Within Personalization, it can be a broad term, or it can hold a more cultivating method. For example, the basic level of personalization emails includes the subscriber's name in the subject line, whereas a more cultivating email would be based on gender, location, preferences, previous interactions, etc.
The average person spends about 147 minutes a day on social media; this can also affect their outlook on emails, expecting those to be personal too. Email personalization creates an email specifically for a consumer's interests, which increases site traffic. Personalization is a great way to increase open and click-through rates, which have a measurable impact on ROI and revenue.
Personalizing the subject line:
When creating personalized emails, there are three levels in which email personalization can be displayed. We can consider all the basics in the first level, such as inserting a contact property. An example would be the subscriber's name in the subject headline in the inbox. Many companies may include the subscriber's name, but including the name in the subject line will likely increase your open rates as you will catch your subscriber's attention.
Segmentation and Personalization:
With this level of personalized email, you tailor the experience to subscribers based on their previous interactions with your product. This increases their interest and likelihood of engaging with the email or going directly to your website. With segmentation, you can go deeper than superficial emails, creating an individual experience for subscribers based on interest, demographics, and other data you have collected from their previous interactions. Seventy-two percent of consumers state that they only engage with personalized emails and expect brands to accommodate and meet their personal needs.
Time Matters!
A huge factor of personalized emailing is the I am to which the email is sent. It is a great practice to look at the engagement of the user on your website or their open rate with previous emails to determine the most active time to send an email. Determining hi there, your customers are early morning risers and scroll through their emails before work or school through the emails before they go to bed. It is essential to determine when to send the email for the best interaction in opening rates. Another factor to consider is time zones; being aware of the audience and their time zone is critical.
The Five Best Practices For Sending Personalized Emails
Define your goals
Determine what you want the outcome of your personalized emails to be. Whether to build customer loyalty or find prospective clients, the approach needs to be clean and clear.
Collect the right data
When a consumer is signing up or giving you their email address, it is a great time to include additional questions about interests etc. If you have a B2B subscriber, you will definitely want to know more about their short-term needs, what their business encompasses, and where they are located (time zone). That way, you can structure those personal emails. In other cases, there may be B2C subscribers; in this case, birthdays, an accumulation of points, locations, and preferences are essential to send a tremendously personalized email.
Identify your target audience.
See the world in the customer's eyes.
Understanding your customers' needs and frustrations by doing research
Using data about your target audience's online behavior, likes/dislikes
Implementing email personalization techniques to match your customer's wants and needs4.Use friendly-form names
Emailing is one of a company's highest forms of communication – why not make it personal? When a consumer sees something unique to them in their inbox, their click response and click interaction rate is much higher.
Use email personalization's fallbacks.
Customer Reach Out - Reaching out to customers to get their attention back on your product is critical. You can do this in a few ways.
A coupon code for something that is abandoned in your cart
Offer for something a customer looked at but didn't purchase
Email asking why they abandoned their cart
Follow-up emails! Typically, three days after their visit.
Add "Recommendations for You"
A great way to create email personalization techniques is to recommend purchases or action based on the consumer's past interactions. Amazon's "Frequently Bought Together" or "Users also purchased" is a real-life example. Users typically appreciate the recommendations if they have purchased a similar product.
Optimize your landing page; email personalization aims to create traffic to your product or service. Catching the attention is one part, but keeping the watch is another; these emails aim to convert viewers into customers. To do this productively, ensure the correct landing pages are linked throughout the emails.
A picture paints a thousand words; in email, personalization using imagery allows marketers to build a connection with customers and has the potential to influence their purchasing decisions. Keeping the text short and catchy is vital as people now skim through emails out of convenience; an image creates more interaction.
Examples of when to use email personalization
Order confirmation emails
Password reset emails
Welcome emails
Onboarding emails
Personalized product recommendations
Personalized content recommendations
Personalized data visualizations
Rewards/loyalty program emails
Birthday/anniversary emails
5 Great Examples Of Personalized Emails
Etsy
Why this is Great: This targets a customer who has previously interacted with or purchased something similar.
There is also a discount that is bolded on top right next to the term “Your favorite” putting these two terms together is one of the best practices for getting a customer to interact with the email.
In addition, the original price is crossed out, and the new price is now bolded, allowing the customer to see the price easily and not have to make the effort of deducting the 15%.
This example is excellent at how a customer’s previous interaction and search behavior can re-engage them into a potential customer.
Sephora
Why this is Great: Sephora did a great job by personalizing their generic birthday email to include her name and how many
points she has and have it specifically sent on her birthday. This is an excellent example for brands to achieve customer reactivation – using the fixed birthday to generate interest in products they have already spent money on or expressed interest.
Ticketmaster
Why this is Great: This email is an excellent example because of the location-based events; not only has it shown you events in your location, but it gives the option to see multiple events coming up in the future. In this email, Ticketmaster makes it very visual and simplistic to draw attention to three things they are trying to get across to their audience, their location, purchasing tickets, and what band is playing, emphasizing not to overcomplicate. This personalization method is excellent for a company to deliver more relevant messages between leads or existing customers.
Spotify
Why this is Great:
When subscribing to something in this day and age, it automatically generates what you have previously expressed interest in. With Spotify sending these personalized emails based explicitly on subscribers’ interactions, it creates a significant relationship between the app and the individual. Spotify has done this over the past years and has created a momentum of subscribers to get excited and anticipate these emails. Music creates a very emotionally tight impact on an individual as they can relate it to emotions, the situation they are going through, etc. In addition, Spotify typically wraps the year. They are sending a recap per individual before the new year begins so they can have a reflection on it. These types of emails stand out precisely because it makes the subscriber feel as if they are being rewarded for listening to Spotify music.
If you look at the bottom of this image, it asks the subscriber which song is their number one—again, creating excitement in viewing their email. After that, it states, “dig in this into the music that made your year,” emphasizing that they’re showing that Spotify takes into consideration and cares about your interest.
Alaska Airlines
Why this is Great: Alaska does a great job in this email, targeting the individual and almost haunting their customers by showing them what they can’t have. It reminds someone who is a frequent traveler or recently taking a trip of their activities and makes them want to plan for another. Explicitly mentioning that the customer has not opened an email from Alaska in a while, it uses an image that is not only eye-catching but is to be considered the “dream” life.
If you look at the bottom, there is a button for March deals; this is a strategy to offer something unique to a user who has recently engaged with Alaska Airlines—essentially giving your audience motivation to take the next step into booking a trip or even interacting by seeing the prices. This then sparked the idea of places they would like to travel, bringing the retention back to their website.
Within personalized emails, there are many ways to reach out to your consumers to create that stream of communication. We have examined different approaches to personalize emails, as well as a dive into some comparisons as well as how to integrate personalized emails into your company’s outreach. Looking at the examples above does a great job of breaking down what each company has done to create retention with either previous customers or customers who are at once interested. Personalized emails are only continuing to thrive and evolve even more than adding a first name in the subject line. With the current access to data, email marketers are becoming equipped with the ability to become even more personal with subscribers or customers.
Personalized email doesn’t start when you create the template to be sent out – it begins when you obtain leads and track their habits. Observe their place in the sales funnel and make an effort to engage with the customer at a time you will benefit from. Once you determine the factors, the creativity of writing the email comes into play.
Using the mail softly platform, you can personalize emails based on multiple variables, such as first names, last names, company, title, and signature. With this platform, you can create a template that is customizable per person. As mentioned previously, it is essential to send out an email that is customer specific, standing out in the sea of emails, especially on big sales, birthdays or company events. For more information, you can check out: https://mailsoftly.com/personalized-email/ or https://mailsoftly.com/.
Why this is Great
Spotify
Why this is Great: