Strategies for mastering personalized email marketing
We are all inundated daily with emails, DMs, pings, texts, and more, with every one of them demanding our attention. Some of these messages we’ve asked for. Others are spam. The overwhelming nature of it all makes us as recipients collectively harder to reach.
This is why email marketing personalization is more than just a nice-to-have for an email marketing program. It is quickly becoming table stakes.
Recipients now expect nearly all the offers and ads they receive online to be tailored to their interests and desires, regardless of channel. This is no different from the email messages they receive from brands.
Whether it is declining repeat purchases, withering conversions per message, or Gmail thinking your messages are spam, the best fix for email marketing challenges is most often one that makes sure as many recipients as possible are getting what they want.
The most effective way for marketers to deliver what recipients want is through increased strategic personalization. This guide is here to empower you, the marketer, to create more personalized emails for deeper engagement, higher ROI, and better deliverability.
The power (and benefits) of personalized email marketing
Any email deliverability professional will tell you that sending messages recipients want and find engaging is the key to getting email messages delivered to recipient inboxes. At its core, email personalization strategies help marketers move beyond blasting the same message to each recipient in their database.
By using data to send the right message to the right recipient at the right time, marketers who deeply personalize messages greatly increase the likelihood that their messaging will resonate positively with the recipient.
Just as importantly, senders focusing on personalized messages over batch and blast strategies send way fewer messages to recipients who are likely to report the message as spam or simply not engage.
Improved open rates
One of the first benefits marketers see from increased investment in personalized email messages is higher open rates. While open rates are nowhere near a perfectly accurate measure of success, senders personalizing messages often increase open rates by up to 20%.
These types of increases tell senders that higher percentages of mail are reaching inboxes and that those messages are resonating.
Higher click-through rates (CTR)
Along with increased open rates, click-through rates for deeply personalized messages can be up to 30-40% higher compared to batch and blast marketing. While also not a perfect measure of human engagement, higher click rates are yet another good sign that mailbox provider spam filters see your recipients being more and more positively engaged.
By increasing click-through rates, marketers can drive more traffic to their websites or apps, allowing for even more accurate insight into future personalization opportunities.
Increased conversion rates
Of course, the most meaningful benefit most senders see with investments into personalized messaging is more conversions per message. Personalized online experiences are increasingly the norm and messages that feel irrelevant do more than just fail to meet recipient expectations — they erode engagement and loyalty over time.
The more senders rely on sheer volume increases to increase the raw number of conversions, the less efficient those messages become. This messaging inefficiency is the exact type of overarching negative signal that spam filters quickly pick up on.
Put bluntly, sending too many messages to unengaged addresses greatly increases the likelihood of future spam filtering.
Strategic personalization in terms of both targeted content and message timing increases the rate of conversions per message allowing marketers to optimize marketing efforts confidently without harming their brand’s ability to continue delivering email to the inbox.
What we mean by personalized email marketing
By this point, you might be wondering what is meant by strategic, meaningful, and deep personalization.
The more a message is tailored to the recipient’s individual wants, needs, and behaviors, the more effective it is likely to be at both increasing conversions and creating the types of signals that inbox providers and spam filters like to see.
Meaningful personalization requires data. However, improving personalization doesn’t have to be a data science exercise. Senders who include personalized product recommendations based on past purchases, special birthday offers, or even by providing early access to special offers to the best customers often see quick improvements in overall conversions per message across all email sending.
Triggered messaging, such as abandoned cart messages or a lead nurturing series, are extremely effective at improving the recipient experience. As you refine your strategy and collect insights, optimizing and deepening personalization strategies becomes more data-driven and much less a matter of guesswork.
Mastering customer data for personalized email marketing
For many marketers, easy, actionable access to data remains the biggest challenge when it comes to personalized messaging. With so many marketing tools at a brand’s disposal, it is still too common that the data those tools produce is siloed and difficult to combine without strong SQL skills or regular, involved access from a data team. This is where a CDP can be an email marketing game-changer.
CDPs, like Simon Data, give marketers a centralized, complete view of each recipient, along with segmentation tools that allow for easy use of data points outside of standard contact fields and email engagement data.
"The most effective and simplest way for marketers to respond to the challenges they face today is to use the data available to identify and deliver the messaging and offers that each recipient is most likely to want."
Personalization becomes much more effective as marketers utilize data points like purchase information and purchase dates, website visit data, typical email engagement times, etc., to deliver a wanted, engaging experience to their recipients.
The difference between “Hello, {first_name}” and crafting customer journeys that account for many facets of recipient behavior and lifecycle often lies with how easy it is for the marketer to make the data connections. CDPs are all about data connections.
How to build your personalized email marketing strategy
The first step in improving and growing your personalization strategy should always be an audit of the data points you have at your disposal and what those data points tell you about your recipients.
- Do you have any conversion data you can use such as the recipient’s purchase dates and history? These can be hugely beneficial data points for identifying which recipients might be most responsive to which offers.
- Can you segment your audience based on purchase frequency and recency? If so, aligning recipient content and recipient frequency strategies becomes much simpler.
- Maybe you know which addresses have opened an email recently and which ones haven’t? You can still use that data point to inform what content you send and how often you send it to different cohorts of recipients.
- Are there data points that you could collect moving forward to make this work easier in the future?
All of these things are made much simpler and effective with a CDP, but many are still possible otherwise with a little creativity.
Identified data points tell you more about your recipient’s wants and behaviors. You can create a general outline of how you want to utilize those data points and what you expect them to do.
I suggest highlighting three general areas of personalization strategy:
- Content selection
- Lifecycle journey building
- Audience segmentation
Personalization is almost always thought of in terms of content — and for good reason. We live in a world where algorithms know with shocking accuracy what offers to serve us and when. Recipients largely expect the same from email.
You might not have Gmail’s algorithms at your disposal, but you can start thinking more like them. Here are some ways to do so.
Use customer purchase history to create personalized messaging
If you offer different products or services to customers, a great place to start is to consider what purchasing one product over another might tell you about a customer’s future needs and how you might provide the types of content that help them along their journey toward the next purchase.
You probably already have the data you need to begin doing this, but if not, common sense can go a long way.
Collect zero- and first-party data to make informed decisions
If, for example, you collected specific interest information from subscribers when they signed up for your email program, use that data to focus the offers you send based on what that recipient wanted when they signed up for your mail.
Find ways to build into your email collection processes ways to get important feedback from subscribers. Asking the right questions when a subscriber provides their email address to your brand can be invaluable information for personalization decisions.
A/B test and experiment with personalized content
Test different types of content between different cohorts of recipients to learn how recipients at different stages of the customer lifecycle engage with different types of messaging and calls to action. Likely, calls to action that most resonate with new subscribers or customers are not as engaging to a customer who purchased a year ago and vice versa.
As you consider sending content and offers that are more tailored to different recipients or types of recipients, also consider different types of receiving journeys your recipients will experience based on their behaviors.
Tailor your email marketing campaigns to the customer journey
Thinking in terms of journeys might feel new to email marketers, but each recipient is on their own journey over time with how they relate to your brand or product. If you can identify patterns in how recipients change their engagement behaviors over time, you can start to optimize your content specifically for those cohorts of recipients.
Remember: No one is more engaged with your brand than a new customer. Personalized post-purchase journeys can help customers get the most out of your product or service while encouraging greater brand loyalty.
You can also use conversion data with email sending data to understand how recipient engagement changes over time. For example, identifying customers who’ve purchased in the last 12 months are much less likely to make a repeat purchase when they’ve gone through more than 45 email messages without engaging.
This means you should consider changing both the content and frequency of messaging for customers that are nearing that engagement mark. This type of personalization strategy is a much more effective and less risky way to re-engage recipients than a batch and blast re-engagement campaign.
Or, perhaps you see evidence in your data that a significant portion of seemingly unengaged recipients make a repeat purchase around 14 months from their last purchase date. This insight could lead you to fashion-targeted content designed for recipients as they approach that date to help increase the rate of re-engagement and repeat purchases.
Segment your customers for maximum personalization
Finally, consider how you can segment your audience in personalized ways. Not every recipient needs every message across every communication channel a brand utilizes.
For recipients who do not engage with email, sending them more emails is rarely the answer. Try SMS or push notifications with more targeted calls to action designed to re-engage them.
You’ve probably heard of send time optimization as a strategy, but send time personalization is even more powerful. Use event timestamps to identify the cohorts of your messages that typically engage several hours after the message was delivered so that you can make sure to send messages at relevant times rather than your blast getting buried in the inbox.
Reward your most loyal customers with earlier access to offers, better deals, or even more thank yous. Being treated specially from time to time can build the type of brand engagement that lasts. Loyalty programs go a long way, especially when the content is deeply personalized.
The key to success with email personalization is listening to your recipients and continually optimizing based on the data you have. The more granularly you can analyze your data, the more accurately and granularly you can personalize all aspects of your messaging strategy.
Utilizing a tool like a CDP simplifies this work in ways that enable marketers to make analysis and optimization decisions with far less assistance required from data teams, fewer third-party consultants, and without the need to learn a new skill or query language.
Conclusion
The current reality of email marketing is one where sending high volumes of the same message to all of your recipients pleases neither your customers nor inbox providers or spam filters.
Customer expectations of personalized brand experiences are only growing in sophistication. Mass batch and blast sending increasingly create types of negative signals, such as unengaged recipients and spam complaints, that spam filters consider signs of unwanted mail and cause for increased filtering.
The most effective and simplest way for marketers to respond to these challenges is to use the data available to identify and deliver the messaging and offers that each recipient is most likely to want.
If you don’t currently use a CDP, now is the time to explore how they can help you get the most out of email and your other messaging channels. Simon Data’s CDP gives marketers the power and tooling to deepen messaging personalization strategies and execute sophisticated, data-driven customer journeys without a PhD in data science or having to be a coding expert.
While Simon Data can bring the power of a CDP to almost any email-sending platform your brand uses, we also offer Simon Mail, an email-sending engine purpose-built to help marketers get the most out of their data for personalization and email segmentation. To learn more, read our guide.
