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The power of email personalisation

The power of email personalisation

The power of email personalisation. Consumers have come to demand and expect relevant and personalised content and experience, both online and offline. Before we get into it just pause for a moment, and consider all the ways you are different to everyone around you.

Everything from physical attributes to what you do, and how you do it. Next taste, what do you like that you siblings would run a mile from? No two people are ever that alike no matter how much they might protest otherwise.

To meet those demands, marketers are striving to leverage email personalisation to move toward 1:1 experiences that not only meet, but exceed consumer expectations and set them apart from the competition.

That’s why it’s not surprising that, when asked by Campaign Monitor to prioritise one capability that will be most important to marketing in the future, 33% of marketers answered: “personalisation.” Furthermore, 74% of marketers say targeted personalisation increases customer engagement, and they see an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalised experiences.

The basic personalisation tactics, like personalising an email subject line, as well as more sophisticated techniques like using dynamic content or behavioural data based on how consumers are engaging with your brand, delivers phenomenal reward. Marketers at every level and ability can reap the benefits of sending more relevant and personalised messages that get results.

What is email personalisation?

Personalisation, in the context of email marketing, is the act of targeting an email campaign to a specific subscriber by leveraging the data and information you have about them. It could be bland non-descript information like their first name, the last product they bought, where they live, how many times they log into your app, or a number of other data points, but it could be much more sophisticated, like predictive personalisation identifying imminent and future purchases using their previous impressions (what they click on, for how long, how many times they return, hover over, put in their basket, previously matching purchases etc) and buying habits. 

Personalisation is a broad term, and it can vary in sophistication. Basic email personalisation includes tactics like using a subscriber’s name in the subject line, while more advanced tactics can include changing the content of the email based on a subscriber’s gender, location, or other things you know about them. The distinction in a study by Yieldify is difference of a few extra percentage gains to a massively greater return!

Personalising your email campaigns is a proven way to increase your open and click-through rates and can have a measurable impact on your ROI and revenue. Studies have shown emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened than those without, and Rich Relevance found that revenue is 5.7 times higher in emails that employ personalisation.

These results stem from the fact that personalised emails are more relevant to each individual subscriber. Instead of receiving a campaign with generic offers and messaging, each subscribers will receive an email that is targeted directly at them, includes their name, and provides offers (products, promotions, etc.) that are relevant to their interests.

By this we don’t mean segmenting, we shall explain why. Segmentation is where you group a bunch of customers together , usually because it suits your ability to send the same product item to. Such as a blouse “all women between 30- and 55”, en primeur release of a particular wine to “55-70 year old men”. 

Imagine instead you could not only make these distinctions without needing to pay the salaries of the staff to segment or analyse the audience, but could make it to identified an individual lady who has a penchant for that particular brand/size/style for the blouse, who by her buying habits was most likely to buy one this month. Or, in the case of the wine, to a lover of that particular winery/chateau, and taste always ran to that grape at this time. Which do you think would achieve a far greater result?

The power of email personalisation

Advanced Sophistication Email Personalisation Tactics

Marketers with specific use cases who may be utilising customer journeys and automation, as well as other, more advanced tactics, can employ personalisation techniques using data from other sources to create a highly personalised experience. They may be capturing data about consumers via their email service provider, CRM, e-commerce platform, website behavior, and other third-party applications.

Marketers with this rich data can employ behavioural segmentation creating dynamic segments based on a consumer’s engagement with their brand via multiple channels, or install a plugin SaaS, such as SwiftERM, which runs alongside any existing ESP to deliver this for them.  This a game changer for more advanced marketers because it takes the constant, manual data management aspect out of email segmentation and personalisation. It’s the foundation for a highly personalised strategy.

Elements included:

Product recommendations

By integrating a customer’s recent purchases or browsing history into their email marketing, marketers can leverage customer behaviour to create relevant, engaging email campaigns that boost purchases through cross-selling and up-selling product recommendations that are merchandised to each unique recipient in your email list.

Retailers and e-commerce sites can now easily create real-time, one-to-one targeted content that speaks right to the individual to create a long-term relationship and increase the lifetime value of that customer. The hike in customer lifetime value (CLV or CLTV), and average order value (AOV) are enormous.

VIP loyalty

Sephora, a cosmetics company, uses marketing automation to automatically send a series of special offers to their best customers once they’ve reached VIP status, which is triggered by a spending threshold.

Using automation, they take their customers on a personalised journey, tailored to each subscriber’s behavior. For instance, if a customer reaches VIP status, they receive a different email than a customer who doesn’t reach the spend threshold.

Sephora then continues that journey based on how the customer engages with each message. This kind of segmentation allows marketers to deliver the most relevant message to each subscriber, driving stronger engagement and revenue.

You can use integrationswith systems like Shopify to leverage the powerful customer data to create targeted, timely email marketing campaigns.

Purchase abandonment

Every online retailer and e-commerce company knows that, just because someone puts an item in their shopping cart, doesn’t mean they’ll purchase it. The digital shopping cart abandonment rate is 74.3% worldwide. That roughly translates to only 1 in 4 carts become derelict.

Whether the consumer had second thoughts, got distracted, or simply ran out of time, it’s nice to know that you can still try to get the customer to come back using email marketing and automation. SwiftERM is auto-triggered if this happens and an average of over 60% recapture suggests it is a highly significant and worthwhile practise. This element within the system can be switched-off, should alternate facilities be doing the same job.

Wrapping up 

Personalising your email campaigns is a proven way to deliver incredibly targeted and relevant content to your customers and prospects, adding value to their experience along the way, greater CLV and average order value. In return, you can drive much needed increased ROI and revenue for your growing business.

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