Personalized Email Marketing: 9 Strategies for Success

What is email personalization?

Email personalization is an email marketing strategy that businesses and marketers use to give their audience content customized based on several factors, including actions recently taken on their website, recently purchased products, and where users are in the customer journey.

Personalized emails use customer data and email automation to lead subscribers through the customer journey by giving them a more personalized experience.

The benefits of email personalization

A personalized email can make your customers feel special, but it does more than that. The benefits of email personalization and sending targeted emails include the following:

Increases open rates

Customized emails don't only focus on the email's body; you can personalize your subject line to increase open rates. Personalized emails with personalized subject lines have a higher open rate because they easily capture the recipient's attention by standing out in their inboxes.

Boosts customer engagement

Personalized email campaigns have higher engagement rates than generic ones, which means more people are opening, reading, and taking action on them. Personalized emails increase the likelihood of someone clicking a link to your website, giving you more opportunities to convert.

Improves relationship building

Customers want a more personalized experience with brands. Unfortunately, you can't meet with all your customers in person when you're running a business, but email personalization can help. Even though you're sending everyone the same offer or types of content, emails can still appear personal to customers, helping you to improve valuable customer relationships.

Your customers want to feel like they matter to your business, so even something as simple as remembering the customer's birthday and sending them special offers can help.

Drives sales

Email marketing aims to drive sales and revenue. Email personalization offers increased open rates and engagement, so users are more likely to click a link back to your website, giving you more opportunities to convert subscribers into customers. In addition, since personalized email campaigns allow you to build relationships, customers will be more likely to purchase your products and services because they feel more connected to the business.

Email personalization tips

Email personalization goes beyond adding a subscriber's name to the email; there are several things you can do to make your customers feel like you wrote your emails just for them.

1. Segment audiences

Segmenting your audiences is the best way to provide personalized content that resonates with subscribers. You can segment your audience based on recent purchases, actions taken on your website, and demographics.

Segmentation allows you to divide customers into different groups based on common features to help you determine who you should target based on what factors. For example, you can target individuals who have recently purchased the same product by sending them other product recommendations.

2. Use automation

If you want to make audience segmentation easier, using automation can help. For example, you can use a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to automatically group customers together based on actions they've taken on your site.

A good example of automation is cart abandonment emails. If you're an e-commerce business, you could be losing revenue due to abandoned carts, and one way to increase your revenue is to target subscribers who have left something behind in their carts and didn't finish the checkout process.

Cart abandonment emails are automations that allow you to target individuals who are interested in your products to remind them they've left something behind. Your emails can entice these individuals to finish the checkout process by providing them with an offer or deal for completing their purchase. In many cases, a simple reminder that they've abandoned their carts might be enough to bring them back.

3. Create dynamic content

Even if you're using email templates, your content can still be personalized based on the audience. Dynamic content allows you to send the same email campaign to your subscribers but personalize emails based on different factors.

Dynamic content can be changed automatically based on the audience receiving the email. For example, you can use dynamic content such as first name fields to use a subscriber's first name in the email subject line or body content.

You can also take dynamic content further by creating content for different audiences. For example, if you're a pet product company, you likely sell products for cats and dogs. Dog owners won't need to see content for cats, so you can send cat and dog owners the same email campaign but tailor the content to meet their needs. In this example, a dog owner would receive an email about dog products, while a cat owner would receive an email about cat products.

4. Don't forget birthdays

The best way to build relationships with customers is to remember their birthdays and send them an offer they can use to buy themselves something special. Birthdays are special occasions, and something as simple as sending someone an email offer around their birthday can help them re-engage with your brand.

5. Recommend products

The goal of email personalization is to increase revenue, and one of the best ways to do that is by recommending products to customers who have already purchased from your website. Popular personalization techniques for e-commerce businesses include product recommendations.

You can automate emails to be sent out to customers who purchase particular products to show them others they may also like. You can also send reminders about products they recently viewed but didn't add to their carts.

6. Personalize sender information

Personalizing sender details can help you stand out from other emails in someone's inbox because it humanizes your brand and showcases its unique identity. In addition, personalizing emails will make them less generic to entice subscribers to take action while building relationships with your business.

The sender information is your business' email used to send marketing emails. Remember, subscribers want to hear from real people, so personalizing sender information by putting a name on your emails can increase engagement.

In addition, updating your sender information gives customers access to someone who can answer their questions about anything in your customized emails.

For example, suppose a B2B business sends an email as part of its sales cycle. In that case, customers may want to discuss opportunities directly with a person instead of receiving emails from an email that might not be connected to anyone in particular. In this case, they could reply to the email to set up a phone call, making it easier to keep them in the sales funnel.

7. Send re-engagement emails

Re-engagement emails allow you to connect with subscribers who haven't taken action on your website in a while. For example, if someone purchased a product from your site last year but hasn't returned, you might send them a re-engagement offer to entice them to visit your website again.

8. Collect data

Personalized emails aren't possible without customer data. You can collect customer information in several ways, including having a form on your website where individuals sign up for email communications in exchange for a deal or collecting contact information when users make a purchase on your website.

Whatever you choose to do, you need customer data for personalized emails. At the very least, you should always collect names and email addresses.

9. Create personalized content

Personalized content means knowing your target audience. Consider your brand identity and personality instead of sending general emails that may be too formal. Your emails should match your branding to be friendly and recognizable.

In addition to adding customers' names to emails, personalized content can help you connect with them by showcasing your unique brand voice to make the experience more personalized and unique. For example, a children's toy brand will have a different voice than a financial advisor, so always know your audience and how subscribers expect you to talk to them.

Make your audience feel special

Personalized emails can make your audience feel special to improve relationships with them and drive sales. Personalized email is more effective than standard email marketing practices alone, allowing you to improve upon your strategy and connect with customers.

Mailchimp's email marketing software makes it easy for you to create personalized emails to target specific audience segments and help you build better relationships. Try personalized email marketing with Mailchimp's all-in-one marketing platform today.