Personalized content—everyone is doing it: 74% of marketers say that personalized content increases engagement and can generate up to six times the revenue per email.
Using email personalization is a great way to resonate with your subscribers. When you send your customers content that matters to them, you build trust, boost sales and increase your ROI. It makes sense that everyone is doing it these days.
But in an oversaturated inbox, how can you ensure that your emails go beyond {firstname-fix!}?
One word: data.
How data helps drive personalization
Data exists to help you make better-informed decisions when it comes to your marketing. By looking at the behavioral and demographic patterns of your customers, you unlock valuable insights that allow you to connect with them on a much more personal level.
And with so many ways to collect information on your customers (hint: it starts with your sign up form), there’s a massive opportunity for marketers to engage their customers with better targeted and relevant communications.
How to use data to personalize your creative
Send personalized recommendations
Using data from past purchases to influence future decision-making is a great way to provide consistent value to your customers. Take this email from Netflix for example:
(Image via Really Good Emails)
By sending personalized content recommendations based on their browsing history, you can make smarter predictions about what they’ll buy in the future—and entice them to keep paying for your products or service.
Don’t think that you need a subscription-based business to take this approach. It works just as well for retail brands (take Amazon, for example), and can totally apply to digital marketing materials as well (think ebooks, courses or webinars).
Use automated emails to motivate activation
Nearly 60% of users who sign up for a free trial or service will use it once and never come back.
Activation is one of the most important steps in getting new customers to start seeing the value of your products. Personalizing the onboarding experience to reduce the amount of friction it takes to get set up can make a world of difference.
Let’s take a look at this example from Meetup:
(Image via Really Good Emails)
The user clearly intended to utilize the service—they went through the steps to create an account and input their information, but never followed through. Maybe they got stuck somewhere in the process. Or perhaps there were too many steps and they planned to finish it “later”.
Sending a personalized note can help motivate users to finish the setup process. Good support is key to improving activation and building trust with your new customers. This is a great opportunity to invite questions and conversation that can help improve your activation process.
Implementing a personalized lifecycle sequence, based on actions that your customers take, can be a huge step forward to improve your activation rate and increase ROI.
Step up your subject line game
Emails with personalized subject lines have 26% higher unique open rates than non-personalized emails.
But that doesn’t mean you have to keep things on a first name basis—a great personalization tactic is to tailor your subject line to include other demographic information, like location or birthday. You can use this information to send relevant messaging, like location-specific offers, news or exclusive deals.
Your subject line isn’t the place to go crazy on the personalization. A light touch helps to show your subscribers that you know them beyond their email address and could help improve your open rates.
Start making better creative
Each of your customers is unique and interacts with your brand in many different ways. Great personalization starts with understanding who they are and what makes them tick.
Take a page from The Behavioral Marketing Playbook and learn how to use behavioral marketing to track your customer’s interactions with your brand, from recently browsed items to products added to their shopping cart—you’ll even find examples of how to bring these ideas to life! Download the eBook here.