Success Factor Personalization: Strengthening Customer Relationships in Email Marketing

Online communication is becoming more personal. This is especially true for email marketing. This marketing channel is ideal for directly contacting your target audience, building a relationship with them, and maintaining it in the long run. The challenge: Every email recipient has their own interests, needs, habits, and goals, which are, in turn, time-limited. Only those who understand and can cater to these individual characteristics will be successful in email marketing.

Whether it's a newsletter, reminder, or offer email - studies show that personalized emails lead to higher click and conversion rates than messages without customized content. The reason: Recipients feel personally addressed and are presented with content that they consider relevant.

Requirements for Personalized Emails

One thing in advance: It's not possible or effective to tailor an email individually to each person. Personalized email is not about writing a unique text for each user. Instead, recipient groups are defined to receive customized content (which can include salutations, displayed products, etc.). These are integrated into a fixed newsletter framework and sent to the appropriate target group at a given time.

By defining different recipient groups, you can minimize scattering losses, increase the conversion rate, and ultimately boost your revenue. However, to send your newsletter subscribers tailored newsletters, you need data. The good news: Access to relevant data is no longer an issue for email marketers. Various tools and tracking systems provide a detailed picture of users. Through target group segmentation, interests, needs, desires, etc., can be identified and utilized for your email campaigns.

Fields of Application for Personalized Email

Personalized emails are used in different areas. We introduce possible fields of application below.

Autoresponder

With autoresponders, you can send automated notifications to your users. Aside from the classic out-of-office emails, you can also use such messages for your newsletter campaign. For example, you can set up a multi-step welcome series. In this, the new newsletter subscriber receives additional emails at predetermined intervals after signing up, alongside the regular newsletter. How you design these email campaigns content-wise is, of course, up to you. Possible contents include a survey, an exclusive offer specifically for new subscribers, or a detailed introduction to your company and its goals.

Exclusive Offers

Email is an excellent medium for presenting offers to your newsletter subscribers that other users and customers do not receive. This approach gives your subscribers a sense of exclusivity, which positively contributes to customer loyalty. To boost the click and conversion rate, you can prepare various offers for your subscribers.

Offer Products that Match User Interests

Modern tracking systems capture, among other things, the products viewed by website visitors and cart contents. Based on this information, you can offer similar products to users via email. For this feature to be utilized, the user must be logged in while surfing and filling the cart.

Cart Reminder

It's common for users to add products to their cart, but instead of buying, they leave the online shop. To encourage users to complete the purchase, it makes sense to send a reminder email. This retargeting measure promises high sales potential, as these users are already familiar with you and are advanced in the buying process.

There are numerous reasons for cart abandonment. An abandoned purchase doesn't always mean the product isn't convincing or the purchase process (payment method, entering payment data, shipping options, etc.) is too complicated. Beyond loss of interest, it might be a disrupted internet connection, other technical issues, or distractions from friends or family. To identify abandonment reasons, you should analyze the abandonment behavior.

Congratulations

When completing a purchase, customers typically provide personal information such as their name and birthdate. You can use this information to send subscribers a special birthday email, for instance, with personalized birthday offers.

How to Personalize Your Emails

After analyzing and defining potential use cases for personalized emails, the next step is the operational implementation.

Utilize Data Analysis Systems

To send personalized emails to your recipients, you need data as mentioned before. Many email service providers offer statistics for this purpose. You can also resort to other web analytics tools. Make sure to comply with data protection regulations when collecting and evaluating data.

Personal Salutation

The personalized address can already be considered standard in email marketing. However, there's a downside: The automatic personalization of names in emails is no longer a secret and hardly impresses anyone - but it shouldn't be omitted either. Therefore, if possible, you should include additional personalizations in your email campaigns.

Pay Attention to the Language Style of Your Audience

If you engage in email marketing, you need to address your leads, customers, etc., with precision. If your business doesn’t have a homogeneous target audience but addresses different user groups, each target group requires its own approach. Precision addressing involves more than just the language style. It must match not only interests but also age and origin. A 40-year-old family man living in a rural area has a different way of speaking than a 23-year-old student in a city.

Align Content to the Target Audience

If you've defined various recipient target groups that should each receive separate emails, you need to create individual content. This includes not only the text but also graphics and images. Especially the visual design of the newsletter greatly impacts its overall performance. Different age groups, genders, and interest groups respond differently well to the visual presentation of content.

Deploy Sufficient Staff for Content Creation

To send various personalized emails, you need enough manpower capable of creating the respective content. Do not underestimate the workload. Therefore, conduct an inventory (audit) during the strategy phase and consider which employees you can assign to create your email campaigns.

Use Professional Email Marketing Software

To extensively personalize your email campaigns, you need software capable of assigning individual personalization elements to a predefined recipient list. The software you use must be able to process complex conditions and serve the "right" content to the "right" recipient.

Personalization Pitfalls

Personalizing your newsletter and other email campaigns can have a positive effect on your business. However, there are also pitfalls you should be aware of and avoid.

When choosing an email marketing tool, ensure it can handle German umlauts (or specific letters of the respective language if you enter other markets). For international email campaigns, it might be necessary to rely on different providers.

If you provide customized texts, you'll work with placeholders in various places. These are also a source for embarrassing errors. If you use placeholders, pay close attention to the correct syntax of the technical commands. A forgotten bracket can have serious consequences, prompting users to be addressed with the technical placeholder command instead of their name.

Pay Attention to Data Protection

It's never been easier to collect, evaluate, and reutilize sensitive data about the target audience than today. Many of these possibilities, however, contradict German data protection laws. Violations can become costly. Ensure that data collection and usage comply with data protection regulations. Be especially cautious with US-based providers. Consider getting professional support if necessary.

What We Can Do for You

Want to optimize your email marketing and offer your newsletter subscribers better service and individual offers? Want to minimize scattering losses and increase your revenue? Together with you, we develop a sustainable marketing strategy, plan and create tailored newsletter content, and check the success. Contact us.