Success Factor Personalization: Strengthening Customer Relationships in Email Marketing

Online communication is becoming increasingly personal. This is especially true for email marketing. This marketing channel is ideal for directly engaging with your target audience, building a relationship with them, and maintaining it over the long term. The challenge: Every email recipient has unique interests, needs, habits, and goals, which are often time-sensitive. Only those who understand and cater to these individual characteristics will be successful in email marketing.

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

The Prerequisites for Personalization in Emails

Let's establish one thing upfront: An email tailored uniquely to each person is neither possible nor effective. Personalization in emails is not about creating one-of-a-kind text for each user. Instead, recipient groups are defined to receive individualized content (such as salutations, featured products, etc.). This content is integrated into a standard newsletter framework and sent to the appropriate target audience at a specific time.

By defining different recipient groups, you can minimize scatter losses, increase the conversion rate, and ultimately boost your revenue. However, to send your newsletter subscribers perfectly tailored newsletters, you need data. The good news: For email marketers, gaining access to relevant data is no longer a hurdle. Various tools and tracking systems allow for a detailed picture of users. Audience segmentation can identify interests, needs, wishes, etc., and these insights can be used for your email campaigns.

Applications of Personalized Emails

Personalized emails are utilized in various fields. The following are some potential use cases.

Autoresponders

With autoresponders, you can send your users automated notifications. Besides classic out-of-office emails, you can also use such emails for your newsletter campaigns. For instance, you can set up a multi-part welcome series. New newsletter subscribers receive additional emails besides the regular newsletter after signing up, within a specified timeframe. How you design such email campaigns, content is, of course, up to you. Possible content includes 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 to present offers to your newsletter subscribers that other users and customers do not receive. By doing so, you give your subscribers a sense of exclusivity, which positively contributes to customer loyalty. To increase the click and conversion rate, prepare various offers for your subscribers.

Offer Products that Match User Interests

Modern tracking systems capture, among other things, the products viewed by visitors and cart contents. Based on this information, you can offer users similar products via email. However, for this feature to be used, the user must be logged in while browsing and adding items to the cart.

Cart Reminder

It often happens that users add items to their cart but leave the online shop without making a purchase. To encourage these users to complete their purchase, you can send a reminder email. This retargeting measure promises significant revenue potential as these users are already familiar with you and have advanced far into the purchase process.

There are numerous reasons for shopping cart abandonment. An abandoned purchase doesn’t always mean the product is unimpressive, or the purchase process (payment method, entering payment details, shipping options, etc.) is too complicated. Besides losing interest, causes can include a disrupted internet connection, technical issues, or distraction from friends or family. To identify abandonment reasons, you should analyze abandonment behavior.

Congratulations

When completing a purchase, customers typically provide personal details like their name and date of birth. You can use this information to send subscribers a special birthday email, for example, with personalized birthday offers.

How to Personalize Your Emails

Once you have analyzed and defined potential fields of application for personalized emails, the next step is operational implementation.

Use Data Analysis Systems

To send a personalized email to your recipients, as mentioned earlier, data is required. Many email service providers offer statistics for this purpose. You can also use other web analytics tools. Naturally, you should respect data privacy when collecting and evaluating data.

Personalized Greeting

Personalized addressing can be considered a standard in email marketing. However, there is a caveat: The automatic personalization of names in emails is no longer a novelty and hardly impresses recipients anymore - but omitting it isn't an option either. Therefore, if possible, add other personal touches to your email campaigns.

Pay Attention to Your Audience's Language Style

If you're doing email marketing, you need to address your leads, customers, etc., accurately. If your business targets a diverse audience, each group requires a specific approach. Tailored communication includes not only style but should also align with interests, age, and origin. A 40-year-old father living in a rural area speaks differently than a 23-year-old student in a city.

Align Content with Your Audience

When you define different recipient groups that should receive separate emails, you, of course, need to create individualized content. This includes not only text but also graphics and images. The visual design of the newsletter significantly influences its overall performance. Different age groups, genders, and interest groups are differently affected by the visual presentation of the content.

Allocate Sufficient Staff for Content Creation

To send various personalized emails, you need a sufficient workforce capable of creating the relevant content. Don't underestimate the workload. Therefore, during the strategy phase, conduct an audit to assess the available resources and consider which staff you can assign to your email campaigns.

Utilize Professional Email Marketing Software

To personalize your email campaigns as much as possible, you need software that can associate each personalization element with a previously defined recipient list. The software you use must be capable of processing complex conditions and delivering the "right" content to the "right" recipient.

Personalization Pitfalls

Personalizing your newsletter and other email campaigns can positively impact your business. However, there are pitfalls you need to be aware of and avoid.

When choosing an email marketing tool, ensure that it can handle special characters like umlauts (or, if targeting other markets, the specific characters of the respective language). For international email campaigns, it may be necessary to rely on different providers.

If you're offering individualized texts, you'll likely work with placeholders at various points. These are also a source of embarrassing mistakes. When using placeholders, pay close attention to the correct coding. A missed bracket can have severe consequences, such as addressing users with the technical placeholder command instead of their names.

Respect Data Privacy

It's never been easier to collect, evaluate, and reuse sensitive data about your audience than today. However, many of these opportunities conflict with privacy laws. Violations can be costly for you. When collecting and using data, ensure privacy compliance. Exercise special caution with U.S. providers and seek professional help if necessary.

What We Can Do for You

Do you want to enhance your email marketing and offer your newsletter subscribers better service and tailored offers? Want to minimize scatter losses and increase your revenue? We will work with you to develop a sustainable marketing strategy, plan and create tailored newsletter content, and evaluate success. Contact us.