How can personalisation improve your email marketing strategy?
With the increased expectancy for personalised marketing communications, it is imperative to send customers content that is relevant to them. Below we show you how personalisation can improve your email marketing strategy.
What is email personalisation?
When it comes to email marketing, personalisation can be the make-or-break between a sale or repeating sales. But what is email personalisation? It is the practice of using customer data to create variations of emails that are tailored for each customer as an individual. This could be anything from including a customer’s name in the opening greeting line, to showcasing relevant items that a customer may be interested in. If you have GDPR compliant customer data, it would be silly not to utilise it in your email messaging.
Examples of using personalisation in emails.
Personalisation will look different for everybody because we all have different target audiences and sectors that we operate in. With this in mind, here are some examples that should give you an idea of the possibilities when implementing personalisation into your email marketing strategy.
For one UK hotel chain, the analysis and unification of customer data made it possible to identify a customer’s likely future booking points. A large amount of these tended to be around 5 days after a customer returned from a holiday. In addition to this, a significant amount of people booked accommodation whilst actually being on holiday.
The reason they were successful in targeting people at these points was due to referencing the relevant events in their email content. To elaborate, if you send a marketing email to a client about booking their next holiday whilst they are already sipping cocktails on the beach it can look uncoordinated. However, if you reference that you hope they are enjoying their stay at “chosen hotel” and here are some holidays they may enjoy next year, then it will be treated in a positive fashion.
An online retailer specialising in pet food found great success with email personalisation. They were able to use customer data to segment people based on whether they had a cat, a dog or both. This information could be used to significantly improve the outcome of the retailer’s marketing activity. For example, marketing messages that were targeting cat owners were supported with images of cats, and vice versa for dogs. The results were impressive.
Customers that received messages supported with images relevant to the pet they owned were 3 times more likely to result in a click-through than those that were sent generic imagery of pets. An even more interesting discovery was that when cat and dog owners were targeted with tailored imagery, they were 6 times more likely to click through than those that were sent generic imagery.
What are the benefits of personalising emails?
An instant benefit that you will see from personalisation is customer engagement with your email messages. If you specifically build the messages you send to fit your customers’ needs it will make them feel valued. Ultimately this will make it more likely for them to interact with your emails.
Another benefit you will enjoy is increased brand loyalty and repeat purchases. Customers are more likely to buy from a brand if the messages they receive are personal to them. For example, if a customer just bought a new snowboard they probably wouldn’t want to be sent marketing emails that are promoting skiing lessons. Relevant messaging will increase conversion rates.
In addition to the obvious benefit of increasing sales, another positive impact you could see is Increased customer satisfaction. If the emails you send people are checking all the right boxes, you will see a great rise in happy customers. This has a snowball effect and could lead to an increase in positive reviews left by customers that are impressed by the way they were communicated to.
To sum it up
Email personalisation can greatly improve your relationship with your customers and how your brand is perceived. If you want to improve the outcome of your marketing activity, email personalisation is the perfect way to start. If you are interested in personalising your messaging and automating your marketing activities, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
