Personalization Tips for Your Email Marketing Strategy

Look, we all know that email marketing campaigns are sent to dozens, if not hundreds, of people. But a little extra effort can make your subscribers feel like you’re speaking directly to them. In this post, we’ll discuss why personalization is the best way to stand out in an inbox and how to get started with personalization in your emails.

Personalized email marketing is when you send a targeted, subject-specific email to a relevant segment of your subscribers.

In an ocean of email, using personalization is a great way to help your email stand out and communicate directly with your reader, and personalization is also a great way to boost your all-important open rate.

Let’s take a look at some tips on how to get personal.

Start by deciding what you want to collect on your email marketing web form, aka, sign-up form. For example, “websites plus marketing” from GoDaddy has a customizable signup form that you can incorporate into your social sites. What type and how much data you collect depends on your goals and your relationship with your subscribers. For instance, if you’re a membership organization, you can get away with collecting more data than say, online clothing retailers.

You want the signup process to be quick and painless. So keep data collection at a minimum to avoid scaring off would-be subscribers.

Next up segment your list. Customer segments can be created from just about anything, for example, location, demographic info, or common interest.

You get the point. If you’re just starting out – and you don’t have a lot of info to create customer segments – consider sending your current contacts a survey. There are tons of free survey tools online. Once you have your survey responses, you can create segments, split them in the list and then import them into websites post marketing. Now start thinking about ways you can personalize.

For example, you could send an email to subscribers who live in a specific area about events only going on in their neighborhood. Or you can send content related to your subscribers’ interests. If you’re a pet retailer, you could create a dog-loving email and send it to your dog-loving customer segment and then flip it and send it to your cat lovers too!

Timing a personalized email to a specific event is also popular, like sending your subscribers a greeting and a coupon code on their birthday. Start your emails off with a personalized greeting using your subscriber’s name and then add any subscriber-specific info into the body text.

The secret to all this customization? Personalization tags. They’re similar to mail-merge tags which are little codes you enter into your emails to personalize the content with data points you’ve pulled from your subscriber list. So for a personalized greeting, your text may say hello, “first name” where the first name is pulled from your subscriber list. And if you’re missing a data point you can always add a fallback to your tag.

When you include a fallback in a personalization tag, it displays a logical generic word instead of leaving the space blank. So, for example, if you didn’t have a customer’s first name, you could display customer or friend.

Hopefully, this post has given you plenty of tips on how to get personal with your subscribers.