5 Email Personalization Techniques To Maximize Engagement

We all get a sea of emails everyday from every company we have ever done business with or thought of doing business with. Making your small business stand out in a packed inbox can seem impossible but luckily, it isn’t!

The worst kept secret in email marketing is personalization. Personalization is how you take your generic sends and turn them into engaging and converting assets. Personalized emails get opened more and they get interacted with more.

Personalized emails can generate a transaction 6x higher than regular email sends (Business2Community). 

Likewise, personalized sends by segmented campaigns also have a much bigger yield with marketers noting a 760 percent increase in revenue over generic mass sends. (Campaign Monitor)

These numbers don’t lie. If you want to get the most out of your email marketing program you have to personalize your content to your reader. This means going beyond adding their first name to the subject line!

Here are 5 ways you can personalize your email campaigns beyond names…

Collect More Data

Who are your customers? Right now your email list may be a sea of names and email addresses and not much more. If you are lucky maybe you have some cities and states. Having more information about your customers means you can send them more personalized content.

You can collect more data in a few different ways. First you can do it right at the top by asking a few more questions on your email sign up form. You don’t want to overdo it because then it becomes a barrier but asking things like age and general location will help you deliver better emails.

You can also send out a survey or track clicks across emails to hone down on what your subscriber is most interested in.

If your email marketing program allows it you can also use integrations to push data from other programs into your email client to populate certain data fields. Most email clients have a variety of integrations to tools like Shopify and Salesforce that you may already use to collect client data.

Use Subscriber Tags To Segment Your List

Within just about every email marketing tool is the option to add tags to subscribers to keep track of whatever you want. Use them! You can add tags to denote where a customer is on the buying journey, you can use tags to note their preferences or location or whatever you like. Once you have used the tags enough you will be able to send emails to contacts containing certain tags, making sends much more relevant to the reader. You can also schedule sends excluding certain tags. 

Send Emails Based On Actions

In your email marketing client set up emails to be sent out once a contact triggers a certain behavior. For example if a contact reads an email and clicks a link, set up an automated campaign that will now schedule them to receive another email based on that action.

This is a great way to further engage contacts that are already engaged and an even better way to personalize sends, especially for emails with lots of links. Say you have an email with a display of 6 products with accompanying links. If someone clicks one of those products they should hit a trigger to be sent another email later on with similar content to what they have shown interest in.

Let their actions indicate their interest. You don’t have to schedule out a complicated web of emails either! Simplicity is always best.

Let Subscribers Tailor Their Preferences

Collect data and give your audience some control in one simple action! You can create a page where subscribers can tailor their preferences to their location, age, gender and other interests so they only get emails that apply to them. While there they can choose their own email frequency which will help you when analyzing your open and click through rates overall.

Follow Up With Purchases

If someone has purchased a lawn mower from your company don’t let the communication end there! Create some content that shows them the best way to use the lawn mower or suggest some products to help keep the lawn mower working efficiently.

You can certainly follow up and ask them to leave you a review but following up with useful information is much more interactive and could be useful to your customer.

You don’t have to undertake a huge content building effort to create content for every single one of your products to do this. Choose some of your best sellers or create content that applies to a category of products rather than individual products. Focus on the ones that can be converted for more purchases down the line.

Final Thoughts

The more personal you can make your email sends the better results you will see in return. If you can appeal to your customer’s interests or needs directly you will give your small business a much better shot to stand out in any crowded inbox.