7 ideas for personalization of emails

Today, everything is about making things as personal as possible.

Nevertheless, many people do not get to use the many exceptional opportunities that lie in adapting content precisely to the individual recipient.

It may be because you have not collected a sufficient amount of necessary data, or it may be a lack of knowledge.

Email Marketing is still one of the most effective marketing channels today. Studies have repeatedly shown that ROI (Return on Investment) on email marketing is sky high.

Imagine how much extra you can get from your email marketing if you make your content tailored for the individual recipient based on behaviour or past actions. It will ensure higher Open Rate and Click Through Rate and ultimately meet multiple goals – while providing a new and more meaningful communication with the target audience.

Remember also that the more data you have collected about your email contacts, the greater the chance to hit with personalization in your email marketing.

Below follow examples of how you can make your newsletters more personal and achieve better bottom line results:

1. Insert the recipient’s name in the subject field 

It is a very small thing, but at the same time, something that has a relatively large effect: When you insert the recipient’s name in the subject field, the interaction with the recipient is much more personal and in the subconscious of the recipient it will look like the email really is styled directly for the recipient.

Studies have often proved that Open Rate is significantly higher with the name of the recipient inserted in the subject line. A study from Marketingland has proved a 26% higher Open Rate in emails where the name of the recipient was inserted. However, this figure is different depending on the industry.

An example is this email:

As a recipient, you immediately get the impression that a little extra has been done by creating an email personally to one, just as it gives the impression that you have a personal conversation with the sender.

However, make sure that you have a good control over your data. In the following case, both the “real” name, but also middle name are included in the subject. This may seem annoying to the recipient of the email.

When collecting data, it’s important to request – and use – the correct data, so you do not end up serving content that looks incorrect or even unprofessional at times.

2. Use dynamic content

By using dynamic content in your emails, you can modify the individual elements in your emails to the individual recipient. Not all email marketing platforms have this option, but this is possible in MarketingPlatform system. Here is an example where a given field gets dynamic content if the recipient has opened an email marketing campaign within the past 3 months:

The options of customizing the content to the individual recipient and making it highly personal are endless.

For example, adjust the content if one is male or female, if one has children, if one has pets, if one has made a purchase in the past 4 weeks, if one has previously bought a specific product or from a specific category etc.

3. Send emails at the right time

It is impossible to say exactly when is the best time to send an email to the recipients. It depends on many factors, for example, in which industry the recipient works. If one works internationally, one must also take time zones into account.

However, with the many emails that people receive at work or privately, one can with big advantage use some time to research when people actually open the emails that you send to them. For this purpose, use the statistics tool in your email marketing platform or an analysis tool like Google Analytics to learn when your target audience has the highest Open and Click Through Rate.

4. Behaviour-based offers

The behaviour a visitor exhibits on a website is very useful in email marketing. If a visitor of a website has visited a category page, a product page or added an item to the basket, but has not made a purchase, you have an option to target the visitor with a good, personal offer, as long as the visitor has been logged in via his/her email address, or the visitor’s way is otherwise tracked via his/her email address, for example, by filling in the email address in the check out flow.

Here is what shapeit.dk does if you have added an item to the basket, and have not completed a purchase: 

Here one should consider taking into account various factors, so that one does not necessarily just hand out discounts on the first given opportunity. You can include elements such as “time on site”, “number of visited pages”, “used internal search feature” or other parameters, that give an indication of commitment and seriousness on the site.

5. Make the company’s communication more personal

There is a tendency for people to often respond better to communication that has a personal sender rather than the company as the sender. There is generally a greater desire to open emails, which seem to come personally from a real person rather than the company without a real sender.

Therefore, insert a person’s name as the sender of the email as done here:

Be aware that some mail clients shorten the number of characters available, so remember to test how the email looks in the different mail clients.

If you want to go a step further, you can personalize the email further by adding an image at the end of the email as Unbounce has done here:

And to spice it up a little, you can add a signature along with the image in order to give an extra credibility.

 6. Wish happy birthday

Few things are so personal as one’s birthday, so it is logical to use this option if one has birth date of the person. Give a small gift in the form of a discount code, free shipping, VIP membership, a special video greeting or something else.

See how Trendsales has made their birthday greeting that will be sent on birthdays:

7. Use marketing automation for personalization

Marketing automation is absolutely perfect to use in the process of creating content personally in emails, because it is exactly with marketing automation that one can ensure that actions are automatically performed based on a personal action. For example, it could be like in the case above with birthday, but there are many more examples. Some examples are:

– Send automated email when the customer has purchased for more than X euros and give the person VIP membership
– Send automated email to the customer 1 month prior to the customer’s child’s birthday (assuming that you already have this data, of course) with a reminder that it is time to buy a birthday present. Remember of course, to use the child’s name in the reminder email to make it even more personal.
– Send automated email to the customer when a service update of the equipment the customer bought is available, or when there is a new version of the equipment in stock.