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Email personalization is about more than merging in the contacts first name into the salutation, or having dynamic images or text, it’s about building a reputation that your emails are interesting, relevant, and timely. To increase our open rates and engagement, we need to think bigger.
That starts with the messaging
The biggest way to increase email engagement is with content and offers that people actually want to read, not just content you want them to read. An email should not just be an advertisement, and it should not be the same rehashed information found on your website. It should add to the experience and be interesting enough that the next time you send an email, someone might actually find value in reading it versus all of the other annoying emails that flood their inbox on a daily basis.
Then, there’s segmentation
The next way to personalize an email is to focus on segmenting the audience, and when it comes to segmentation, there are multiple factors you want to segment like:
- position in your marketing/sales funnel
- prior web browsing or purchase behavior
- net promoter score
- prior email engagement
in addition to many of the other factors dependent on your industry and vertical.
Finally, there’s timing
Email timing is about making sure to send those emails when a recipient would have a need to receive them. Order confirmations and shipping emails are no brainers, but what about a post purchase review? What about sending a campaign email to someone who is currently receiving an onboarding or welcome series?
You wouldn’t want to hammer them with so much email that they get overwhelmed and disinterested.
Takeaways
There are ways to personalize the sending triggers based on timing and segmentation, and there are ways to make email content dynamic based on the audience, segment, and timing as well.
But when it comes down to it, there’s no magic bullet to email personalization, it’s about building a long lasting relationship and reputation with your subscribers to know that you actually have important things to say to them, not just a plea to get them to buy your stuff.
For people with low deliverability and engagement, we often work with them and go through our rehabilitation process which can be found here:
Digging Out of an Email Deliverability Hole
Need more help driving engagement with your email marketing efforts?