Last week I started a series on how to make your email marketing strategy more effective. That first post covered the overall strategy. This week, we delve into the first of several tools you can use to increase your open rate and get more people to buy: email personalization.
There is a long-running debate over email personalization in the marketing world. Should you do it, or is it seen as cheesy and trite?
Personalization is here to stay in the online marketing world. Email personalization should be part of your marketing strategy, as your subscribers and customers have come to expect it.
Yet, 70% of brands do not use personalization as part of their email marketing strategy.
Sounds like a missed opportunity to me.
What Is Email Personalization?
Most people think of it as “Hey Insert your name here” at the top of an email.
This is a personalization function in most ESPs and CRMs. Basically, it’s a form field that pulls information from a subscriber’s record and inserts that data into an email. In this case, it would be that person’s first name.
A lot of marketers consider this “so 2000s” and don’t want to do it anymore.
I will point out that, according to a blog post by Marketing Land, “personalized promotional emails were shown to lift transaction rates and revenue per email 6 times higher than non-personalized emails.”
Email personalization goes further than a subscriber’s name. We’ll explore different ways to personalize a subscriber’s experience in this blog post.
Why Does Email Personalization Work?
There is an idea in marketing that the word every person pays the most attention to is their own name.
That’s why you see so many emails that start out with “Hey Insert your name here”.
Let’s be fair. If you are in the middle of a large crowd of people and someone shouts your name, do you look?
I do. Most people do. Even if they have a common name like John or Elizabeth.
We’re all trained to respond to our own names, whether we hear them or see them written out.
Therefore, something as simple as seeing your own name in an email subject line is bound to catch your eye.
For example, Danny Iny of Mirasee is trying to attract my attention, because I haven’t opened any of his emails for a while.
Ramit Sethi is reminding me of why I signed up for his emails in the first place.
These are just a few of the examples I found in my email swipe file.
Even if you don’t include a subscriber’s name in your subject line, you do at least want to acknowledge them and call them by name as they start to read your email.
Look at the difference between these two email introductions:
Which one is your eye drawn to?
Mine is drawn to the second one, which includes my name. Granted, it is my name, which does make it more appealing to me. But it also “feels” better overall, because somehow “Hi there” feels more artificial, even though I know the first email just used the information in a form field to fill in my name.
You can use most of the data you collect from your subscribers from your opt-in form in your emails this way. That’s why a lot of companies try to collect as much information as possible.
However, a lot of people won’t fill out a form that asks for a lot of information because they feel it’s intrusive. A standard best practice is to collect as little information as possible when someone opts into your list.
Asking for someone’s email address is a necessity. It’s also fairly safe to ask for their first name or whole name. Anything past that may be pushing it. I personally recommend only asking for additional information on your opt-in form if you really need it. As you build trust and authority with your new subscribers, you can ask for more details.
Making Your Emails More Personal and Flexible
Liquid is a dynamic templating language that was originally created by Shopify for use in its platform. Several ESPs and CRMs use it as part of their platforms to make email personalization easier.
You can write one automated email and add Liquid language to customize that email to each specific subscriber, without rewriting the email several times, based on tags or segments.
Depending on your platform and what it allows, you can use Liquid to:
- Insert information about a product or service your customer purchased.
- Send an abandon cart campaign that shows a subscriber exactly what they were about to purchase and urges them to come back and finish their transaction.
- Customize the content your subscribers see, based on their interests.
- Tell subscribers when to watch for a specific email in an automated campaign, even when the date or time they receive that campaign will vary.
- Reference other emails your subscribers have opened.
- Create urgency with dates and times based on when an email is sent, not an arbitrary date.
- Personalize calls to action based on what a subscriber or customer has already done.
Depending on what you’re doing, you can also add Liquid to broadcast emails for some of the same functions.
This may sound like you need a developer to help you with your emails. It’s not that bad. In fact, many ESPs and CRMs make it as simple as possible for you to use Liquid for email personalization within their systems.
For instance, here is the window you would use in Drip to include Liquid in an email. All you have to do is choose an option and it is automatically inserted.
Other Simple Email Personalization Tips
These are tips to use on “your” side, more than they are for your subscribers’ information, but they make your emails more personal and help build the relationship between you and your subscribers.
Use Your Own Email Address as the “Reply To” Address in Your Emails
This shows that there’s a real human being behind these emails. Would you rather see a legitimate email address in the “Reply To” field, or are you okay with no-reply@randomcompanyname.com? I know which one I would prefer.
This also gives you the advantage of getting email responses directly to your inbox (or whatever inbox you will check regularly for “company” emails,” so you can follow up quickly. Again, this builds trust and authority and reassures your subscribers and customers that you’re there to help them.
Use Your Own Name and Email Signature in Your Emails
You are the head of your company. Even if you’re not the person responding directly to emails, your subscribers and customers feel reassured that someone “at the top” is listening to what they have to say.
I also recommend that your support team use their own names and info in their email signatures, so your subscribers and customers get to know these people and feel like there is a “real person” there to help them when they need it.
Use Your Own “Voice” in Your Emails
Lots of companies adopt a more formal company “voice” that anyone can adapt to. However, people respond to personality more than they do to a “professional voice.” Your subscribers want to know who you are and how you behave in the world. Go ahead and “be you” in your emails.
Honestly, I’ve had clients who tell me it’s okay to swear in their copy, because their CEOs do this all the time. That’s the kind of personalization people are looking for when they’re building a relationship with a company.
For the record, I don’t advocate swearing in your email copy unless this is part of who you are already. Don’t do anything you wouldn’t do naturally.
Use These Email Personalization Strategies to Increase Your Open Rate and Get More Sales
Each of these strategies will work on its own to make your email marketing more effective.
I recommend choosing one to start with and testing it to see how it works, then adding another. That way you know exactly what works for your audience, as well as what doesn’t.
If you’re stuck for ideas to write about, click on the button below to download your copy of 30 Subject Lines to Keep Your Subscribers Opening and Reading Every Email now.
Even if you write to your subscribers every day, you can cycle through this list over and over again, using different topics each time.
Next week, I’ll talk about segmentatio#simplero-landing-page-220698n and how that can help you put the right offer in your subscribers’ inboxes at the right time.