Generic promotional emails are a dime a dozen — everyone’s inbox is full of them. If you want your email marketing to really stand out and drive better results for your brand, you need to incorporate personalization. 

Personalized email marketing can sound intimidating and out of reach when you get started, but don’t worry. Anyone can craft effective personalized email campaigns with the tips and tricks in this guide. 

What is personalized email marketing?

Personalized email marketing is when you incorporate details about your customers in your promotional emails. Instead of sending identical emails to your entire subscriber list, you adapt the content to better suit each customer. 

Something as simple as including the recipient’s name in the subject line or greeting of the email is a form of personalization. You can also use much higher-level personalization according to a customer’s behavior or other factors if you have that data available. 

Benefits of personalized email marketing

It’s quicker and easier to just send the same message to all your subscribers, so why should you bother with personalized marketing? Personalization in email marketing can offer incredible benefits, such as:

  • Better customer experience
  • Higher open and click-through rates
  • Improved cost-effectiveness
  • Higher conversion rates
  • Greater email subscriber retention

Email personalization is definitely an investment, but you will likely find that it pays excellent dividends even beyond the typical benefits of email marketing

Key aspects of personalized emails

There are several crucial components to any personalized email campaign. Focus on the following elements to give your campaign the best chance of success.

Timeliness

To achieve the best results from your personalized emails, you need to strike when the iron is hot. In other words, send out your messages when the recipients are most likely to read and engage with them. 

If you’re sending a personalized welcome email sequence, for example, you should probably send the first message within 24 hours of customers signing up for your email list. Sending the first message right away keeps the customer thinking about your brand and encourages them to take further action. 

There’s no magic best time to send a marketing email that will work for every campaign. Instead, focus on engaging customers when they’ve recently interacted with your brand. 

Authenticity

So many marketing messages ring hollow and insincere. That’s not what you want in your personalized emails or really any marketing campaign. 

Try to write personalized email campaigns that are authentic to your brand voice and tone. Make them sound like they’re coming from a real person who cares about each customer. Not only will this help with brand recognition, but it will also make customers more likely to trust you. 

Relevance

Every customer has unique needs, wants, and preferences. That means the ideal marketing message is different for each customer you have. Personalized email marketing allows you to create customized messages for customers based on the information you have about them. 

Say you want to reduce your cart abandonment rates. Instead of sending a generic email to all your customers about checking their carts, send each customer an email that mentions the specific products in their abandoned carts. Tailoring the content to each recipient makes your messages much more impactful. 

Personalization levels and techniques

Not all personalized emails are created equal. Brands sometimes use surface-level personalization as a nice touch to their campaigns. Other campaigns utilize advanced personalization techniques.

The basics of personalized emails

At the most basic level, personalized emails incorporate details like a customer’s name or title. For example, you might use email marketing with personalized subject lines that address the customer by their first name. 

Customers readily provide information like their names and locations that you can use to add a personalized touch to your marketing emails. But is it worth it? Do personalized emails perform better?

Personalized email marketing statistics show that even something as simple as adding a customized greeting to messages can improve campaign results. Over 80% of customers prefer when brands offer personalized experiences, including email marketing messages. 

Intermediate level: segmentation and personalized content

If you want to take personalization to the next level, you’ll also segment your email list. Email segmentation is when you break your subscriber list into smaller groups based on shared characteristics. 

You can group email subscribers together by qualities like:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Location
  • Profession
  • Marital status
  • Interests
  • Purchase history
  • Engagement level
  • Brand interactions

Once you have your audience segments, you can craft more targeted messages that speak directly to those customers’ unique needs and preferences. For example, you could create a segment of existing customers who have not purchased anything lately. Then, you could send personalized re-engagement emails to get those customers to buy something again. Sending that same email to new or active customers wouldn’t make sense — that’s why segmentation is so important. 

Think about the different types of customers you have and what they have in common. Diverse campaigns can (and should) target different segments, and your messaging should be as personalized and focused as possible. That’s how you’ll get the best results. 

Advanced level: behavioral triggers and dynamic content

There’s yet another level of email marketing personalization. At the most advanced level, you rely on behavioral triggers to cue your marketing emails and include dynamic content. 

Behavior-based marketing automation is when you set up email campaigns to go out to customers when they take specified actions. For example, you could create an automatic follow-up email that customers receive after interacting with product pages on your website. You can also tie automatic behavioral campaigns to actions like purchase behavior, engagement, or even social media activity. These are also known as triggered emails.  

By nature, these campaigns are completely personalized to each customer’s actions. Customers only receive messages if they take the actions you laid out in the campaign set-up. 

Dynamic emails are another form of advanced personalization. So, what is a dynamic email? A dynamic email includes personalized content that changes according to the recipient’s characteristics. For example, a clothing company might send a dynamic product recommendation email that recommends coats to customers in Alaska and shorts to customers in Texas at the same time. 

Advanced techniques like these overcome the one-size-fits-all marketing approach to create highly personalized, effective email campaigns. 

Best practices for personalized emails

As you start thinking about your personalized email campaigns, remember these email marketing best practices

Setting goals for your campaigns

Your first step with any new marketing campaign should be to set clear goals. Your goals will guide your decision-making and keep you on the right track as you develop your campaign. 

With a personalized email campaign, your goals may look similar to other email campaigns you’ve run. Sample goals include:

  • Increasing brand awareness
  • Driving traffic to your website
  • Generating and nurturing leads
  • Creating more upselling and cross-selling opportunities
  • Boosting customer engagement
  • Improving customer retention
  • Driving sales

Spend some time thinking about exactly what you want to achieve through your personalized campaigns and how those goals connect to your broader business objectives. Even if you strive to accomplish many different things through personalized email marketing, limit yourself to one or two main goals per campaign. Focusing on just a couple of goals in each campaign will help focus your efforts effectively. 

Collecting the right data for personalization

To personalize your messages, you need data about your email subscribers. Sometimes, collecting that data is as simple as asking new subscribers to share information like their names and locations in addition to their email addresses. Such basic data will only help you create basic personalized campaigns, though.

If you want to take your personalization to the next level, you need to collect and utilize more detailed customer data. You probably already have more data about your customers than you realize. Your website, for example, collects data about what pages customers click on and what products they add to their carts. Your customer relationship management software records each customer’s purchase history. If you have a mobile app, that app likely also collects data about your customers’ behavior.

You can use all this first-party data your company collects to create more personalized, effective campaigns. You also have the option to purchase second and third-party data for even more information about your customers. Still, your first-party data is probably the most valuable for your email personalization efforts.  

Adhering to privacy regulations

As you collect and use all this data, you need to be very mindful of different privacy regulations. The European Union has the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which lays out rules for handling customer data. Under the GDPR, companies must only collect the minimum amount of necessary data and delete it if the subject requests it. 

Similarly, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) gives customers more control over their data in California. Companies must notify customers about the data they collect on them and how they use it under this law. 

Review all the privacy regulations your company is subject to and stay up-to-date on developments in this space. Violating privacy regulations can severely damage your customers’ trust in your business and lead to significant fines and penalties. 

Notable examples of personalized emails

If you’re not sure how to get started when designing your campaigns, use these notable personalized email marketing examples for inspiration. 

Discover

Discover referral email sample
This referral promotion email from Discover addresses the recipient by name to make the offer feel more personal and special. Image source: Discover

Casper

Casper abandoned cart email sample
Casper, a mattress and bedding company, uses a clever headline in their cart abandonment email. The email is also personalized with the exact products the customer left in their cart to make it more persuasive. Image source: Casper

Laura Mercier

Laura Mercier reengagement email sample
This Laura Mercier email reengages an inactive customer by offering them a special deal and recommending specific products the customer has purchased before. It’s simple yet effective. Image source: Laura Mercier

Other types of marketing emails that lend themselves to personalization include:

  • Order confirmations
  • Password resets
  • Welcome emails
  • Onboarding messages
  • Loyalty programs
  • Reactivation emails

Measuring success in personalized email marketing

When you set goals for your personalized email marketing campaigns, you should also identify metrics that will measure your progress toward those goals. Tracking these metrics helps you understand your campaigns — what worked and what didn’t. Having qualitative data makes it much easier to evaluate your campaign’s success. 

Key email marketing metrics you may want to track include:

  • Open rates
  • Click-through rates
  • Bounce rates
  • Conversion rates
  • Unsubscribe rates
  • Return on investment
  • List growth rate
  • Deliverability rate
  • Sales

If you’re not happy with the results of your first personalized email marketing campaign, it’s not the end of the road. All the data from that campaign is invaluable information you can learn from to create more impactful future campaigns. 

Marketing automation and personalized emailing

Automation and personalization often go hand-in-hand in email marketing. After all, it’s simply not realistic to manually personalize each subscriber’s messages, especially as your email list grows. Through automation, you can quickly and accurately personalize emails in different ways depending on your campaign goals

You’ll need the right marketing automation tools to help you with your personalized campaigns. Choose a tool that integrates with your existing software and offers a wide range of personalization features. 

Constant Contact, for example, has features that allow you to easily personalize your messages with custom greetings, subject lines, and other details. You can create personalized messages for all your subscribers in just a few clicks.

Constant Contact’s email marketing tool also includes an AI writing assistant, pre-designed templates, and a user-friendly campaign tracking dashboard — everything you need to create your ideal personalized email marketing campaign. You can also sign up for a free trial and see how Constant Contact solutions work in real time. 

The power of personalization 

Email inboxes are crowded. Effective personalization is the key to making your marketing emails stand out and drive meaningful results. Whether you add recipients’ names to subject lines or use dynamic content to show them customized recommendations, personalization catches customers’ attention. Use an email marketing tool like Constant Contact to help develop and track your personalized email marketing campaigns. And learn more about automation and personalization to upgrade your campaigns even further. 

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