These days, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes on to connecting with consumers online and offline. Most subscribers today have come to demand and expect personalized experiences and highly relevant messages that fit their unique interests and pain points.
To meet those demands, there’s an underutilized tactic that you can use to personalize the experience, so your subscribers are more likely to open your emails and engage: email personalization.
Sending personalized emails is the perfect way to authentically reach your unique, individual subscribers. Taking advantage of this approach enables you to provide one-on-one experiences with your audience, which can significantly increase brand engagement.
Moreover, using creative and diversified email personalization methods is also a proven way to foster customer loyalty and appeal to the 75% of consumers that are more likely to buy from a brand that personalizes messages.
Now, it’s important to note that email personalization is more than just inserting a customer’s name into the subject line. Even though that’s a good strategy, you can take personalization way beyond that.
Here are 5 must-know techniques to use personalized emails to boost audience engagement:
1. Segment your email list
Segmenting your email contacts into specific groups can take your email personalization results beyond the stars. But remember that different contacts have different needs, so it’s ideal to create individual segmented lists so you can develop dynamic content for each audience you want to reach.
The first step to segmenting your email list is to collect relevant data about your subscribers. This can be done through your signup forms when someone wants to receive newsletters or learn more about your brand. There, you can ask your subscribers about their geographical location, age, gender, profession, interests, and so on. You can even use data about their buying history or past email activity.
Afterward, start breaking down your segmented list into even more compact groups. For instance, take your ‘male customers’ list and create a list of ‘male customers from Los Angeles’ that buy from you regularly.
2. Automate emails based on subscriber behavior
Implementing marketing automation is crucial to sending out behavior-triggered emails to the right subscriber at the right time. A perfect example of this is sending a “Welcome Email” as soon as new subscribers sign up. This email acts as a warm and friendly greeting and tells them what to do next.
You can even send reminder emails, depending on a certain time period. These emails inform a subscriber about a particular event or occurrence, like renew a subscription or complete a purchase on an item that has been sitting in their shopping cart. You can also send birthday greetings as well as emails that focus on re-engaging customers who have been inactive for a while.
3. Make your email design responsive
Responsive email design is also aspect of email personalization that cannot be ignored. Keep in mind that your customers are likely viewing your email on different devices (smartphones, tablets, and PCs). Therefore, you need to improve their email experience by making sure that can actually view it on whatever device they choose. Also, when designing your emails, pay keen attention to factors like font size, buttons, email length and the overall layout and fluidity of the content. These factors can either make or break your design.
4. Add links to your social media profile(s)
If you want to add an extra boost to your email marketing campaign, why not include buttons that direct your audience to your social media profiles? This can drive more traffic to your social channels as well as your website.
You can also upload your subscriber lists from your email to your social channels. That way, you can connect with your subscribers in a more personal way, on more than one platform. Heck, you can even target social ads to active email subscribers to make more of your advertising dollars.
5. Personalize your landing pages
Landing pages with a personalized call to action can be a powerful way to increase engagement and drive traffic to your site. Your landing pages should directly relate to the content of your email and the interests of your specific segmented list, and should match the look of the overall theme.
Verdict
Email personalization is an all-important tool for increasing audience engagement. Your customers want to feel like they matter to your brand, lest your brand won’t matter to them. By following the techniques above, you can make the email personalization process a breeze.
