If you’re currently trying to develop a new email marketing campaign or you’re trying to figure out why your last one wasn’t a success, one of the factors to consider is whether you have personalized the email. Sending out the same email to all of your contacts might be faster than developing personalized content but it is nowhere near as successful in achieving ROI.
Personalized emails have a far greater success rate than your blast style emails, so putting in that extra amount of time to craft content that will appeal more to the recipient will be time well spent. Now a lot of the larger companies can afford sophisticated analytical tools that will help you to create this personalization strategy but if you don’t have that luxury, there are still a number of things that you can do.
Whichever methods you use to collate your data about your contacts, you need to see every interaction as an opportunity to get as much useful data about the personal that you can. If you find out information like age, interests, job etc. this is all useful to your marketing strategy. You can split your contact list into segments determined by the information that you have and then design emails that you know will appeal to them. If you’re trying to sell products, you will see much more success by making the content more personalized.
For example, say you are sending an email advertising hair straighteners to 100 people without segmentation. Within those 100 people there will be males that won’t even open the email because the product is of no interest to them. That’s not to say that no males will be interested but you will see better results if you focus on people who have expressed an interest in the product previously or people who fit the typical demographics of the customers of this product.
If you attacked this from a different angle and sent the email out to people with an interest in the product, your success rates will be much higher. Now that is a very basic look at segmentation and personalization but the better the data that you can collect, the more you can do with it. So now we’re getting into a different layer of personalization. If you know from the purchase history that they like to buy a new set of straighteners each year around the same time, maybe a birthday or at Christmas, then that is what you schedule your campaign around.
Personalization doesn’t just apply to email marketing, it working in conjunction with the full marketing philosophy. Social media is a very good way of being able to send personalized content. If there is a group set up that indicated a particular interest, then you can use that knowledge if it is related to your products. Use social media to find potential customers and direct them to your website using content that you know they are interested in. If you’re not getting personal with your marketing strategy then this could well be where you are going wrong.