In this edition of the Insightful Media Series, we delve into the topic of Personalised Emails, an underrated behavioural advertising technique used for email and retargeting campaigns. We will discuss how it works, why you should use it, and what the future holds. But first, we have to ask…
What is Personalised Email?
The potential efficacy of email marketing has strengthened considerably in recent times, especially as a means of developing brand loyalty. Recent studies have shown that, contrary to what many people claim, email has retained an enduring popularity among consumers with more than 70% stating that email is their chosen medium in which to communicate with companies. With such a high level of popularity, competition to have your company’s email noticed is fierce. Long gone are the days when “ Dear [First Name]” was considered a personalised email. As more companies have embarked on regular email campaigns with their customers, customers have developed a sort of quality filter that has made the inbox an unforgiving environment. Recent studies have shown that consumers typically skim over the content or outright ignore it. This is because they have been there, seen that. A consumer’s email inbox is their own private place, their inbox revolves around them and they demand that the only emails they receive are relevant to them and their distinctive tastes and habits. This is where Personalised Email comes in…
Personalised Email is the result of email marketing getting smarter, personalisation isn’t just about using names but about tailored content based on a consumer’s demographic, location and behaviour. Email marketers have realised that one size does not fit all if you want to increase consumer engagement. According to this article, dynamic content is content that adapts based on real-time data. In other words, Personalised Email is where you use what you know about your subscriber’s current and past behaviour to show more relevant content to them. For example, say you are a clothes shop sending out a single email about the new stock that has just arrived. By using personalised email, you ensure that men will receive news about men’s clothing and women will receive news about women’s clothing. That is a basic example; Personalised email can be tailored far more to the point that customers will receive certain content based on their previous behaviour on your site as well as their location, demographic and other sites they have visited. Personalised email is a way to ensure that your marketing messages are highly relevant and tied to compelling offers that are more likely to convert.
How Does Email Personalisation Work?
To provide content that is relevant to your recipients, you need to know something about them. This could be something as simple as finding out their name and gender to finding out their job title and the company where they work. This data will be the basis for your first personalised email campaign.
A Simple Email Subscription Prompt
Segmentation:
The first step to introducing personalised emails is to create segments for your subscribers. Segmentation leads to higher open and click-through rates, fewer unsubscribes and, in general, a better experience for your customers.
Segments can be real-time and can be altered to reflect new data such as if a potential customer has visited the pricing page or a check-out page recently.
By doing this, you will ensure that the recipients of your email only receive the relevant information for their segment and allows you to put more focus on certain segments that have shown a greater intent to buy.
Targeting:
After that you have to set your targeting settings. The main aspect of Personalised Email is that each section of content is tailored on a ‘Show or Don’t Show’ basis. Your email will be split up into content boxes. This means that you put all the content into the one email and select which segment should see this particular section and which segment should not. Each content box will have individual settings meaning you can set which content is general and which is dynamic. You then set the conditions for each box and the recipient’s email will only show them the content that matches their own conditions.
What Are The Benefits Of Email Personalisation?
Increased ROI:
The fact is that email is the best digital channel for ROI, as confirmed by eConsultancy who revealed that email is the marketing industry’s top choice with 68% of respondents rating email marketing as either good or excellent in regards to ROI. On average, companies attributed 23% of their sales to their email marketing channel and personalised emails can help grow this percentage even further. Business2Community recently released an infographic that reveals that personalised emails with dynamic content drive 18 times more revenue to companies than regular broadcast emails. On top of that, CampaignMonitor, one of the leaders in the Email Marketing industry, saw a 13% increase in conversions and 1000s more visits to their site when they implemented Dynamic content in their emails.
Higher Open Rates and CTRs:
Unsurprisingly, personalised and real-time content makes your subscribers feel unique and special. With this greater relevancy comes greater engagement and Personalised Email allows you to push your subscriber leads towards the desired action you wish them to take. Experian, a global leader in consumer and business credit reporting and marketing service, produced a report that shows that Personalised Emails had a 29% higher open rate and 41% unique click-through rate.
Relevancy:
The obvious benefit of Personalised and Dynamic Email is sending more relevant content to your subscribers. As stated earlier on in the post, recent usability studies have shown that the inbox is a harsher environment than the internet when it comes to skimming or outright ignoring content. With Personalised Email, you send more relevant and, therefore, more likely to be viewed content.
Increased Productivity:
The issue with segmentation previously was that it was a manual task that needed to be updated weekly over multiple campaigns. Thankfully SaaS technology has come on in recent years with companies like CampaignMonitor, dotmailer and GetVero allowing for automatic updates and suggested segments that allow users to use more advanced techniques in less time.
The Future of Email Personalisation
Personalised Email is just part of the growing trend of marketing automation. The next big step for Personalised Email is becoming ever more precise and relevant through the analysis of the contextual behaviour of consumers. This means marketers can not only send more relevant and personalised emails to their subscribers but each email will be sent to that the subscriber at the ideal time and place based on their real-time and previous behaviour. The data from beacons could very well start to play a major part in the coming years as marketers look for the real-time data of potential consumers offline as well as online.
On top of being more precise, more reactive emails look set to be the next great challenge. This idea of real time and location based segments seems to be supported by some of the email marketing industry’s biggest leaders. They have predicted that real-time triggers will play an increasingly large role in years to come. Jason Warnock, VP of market intelligence and deliverability at email marketing software Yesmail, believes that because consumers consistently check their news feed throughout the day, a real-time marketing email based on a local event or news story will be very likely to be read as the event is at forefront of the recipient’s mind.
With these plans to improve their email marketing even further, it is no surprise that 26% of marketers agreed that the automation of their email campaigns was their number one priority in 2014 and that number is expected to grow this year and beyond as marketers continue to see the success of Personalised Emails and the tailoring of dynamic content.
Further Reading:
3 Unique Ways to Personalize Emails & Create Brand Loyalty
https://troops.ai/blog/personalize-emails/
Business 2 Community, Why Personalisation and Dynamic Content is Key to Email Marketing Strategies: http://www.business2community.com/email-marketing/personalisation-dynamic-content-key-email-marketing-strategies-01002890
Business 2 Community, Five Things Every Email Marketer Needs To Know About Dynamic Content: http://www.business2community.com/email-marketing/five-things-every-email-marketer-needs-know-dynamic-content-01079281
Hubspot, How Personalization Works
http://www.hubspot.com/products/how-personalization-works
Digital Marketing News, Six Must-Know Steps for Creating Dynamic Email Content
GetResponse.com, How to Personalise Your Emails With Dynamic Content
https://blog.getresponse.com/how-to-personalize-your-emails-with-dynamic-content-freebiemonday.html
CampaignMonitor , Dynamic Content And Email Personalisation https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/dynamic-content/
CampaignMonitor, How we used Dynamic Content to increase our email click-through rate
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/4531/dynamic-content-increase-email-click-through-rate
HubSpot, 33 Examples of Dynamic Tags to Personalise Your Email Sends
Business2Community, Dynamic Content in Email Marketing [Infographic]
http://www.business2community.com/infographics/dynamic-content-email-marketing-infographic-01079949
SalsForce, Dynamic Content
http://help.exacttarget.com/en/documentation/exacttarget/content/dynamic_content/
Email Monks, the omniscient lama of email marketing, Dynamic Email content
http://www.emailmonks.com/dynamic-content/infographic.html
Fox Business, Small Business, Better Data and Personalization Are the Future of Email Marketing
Email Monday, Expert Tips To Increase Email Marketing ROI
http://www.emailmonday.com/expert-tips-to-increase-email-marketing-roi
Experian, The Transactional Email Report
http://www.experian.com/assets/marketing-services/reports/transactional-email-report.pdf
ExchangeWire, Monster Funding Round Marks the Return of Email
https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2015/06/17/monster-funding-round-marks-the-return-of-email/
CrazyEgg, 3 Tactics You Can Implement Today for Higher Email Open Rates
http://blog.crazyegg.com/2014/06/05/high-email-open-rates/
MarketingLand, Study: Personalized Emails Deliver 6X Higher Transaction Rates, But 70% Of Brands Fail To Use Them
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