Personalization in Email Marketing

Personalisation--named as the year's top digital priority by B2B marketers (read the report here), is hot on the marketing radar, but how many marketers prioritize personalisation-and importantly-what level of personalisation is being done (segmented targeting, 1:1, based on content, context, past behaviour?). 

Marketers starting out on the personalisation journey can explore email. Email marketing provides rich prospects for personalization (moving prospects further down the funnel, fuelling goal conversions). Having done this, I feel that this is fairly easy to accomplish, track, target and measure.

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There are host of other areas ripe for personalization: website, social, mobile, in-store and web experiences. But for now, we focus on email marketing personalization.

Personalize by Name: Starting with the most obvious, that is, using the recipient's real name in the email. The lead intelligence software would provide marketers with the lead names, and marketers should do this basic personalization "doable".

Personalize by Content: From my own experience and market research data (14% of marketers indicated that personalized campaigns generate a better response rate than mass-market campaigns, Episerver data), personalized campaigns generate more response rate and ultimately recall. Each email is a piece of marketing communication that is reaching a potential prospect today. Don't send if you cant personalize. Email less but when you do, your reader should want to open that email, should want to read it.

Identify your ideal buyer personas (it may be finance professionals in three stages of their careers-beginners, middle managers and senior professionals. I cannot even imagine the damage that were to happen if I were to send out messaging for beginners to the senior professionals! Brand finito! So personalize, period.

Personalize by Subject Line Now that you have personalized by name & content, don't forget the subject line. More around the buyer personas-the needs & challenges of the beginner are very different from a senior finance professional. Your subject line is your customer hook. In a report published by Experian, 62 percent of marketers say that a personalized email subject is crucial. Don't lose out on the key to your prospects' inbox. Personalize the subject line, by buyer personas, by name if possible (dynamic personalization).

Personalize by Lead Status Now we are slowly moving into the realm of slightly advanced personalization. How do you classify your leads from the email campaign? Do you have access to CLV data? A customer that reads your emails diligently, downloads papers, clicks through your call-to-action is not to be ignored. Are you nurturing this lead? Do you have a nurturing funnel? For example, if one the customers downloads an whitepaper/case study, use marketing automation tools to automatically enter him/her into a lead nurturing campaign that identifies them in the lead funnel, sends out regular similar content of interest as the first topic

Personalized at POS/point-of-conversion Okay, so now that your lead has moved the funnel from lead to serious prospect, and about to land on the conversion page. So are your personalizing your POS/point-of-conversion. Is the customer having to fill forms for data that he/she had already provided earlier? If yes, then why? Marketers should do whatever possible to reduce the barriers to accomplishing conversions. Use smart forms/ pre-completed information/progressive profiling (read more here)  to reduce the customer drop-out rate at this important juncture.
A drop out at this time will cost you more as you have spent considerable time to nurture this lead, acquisition of a new customer will mean more time/costs/efforts. So personalize POS/POC as well.

Then we move into advanced personalization in email marketing, such as automatic emails based on triggers, segmenting campaigns based on user behaviors. Segmentation can include email engagement behavior (open rate, click rate), purchase history, user‐declared personal preferences. We will be looking at these advanced personalization techniques in my subsequent posts.

Personalization leads to pay-offs, but do remember to respect customer privacy issues. I work with 100% permission based marketing and try to build the customer experience for every email campaign first. Do drop in your thoughts and experiences.