3 Advanced Email Personalization Tips to Drastically Improve Your Customer Experience
The B2B environment is continually increasing in congestion, so much that customers are now expecting organizations to offer experiences, deals and information personalized to their needs and preferences. Marketers of these organizations must go way beyond traditional practices to break through the clutter. In today’s digital society, organizations need customized strategies that continually improve the customer experience as well as personalize offers around that customer, sometimes even before they are a customer.
A great way to personalize the customer experience is through email. By knowing where your customers are in the sales cycle, and serving them the appropriate personalized content, you can tailor their experience and provide them with information they need to move down the sales cycle. Personalized emails help brands stand out from their competitors both in the research and buying process.
What are personalized emails?
Research has proven that personalized emails generate great results including 20% growth in sales and increased revenue rates of up to six times. Despite these statistics, most brands are not utilizing personalized email to the fullest.
To help you take your email personalization a step further, we’ve rounded up three advanced level email personalization tips that will help you tailor emails to your customers. These tips will help you provide more impactful emails to your audience and make your content of greater value to your customers, as they go to your emails for offers, deals or even solutions to their problems.
- Integrate behavior data in emails
Automated customer behavior data-backed trigger emails are great for achieving personalization. Marketers can integrate and plan their follow-up email efforts based on behavior data such as actions users take while visiting a websites or sleeping subscribers who have not utilized services for a certain timeframe.
Some campaign ideas that utilize advanced personalization include include welcome emails, transactional emails, re-activation emails to sleeping subscribers, cross-selling and up-selling emails.
- Add location and time specifics
Emails that are delivered at the right time and location can significantly increase the customer experience, which results in brand loyalty by the email receiver. In order to attain success with these kinds of conditional emails marketers and companies must have a deep understanding, along with data, of a subscriber’s preference, location, time zone and so on in order to create an experience that will make the email receiver want to take immediate action and engage with the brand.
Personalizing this type of email trigger also requires a strong grasp of content and how to make the most of an email without including too much or unnecessary information. Real-time marketing offers can highly increase the value of your email campaign, but only if the offer is presenting the right information to your right audience, at the right time.
Some examples of these types of personalized emails include an offer to a new restaurant recommendations, bookstores etc., in the contact’s vicinity so that they can explore new establishments.
Similarly, you can also utilize the time data from your marketing automation platform to have your emails send at the time open rates are highest. By doing so, you further personalize your eamil to your audience and increase the chances of users opening your email to read what’s inside.
- Ideal customer personality
One of the best ways to personalize an email marketing campaign is by crafting the email to a specific segment. In order to do this, you first need to define your ideal customer personas so that you can classify the segment of people (and their actions) that the email(s) will go to. These personas should include a specific area of the target market and sort subscribers based on data-points such as: behaviors, age group, job title and function, as well as their interactions, actions, and nature of engagement with your brand communications and assets. This categorization will enable you to understand this segment of customers, their requirements and their buying patterns.
According to Tony Zambito, expert customer insights researcher, the customer personas should be defined as “research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions.”
Campaigns based on customer persona data collected as real-life data work wonders, however, you need to make sure that the real-time data sets are relevant, accurate and collected from a reliable source. One way of ensuring the quality of your data is to start communicating with customers who have shown interest in your product/services though your either your website, social media, paid ads or other marketing outreach. From the information received through these channels, you can then craft your email based on their feedback by addressing their pain points, providing insight on how your company’s products/services address their needs and also offering a deal that will truly inspire them to move down the sales cycle. If you aren’t sure how to get the data or feedback you need from your customers, you can do so by including fun poles on social media, creating a website survey, or even asking in person questions around what they want to achieve, their lifestyle goals, professional goals, and other information that is a factor of their buying decision.