3 Advanced Email Personalization Tips to Drastically Improve Your Customer Experience and Email Performance

The B2B environment is becoming increasingly congested, so much so that customers are now expecting organizations to offer experiences, deals and information personalized to their needs and preferences. Marketers 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 the 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 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 they can increase revenue rates 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 while adding value to your emails.

1. Integrate behavior data in emails

Sending automated emails based on a customer’s actions  is great for achieving personalization. Marketers can integrate and plan their follow-up email efforts based on behavioral data such as actions users take while visiting a website or in re-engaging with inactive subscribers who have not utilized services in a certain timeframe.

Some campaign ideas that utilize advanced personalization include: welcome emails, transactional emails, re-activation emails to sleeping subscribers, cross-selling and up-selling emails.

2. Add location and time specifics

Emails that are delivered at the right time while catering to a recipient’s location can significantly increase the customer experience, which results in brand loyalty by the recipient. 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 recipient 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 the right audience, at the right time.

Some examples of these types of personalized emails include an offer to a new restaurant or recommendations to a new store, 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 sent at the time open rates are highest. By doing so, you further personalize your email to your audience and increase the chances of users opening your email to read what’s inside.

3. 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 that the email 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 the illustrious customer insights research specialist, Tony Zambito, the buyers’ personas can be defined as

“research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of buyers, 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 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 offer a deal that will help 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 polls 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 in their buying decision.