email personalization

How Automating Email Personalization Can Drive Conversion?

The transformation from your batch and blast email marketing campaigns to personalized, tailored, and targeted emails to each subscriber at the right time can significantly boost your ROI from email marketing. The best thing about personalized email campaigns is that they can be automated. So, what is email personalization, and how can it be automated? Let’s find out.  

What is Email Personalization and Why is It Growing?

Email personalization is the marketing method that requires us to design accurately targeted and customized emails and content by leveraging customer data such as demography, behaviors, and the like. The personalization process is the method of optimizing the email design, offers, and content to targeted segments of subscribers’ unique needs, preferences, responses, past purchases, and other factors.

Since our inboxes are inundated with hundreds of marketing emails, it is difficult to make your emails stand apart from the crowd with one-size-fits-all email messages. On the other hand, your personalized emails are more targeted and relevant to entice your target audience’s attention. 

Campaign Monitor survey has found that emails containing personalized subject lines get increased email open rates up to 26% more than batch and blast emails. In addition to growth in email open rates, marketers have noticed a surge in customer engagement with their targeted, personalized email campaigns as much as 74%, according to eConsultancy. 

Personalizing emails give subscribers the relevance and usefulness that they crave. The best part is that it has never been so easy! You just need to include those fields you want in your email opt-in forms to collect users’ data. Then you can simply retrieve that data, create custom fields and personalization tags to optimize those fields such as “From” name, “To” name, email subject lines, email preheader, email header, email copy and various sections of content, graphic images and diagrams, and many others. Additionally, you can also incorporate the data from other sources and integrations such as your CRM systems and e-commerce service – and all these are made easier for marketers with marketing automation platforms.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation systems are software that automatically send your email marketing campaigns to targeted audiences, including prospects and customers based on the rules you have set in the system. Automated emails are an easy and one-time process to set up. Once configured, the system starts sending out to individual subscribers or a segment of subscribers triggered by the pre-defined rules. 

Let us dissect its functionality to show you how it performs better and faster personalization than manual efforts.

How Does an Automation System Improve Personalization and Conversions?

With the basics of automation systems and personalization clear, let us show you how automated personalization can actually increase your revenue? 

1. Automation Personalizes the Way Customers Want

Email marketing is known to be a reliable and cost-effective marketing channel to drive conversion rates. Many marketers have reported that for every $1 they spend on their email marketing campaigns, the average ROI they can yield is as much as $38. ROI at this rate can be attainable when your customers hear and get what they want from your company.

To entice your subscribers’ attention, the first thing you need is to know and understand your customers’ expectations and pain points. However, personalizing emails to multiple segments and groups of customers with different tastes, ages, job titles, locations, and other unique requirements can be exhausting and time-consuming. That’s why marketing automation comes into play to automate personalization and delivery of relevant messages using lead segment data and preset triggers. 

Even if you have not scaled your company like large enterprises, you still cannot afford to send wrong emails to the wrong audiences. At the wrong times, it only degrades your engagement rate, email opens. Eventually, it will affect your sales. 

By leveraging marketing automation systems, you can adopt the effective methods of delivering emails based on your customers’ actions by tailoring your emails with their preferred content and topics, email frequency, and time when they are more likely to open and engage with your emails.

2. Improved Relevancy Will Lead to Improved Sales

Equipped with a marketing automation system, you not only get the option of delivering targeted email messages based on preset triggers, but you can also benefit from hyper-targeting messages based on the rules you set. When you can personalize by leveraging hyper-targeting functionalities tied to automation platforms, each of your messages will drive sales. VentureBeat has reported that around 70% to 94% of marketers have witnessed increased effectiveness in email marketing campaigns by deploying automated personalization techniques. The more relevance your email will be, the greater you can enhance your chances of increased sales.

3. Personalization Makes Your Prospects Customers Feel Exclusive

Around 73% of customers have expressed their interests to make purchases with businesses that personalize their messages and offers. In contrast, around 86% of customers have stated that personalization has a crucial role to play in their buying decisions, according to Accenture

However, about 70% of companies fail to achieve accurate personalization despite having customer statistics. That’s why we recommend marketing automation platforms, powered with machine-learning technologies that can make the best use of the customer insights you have on your CRM. 

These automation systems can integrate with your existing CRM systems, and syncs updated customer data with the CRM flawlessly to perform accurate personalization and hyper-targeting while crafting and delivering your email marketing messages.

How to Improve Personalization With Marketing Automation?

Backed with the customer data gathered by the marketing automation tool, you can personalize your customer journey roadmap from start to finish. The systems use insights such as a customer’s location, age, job details, functions, company size, and industry to optimize campaigns that yield increasing open rates, engagement rates, click-through rates, and heighten overall customer experience for prospects and existing customers.

Find out how several marketing automation features like segmentation, dynamic content, lead nurturing can help you achieve a more personalized and targeted marketing experience.

Email Personalization

Customers and prospects always have higher expectations now than they had earlier from all forms of digital marketing channels, including email marketing. Batch and blast emails targeting large volumes of data with minimal or no personalization can mostly lead to email deletion as those land in subscribers’ inboxes. Thus, these emails fail to connect and attract customers who prefer relevant and useful email communications. 

The automation platforms feature segmentation tools that can allow you to classify, sort, and group customer databases into smaller and targeted groups as per their common traits and needs. Thus, you can target your email message to each segment with more relevant messaging. So, you can deliver targeted email content such as executive business and marketing guides to leadership contacts in your database, or you can segment your webinar emails based on previous webinar attendee and registration data, users’ language, and other relevant details. 

Dynamic Content

You can include dynamic content in any marketing channel from emails to your websites for offering tailored content based on specific viewer segments and data collected on those viewers. There are various ways you can customize dynamic content, including customer demographics, past responses, their specific preferences, purchase history, and any other factors to ensure unique and personalized content experiences. If you are running a B2B business, you can employ dynamic content for your case studies page to feature the most relevant case studies based on your visitors’ industry.

According to Janrain & Harris Interactive, about 74% of digital customers dislike websites when their content, such as ads and offers, do not match their preferences. 

Viewing only the relevant content to each web visitor can make your call-to-action even more persuasive and transforming your website navigation more personalized. Use this technique in your emails to convert your traditional emails into more personalized ones. Find out the Automation Techniques to Drive Traditional Email Marketing into an ROI Machine.

Lead Nurturing

Your customers expect a relevant and highly interactive sales experience which meets their unique needs. At that, lead nurturing emails can improve your efforts with the most relevant content, to the right segment of leads, at the right time, depending on where leads are positioned in their buying journey. We recommend accompanying plain-text versions of emails along with your HTML emails or even better, only plain-text emails like you send to your peers, family and friends. Your emails may not look personal if those appear like an ad or a magazine. Also, ask your sales reps to include their personalized signature that you can create by using variable tokens in marketing automation tools. Nurture your leads by sending sales emails with content based on a prospects’ behavior and interests to create 1:1 customer experience and make your customer feel exclusive.

Find out more on Why We Need Plain-Text Emails and 5 Best Practices of Plain-Text Email Optimization.

Conclusion

So, are you planning to implement or optimize marketing automation platforms to improve personalization and increased conversion? You can simply get in touch with our certified marketing automation experts via chat box below, the contact us page, or email info@marrinadecisions.com or simply DM our social channels: Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn

All it takes is a simple ‘Hi’ to take you a long way in scaling your marketing process and targeting thousands of people while saving tons of resources and money in manual processes.