Without email personalization, you’re held back by low conversion rates. When emails are not personalized, you cannot create proper engagement with your audience.
But how many people are likely to engage even when you personalize emails?
A study from SmarterHQ says 72% of customers engage only with personalized emails, which clearly shows their potential for engaging customers.
Personalized email marketing content that aligns with the interests of different types of customers is the main factor in engaging customers and prompting them to take action.
This blog explains email personalization, how to personalize emails correctly, and how to get the best out of them to increase your ROI with email marketing personalization.
Let’s begin.
Personalize your emails in the easiest way by segmenting your customers using Retainful.
What Is Email Personalization?
Email personalization is an email marketing strategy that provides personalized email content to engage customers that resonates with their interests, shopping behaviors, preferences, etc., and creates conversions.
Email marketing becomes effective when tailored content is sent to each customer in your email list.
Personalizing an email is tailoring an email with details gathered from customer’s browsing habits or CRM software. Such as,
- Name
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Few personal info like Birthdays or Anniversaries
- Interests and more
This data lets you personalize the content and write emails for specific customers that encourage them to interact with your emails.
It is modifying and turning a dry email into an exciting email that satisfies customers’ needs, leading to increased sales for your business.
Next, let’s see how email personalization is essential for better customer engagement and keeping your sales flowing.
Benefits of Email Personalization
A study says 60% of customers will likely become repeat buyers after receiving a personalized shopping experience.
That is a significant number, and that’s because email personalization statistics say personalized emails have more potential to increase sales by increasing customer engagement and retention.
Now, we’ll learn the benefits of personalized email marketing.
The significant benefits of personalizing emails are,
1. Higher Conversion Rates
According to Campaign Monitor, the average sales conversion achieved through email personalization is 10%.
When sending personalized emails, you end your customers’ search by giving them precisely what they need.
Email personalization results in higher responses from customers when compared to generic emails.
With personalized email content, conversion is more likely to happen as a customer’s necessity and the personalized email’s content fit together.
2. Better ROI
Email personalization can deliver the right content that customers expect. When this happens, customer engagement increases, and so does your ROI.
Personalized emails convert more than generic ones; they are relevant and resonate with customers’ preferences and interests, and they are also a cost-effective method.
3. Increased Customer Engagement
The goal of email marketing personalization is customer engagement; it should convince the customer to shop or subscribe to your business.
A personalized email that helps with customers’ necessities or pain points will undoubtedly engage them and increase that engagement.
4. Gain The Upper Hand Among Competitors
Setting up personalized email marketing makes your business stand out from others.
Because providing your customers with the right solution at the right time will earn you a spot amongst the customers that your competitors didn’t.
If you collect the correct data and use it properly, you can attract more customers when compared to those who don’t send personalized email campaigns.
Segment your customers by using Retainful’s pre-segmentation templates made for every occasion.
5. Reduced Unsubscriptions
Email personalization is a wise strategy for continuously engaging with customers and keeping them looking forward to your emails.
Email marketing personalization provides customers with relevant solutions or content according to their needs and preferences so that unsubscription rates can be reduced.
6. Provides More Valuable Insights
Email marketing personalization is a crucial tactic to collect more information about customers’ data to personalize emails.
Each personalized email you send is a perk that gives you more new insights about customers’ interests and behavior. It is free-flowing information from a simple strategy.
7. Customer Retention
Personalization in email marketing delivers what the customer wants, so maintaining regular communication with personalized content builds a good connection and helps in customer retention.
When customers receive rightly crafted personalized emails, they learn that you understand their needs and requirements well, which leads to quick retention.
Email Personalization Strategies
1. Segment Your Customers
Segmenting your audience doesn’t mean a very typical segmentation. Every action your customers take while browsing is data for personalizing emails.
The right way to segment your customers is by,
- Demographics
Personalizing emails under demographics focuses on insights like age, gender, location, and sometimes the income scale of individuals, which can also be used for segmentation. - Behavioral data
Customer behavior, such as when customers check out a specific product category, the price range of products they browse, when they have been inactive, etc. - Purchase history
It encloses the customer’s cart value, how frequently they purchase, and more. - Stage in the marketing funnel
This way of segmenting is done based on every phase, from the customer discovering a product until they make a purchase.
Based on this, email personalization is done to welcome customers, send product recommendations and information about new products or updates, and more based on where the customer is in the marketing funnel. - Email Engagement
Email engagement in email personalization is done with the data gathered from customers’ email engagement metrics like open rate, and click-through rate.
That includes how often customers engage with their emails and what type of emails they engage more with. You could use A/B testing to find out which emails work well.
And the rest could be further insights obtained from the customers.
Capturing emails and using these data can lead to better email personalization that resonates well with customer’s preferences.
Also segmenting helps to build an email list and maintain it efficiently, so you can have better analysis to personalize the content for customers that provide conversions.
Related reading: Read to know more about the email list-building tools.
2. Customer Behavior Triggered Emails
The email automation feature automatically triggers emails when a customer’s behavior or recent activities to help set up personalized emails accordingly.
For example, if a customer has unsubscribed from your membership, you can send a feedback email asking what made them unsubscribe and what you could do better for them.
Some examples of Behavior triggered emails are:
- Welcome emails – When someone signs up
- Order confirmation emails – When customers place an order
- Post-purchase emails– Feedback emails and thank you emails after customers purchase a product.
- Abandoned cart emails – when customers add items to their cart and leave without purchasing them, etc
In this way, emails can be personalized based on customer behavior data.
3. Social Media Integration
Social media platforms are an excellent solution for creating better customer engagement and experience with a touch of personalization.
It is a two-way path where you can use social media insights to craft email content and use social media as a medium in your emails (for example, asking your customers to share about your product on social media for extra rewards or offers).
Using email personalization software, data and analytics from social media can be aligned with emails that suit customers’ interests. For example, if a customer clicks on a social media ad and checks a product, you can send follow-up emails to that customer.
You can do this by checking what products or topics the customer has looked for on social media platforms and talking about that content in your emails.
Another way to use social media to personalize emails is to include upcoming social events, like product launches, webinars, etc., in the emails and invite your customers to them.
4. User Generated Content (UGC)
UGC can be used effectively to personalize emails, whose content includes reviews and testimonials, search interests, shopping behavior, etc.
The best way to use user-generated content in emails is to include reviews from customers along with pictures or videos of the product. This adds more value to your product and to the brand.
Another way of using this strategy is to include loyalty program details in emails.
To be specific, you might have different sets of customers, like tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3, and you cannot provide the same incentives for all categories of your customers. So try mentioning the existing benefits and motivate the customer to move to the next higher category.
5. Dynamic Content
Using dynamic content while personalizing emails can make the email look more convincing and appealing.
Better usage of dynamic includes adding a widget that shows the live location of the order, a countdown to show how long the offer will be available, and blocks that show a wishlist or recommended products.
Combining these strategies with your email personalization tools can be leveraged ideally to increase sales.
Next, we’ll look at some of the best email personalization examples to inspire you and learn from them how to make your personalized emails the best way.
5 Best Personalized Email Examples And Templates
Here are some of the best personalized email examples (handpicked) to help you succeed in your next personalized email marketing campaign.
1. Grammarly
This Grammarly example is a highly personalized email, as it provides accurate details of the customer’s app usage.
This email has presented its visual appeal in the best way possible by showing how beneficial it is to own a premium subscription, with all the detailed information and the best support they provide for customers.
Also, the approach of this email motivates the customer to engage with Grammarly further.
They have attached the features of the customer’s plan, such as a checklist below. This shows their assistance to the customers.
The comic-themed icons and images go well with this template and make it appear pleasing.
An image with CTA inviting for a webinar is also included, which creates engagement and upselling to their other platform.
Finally, this email personalization example ends correctly with the Unsubscribe option, providing complete freedom of choice.
2. Sling
This example of Sling personalizes its emails based on events. They’ve created this email for the new year to encourage customers to continue their subscriptions.
Those precise details about the viewer’s liking are a great way to use personalization in a mail; Sling nailed it.
They add extra news to keep the customers updated about what’s happening.
This email personalization example of Sling ends funnily with a meme template at the end, which is creative and engaging.
3. Chess.com
Chess.com’s personalized email example is a behavior-triggered email specifically designed using data from customers’ played games.
It addresses the customer’s name, begins the mail, and prompts the customer to engage by saying how easy it is to learn to play chess.
They have included clean infographics that give easy understanding along with simple instructions on using the game review option.
The final part includes email preferences to choose how frequently and how many emails the customer should receive, along with an unsubscribe option.
4. Political Playlist
The political playlist has their email personalization example, focusing on customer interests.
It includes clear statements and information, including statistics, at the beginning to grab the customer’s attention.
Below is the information shared by some political people that the customer is interested in reading.
They add recommendations and news below based on the user’s interest.
This personalized email example has an edit CTA button to modify the preferences and interests of the customers.
5. Airbnb
This is one of the clean personalized email marketing examples by Airbnb, which is very appealing.
The personalization of content in this fits just right. It makes the process a lot easier for the customer by lessening their work to look for travel ideas.
Also, precise details like images of destinations and their ratings are included along with the dates and days. Below are a few other recommendations for the customer.
This mail is perfect in accuracy and detail. This kind of example has little chance of not working.
Now, let us uncover the best practices to make your personalized emails successfully work.
Email Personalization Best Practices
What can businesses do to personalize their emails to customers?
Personalizing emails with just the customer’s name in the opening isn’t personalizing.
Real personalization comes when you craft each part of the email to entice and encourage the customer to engage with your business continuously.
1. Sending Automated Personalized Emails
Automated personalized emails can be most effective when sent at the right time to engage customers easily.
You have created the right content to send your customers. Now, you just have to match it with the right timing with email marketing automation.
For example, if a customer leaves the store after adding a few items to their cart and leaves without buying any,
Then, you can send an abandoned cart email within an hour or two. This practice could be the best way for automating personalized emails.
2. Do A/B Testing
A/B testing works well by helping you determine which personalized email template worked best by sending two types of emails with slightly different content and selecting which email generated more opens and clicks.
This way, you can alter your future campaigns to suit the customer’s preferences, creating more conversions.
3. Personalization To Standout
Personalized emails to stand out take your personalizing level one step higher. You can use the memorable moments while personalizing.
You’ll have the customer journey data with you, so look for milestones or memorable moments. Send emails with anniversaries(customership) and birthday greetings, and you can offer discounts on their special day.
This method of personalizing emails easily connects with the customer and builds a good relationship between you and your customer.
4. Don’t Be Intrusive
Yes, you should send emails at the right time, but not instantly.
Before sending emails, you can confirm explicit permission from the customer using double opt-in forms.
Be less frequent in sending emails don’t send too many emails, and it is best to leave the customer to decide on how frequently they can get emails from you.
So, have a clear idea of how much you can personalize or to which extent the customer expects their emails to be personalized.
5. Emails From Persons
Email personalization sent from persons or automated personalized emails that look like they were sent from natural persons can also be more engaging and conversational.
It can also be automated but make it appear like a natural person wrote it.
You can add a signature at the end of the mail to make it look like it was from a person from your business.
Target, personalize, and engage more customers with Retainful’s easy-to-use email automation.
Send Personalized Emails To Convert
Most businesses have the correct data to personalize emails but don’t know how to do it properly.
Email personalization is the most effective and easiest way to engage and connect with customers. If done correctly, personalized emails could keep your revenue coming in.
I hope you have learned about email personalization and what to focus on to make revenue through personalized email campaigns.
These things should be focused more no matter what, so they could win you a place among your customers and in the market.
Also Read
1. Segment your customers
2. Use the customer’s name
3. Provide optimized content based on their browsing history and habits
4. Use important dates(Birthdays or Anniversaries)
5. Show relevancy in your content that fits with the customer’s interests
Generic emails sent to customers will not benefit businesses. Personalization in emails can improve customer engagement and increase conversion rates.
You can send personalized emails by hiring an email marketer or using email automation plugins to send automated personalized emails effectively.
Of course, personalized emails have provided businesses with a satisfying conversion rate of 26%.
Email personalization strategy gained 41% CTR(Click-Through Rate) compared to generic emails.
When emails are personalized, they help connect with customers more than generic emails. That’s because they provide the customer with what they need.
Segmentation means identifying who to send emails to and who not to send emails, and personalization means customizing content to share with a specific recipient.
A touch of your tone and personalized content created for your customer help you stand out amongst the generic emails in the inbox.
The optimal number of personalized emails to send is 10-20 daily.
