Personalized Email Marketing: 4 Tactics to Re-Engage Your Customers

Email marketing remains one of the most direct ways to get in touch with your customers and offer your products or services—but did you know email personalization more than doubles engagement and results?

In the context of email marketing, personalization is the act of leveraging customer data to create targeted, customized email communications. Types of customer data used in personalized email marketing can include your customer’s first name, the last product they bought, demographics like age, gender, or location, and much more.

Why does email personalization have such a marked effect? Because today’s consumers do not want to be treated like just another number. In fact, they expect businesses to treat them as unique individuals. Email personalization is a necessary way to help your customers feel seen and that your business understands their wants and needs

Personalization gets more emails opened, read, and acted on. It naturally increases engagement and builds better customer relationships. And all that activity equals more conversions, sales, and growth for your business.

Personalization is a vital component to any email marketing campaign. What tactics should your business use?

1. Personalized Subject Lines

Personalized subject lines are the most basic personalization tactic, but effective nonetheless. Subject lines are often what determine if an email gets opened or not. Crafting subject lines is much more than writing a snappy tagline that will hook your readers’ interest—it is all about personal relevance to the reader.

Customers don’t want to be treated like a number—they want to be seen and treated as an individual and valued as a customer. Personalized subject lines will help your business achieve this! Subject lines that increase open rates include:

• First names
• Interests
• Milestones (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.)
• Transaction history
• Urgency (“Hey [name], you left this in your cart!”)
• Recommendations

2. List Segmentation

Don’t assume your target audience is all interested in the same products, services, or content. Generic, bulk emails are not valuable to your customers. Old customers receiving promotional content meant for new customers, customers receiving the same email many times, or customers receiving discounts for a product they have already purchased can lead people to unsubscribe from email lists.

The solution? Break up your email list into small targeted sections, so customers receive content that is relevant to them. When customers receive relevant emails, they are far more likely to open and engage with them and continue building their relationship with your brand. Successful segmentation strategies include:

• Demographics (age, gender, location, job, income, etc.)
• Purchasing habits or transaction history
• Web behavior (pages visited, scrolling behavior, etc.)
• Engagement level (dormant subscribers vs. engaged subscribers)
• Stage in Sales Funnel or Buyer’s Journey (Awareness, Consideration, Decision)

Personalization and list segmentation go hand-in-hand. You can’t have one without the other. Once you have targeted a specific segment, then you can find the personalization tactic that will work best for them.

3. Personalized Content

Personalized “limited-time” special offers are highly influential in re-engaging customers through email. Sending out promos, coupons, discount codes, or product recommendations to targeted segments of your audience (e.g. inactive subscribers) is a winning personalization tactic that creates a sense of urgency and inspires follow-through.

However, personalization isn’t just for promotional emails. Building out creative, informative, educational, or entertaining content adds a different dimension of value to your emails besides money-savings. Find out what your customers are interested in seeing. Would they watch an informational video, download a whitepaper, or read a client case study? Knowing your audience’s interests is a crucial first step before investing time and money in content creation.

4. Behavior Triggers

Behavior-triggered emails are automatic reactions to how customers are interacting with your products or services. This is a type of automated tactic that determines what a customer will see next. This could be an abandoned cart email, a welcome email, or useful instructional information once a customer has bought a product.

These drip campaigns, continuously “drip,” or send a certain number of personalized emails over a set period of time, based on the actions that the customer takes. Highly personalized and targeted, drip campaigns are great at reengaging dormant customers, driving one-off visitors back to your website and increasing conversions. Some examples of behavior-triggered emails include:

• Welcome emails
• Event registration (e.g. webinar)
• Changing contact or profile information
• Abandoned cart reminders
• Product page exit
• Shipping cost exit

Get Started with Personalized Email Marketing Today

Personalization builds relationships with the people who matter most to your business. When you prioritize personalization in email marketing, you put your customers first. Do you need help building a list you can segment, finding ways to collect useful data, or creating a personalized email campaign that converts? Contact Sun Sign Designs today for a consultation.