Tag Archive for: Email Marketing

,

The Do’s and Don’ts of Personalized Email Marketing

We all understand the power of personalization. Receiving emails tailored to our interests makes us feel seen and understood. These personal touches create authentic, lasting connections.

With personalization, people will open, read, and act on more emails. It naturally increases engagement and fosters customer loyalty. And all that activity equals more conversions, sales, and growth for your business. Personalization is a vital component to any marketing campaign. However, there are still ways personalization can go wrong.

What should and shouldn’t your business do with email personalization?

Don’t Use Generic Personalization

It must sound contradictory—how can personalization be generic? But it can be. Simply adding a first name, referencing a recent purchase, or keeping the email copy standard are all empty approaches. Customers can see that considerable thought and effort were not put in, making them feel like just another number. These customers will opt for brands that focus on providing them a specialized experience. In order for your customers to feel seen and valued, businesses must understand their target audience and be thoughtful about the content they send to them.

Don’t Overdo the Personalization

Generic emails and overly-personalized emails both can turn off customers. Be careful with how much personalization is used in an email. You want to offer your customers a customized experience, but you don’t want to take liberties with their data and make them feel uncomfortable. Setting an appropriate balance will help your customers feel seen—not stalked!

Do Build Out Creative Content

Although personalized special offers are influential factors in customers engaging with emails, sending out too many promotional offers can make your email marketing campaign look like a coupon program. 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.

What are your customers interested in seeing? Would they watch a how-to video or read a client case study? Knowing your audience’s interests is a crucial first step before investing time and money in content creation.

Don’t Send Mass Emails

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 already purchased can lead people to unsubscribe from email lists. Customers quickly become aggravated with mass emails that assume their interests align with the majority.

Do Segment Your Audience

Do divide your audience into targeted segments. Don’t assume your target audience is all interested in the same products, services, or content. List segmentation is a highly successful personalization practice that businesses need to take advantage of. By breaking up your email list into small, targeted sections, you ensure your customers are receiving content that is relevant to them. When customer receive relevant emails, they are far more likely to open and engage with them and continue building their relationship with your brand.

Do Personalize the Email Subject Line

Don’t underestimate the power of a good subject line. Your content may be killer, but what’s the point if subscribers won’t open the email? Email inboxes are crowded places and if you don’t grab your customer’s attention with relevance, your business’s emails may be sent to junk mail. To create a personalized subject line that grabs your subscribers’ attention, call on valuable data to find something that will stand out, such as location, milestones, transaction history, and more.

Don’t Personalize Every Email Just Because You Can

Just because you can personalize an email doesn’t mean you should. It’s tempting to personalize all of your email communications when you have the ability to do so—but it doesn’t mean your customers will appreciate it. Just like you don’t want to make customers feel uncomfortable with the personal details you use in emails, you also don’t want to annoy them with how often you personalize your emails. When it comes to personalization, take the quality-over-quantity approach.

Do Use Automation to Your Advantage

Do take advantage of automation software to automatically send out personalized communications. Automation allows your business to easily segment, target, and personalize messages, saving your business major time and preventing manual errors. Your business can even track the performance of the emails and know when it needs to pivot.

Interested in crafting an email marketing campaign that leverages personalization and automation? Contact Sun Sign Designs to get started today.

Email Personalization Practices that Get Results

How does personalization factor into email marketing? Well, today, personalization is much more than using your customers’ first name in emails.

Email personalization is a marketing strategy that uses email subscribers’ data to make communications feel custom-made for an individual. Customers don’t want to be treated like just another number—they want to be seen as a unique individual. Personalized communications engage consumers, make them feel special, and increase brand loyalty.

Email personalization is a necessary way to help your customers feel your business understands their wants and needs, help build lasting trust and loyalty with them, and help customers feel secure about moving forward with your products and services.

Email inboxes are busy places these days. How can your business stand out with personalization?

List Segmentation

Generic, bulk emails are not valuable to your customers. More likely than not, your business will get lost in the spam folder with these basic emails. List segmentation is essential to driving a successful email marketing strategy.

List segmentation is exactly what it sounds like: breaking up your email list into small, targeted sections, so customers receive content that is relevant to them. The segmentation options are limitless. For example, you can segment email lists based on demographics, web behavior, purchase history, and more.  Not only will this increase open rates, engagement, and conversions, but customers will feel that your business understands their wants and needs.

Personalized Subject Lines

Subject lines provide quick first impressions of your brand. In addition, it is often what determines 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 about relevance and personalization.

Subject lines that increase open rates include: first names, interests, milestones like birthdays or anniversaries, transaction history, and more. Customers don’t want to be treated like a number—they want to be seen and treated as an individual. Personalized subject lines will help your business achieve this!

Personalized Call-to-Actions

The combination of urgency and personalization is powerful. The fear of missing out is something that we all understand. No one wants to miss out on a good deal or sale. Personalized call-to-actions naturally perform better than generic call-to-actions. Why? Because they are specifically tailored to customer interests. For example, a customer who is interested in a certain product will likely open and react to an email that tells them that product is on sale or has limited inventory.

Drip Campaigns

Behavior-triggered emails are automatic reactions to how customers are interacting with your products or services. This is a type of automated tactic that determine 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.  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.

Automation Can Bring a More Personal Touch

Personalization builds relationships with the people who matter most to your business. When you prioritize personalization in marketing, you put your customers first. It’s a marketing tactic that businesses cannot ignore. Automation software can take your emails from one-size-fits-all to highly targeted and personal.

Interested in how automation and personalization can drive results? Contact Sun Sign Designs for a consultation.

,

Blue Rooster Web The Most Affordable Way To Do Website Design Period

Blue Rooster Web is the best, most affordable digital design and marketing service out there. We offer incredible added value to our customers every single month with the numerous marketing services you receive in addition to the comprehensive and completely customized website design package. With Blue Rooster Web, every business can become more profitable while saving more money.

Please check back to our News the next two weeks as we break down the services Blue Rooster Web offers in our packages.

If you are looking for an affordable way to host, build and maintain your website. Please check out https://blueroosterweb.com

Blue Rooster Web is a product as a service of Sun Sign Designs Inc.

,

Dirty Words

How Everyday Business Terminology Can Get Flagged by SPAM Filters

I recently had a conversation with a client about how the use of his business name in the subject line of his email was getting picked up by SPAM filters when he sends out his monthly newsletter. Why had the word “financial” become a dirty word? If you are like me you get 50 calls a day about expansion capital. Not only do I get calls, I also receive unwarranted texts and emails with regards to this same topic. If you get enough people complaining and marking these emails as SPAM, then certain words get targeted going forward.

So where is the line between legitimate businesses and SPAM? In many cases that line has disappeared.

Lets add another variable to this equation. Content. A lot of companies use their newsletter as archives on their website to help broaden their website’s footprint and help improve their rank on the search engines. You’ve probably heard a lot about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how using certain keywords can raise your website’s visibility. But what you may not have heard is that the word choice in your content not only has the power to allow more people to see you, but when it comes to emails, it can influence whether you can be seen at all.

While certain keywords can help to improve your online ranking, certain words can also trigger the SPAM filter. You may have stellar content that properly represents your brand and gets your messaging across in an easily understood manner, but if your email includes certain words, it won’t matter how great your content is – it simply won’t be seen. But why is that? It may just end up in your SPAM filter.

Trigger Words

There are actually hundreds of common words and phrases that most SPAM filters will pick up on. These are known as “trigger” words. Though this list of words and phrases is continuously changing, here are just a few examples – you may be surprised.

• #1
• 100%
• Affordable
• Cancel
• Buy
• Click Here
• Credit Card
• Deal

It is not easy to predict all of the words that will trigger SPAM filters, however there are many online resources that you can use to check to see if a word has been listed as a common SPAM word.

Here are a few best practices that can be used to avoid the dreaded SPAM filter:

• Use more than one word in subject lines
• Double check spelling
• DON’T USE ALL CAPS
• Do not include exclamation points!

Sun Sign Designs Can Help!

If you want to learn more about trigger words, email marketing, SEO, and other methods for improving company visibility, Sun Sign Designs, Inc can help. To learn more about Sun Sign Designs and the services that we offer, visit us online or email [email protected] today!