Personalization in marketing is having a moment and looks to be the direction the industry is headed in the foreseeable future, and with good reason. Consumers are demanding relatable content more than ever and take it into consideration when making purchase decisions.
This is especially true with email marketing. Email inboxes are becoming increasingly cluttered with brands pushing their latest and greatest products, events, sales, etc. It’s estimated that the average person receives 121 emails per day, and this number will likely only increase over time.
Think about all the emails you receive per day – how many do you read the subject line of? How many do you open? I would be willing to guess it’s not all of them. In fact, it’s probably only a small percentage.
The average email marketing ROI is $36 for every $1 spent, making it the most profitable channel to leverage in your marketing mix. This makes it more important than ever to capture user attention quickly, and get the reader interested in what you have to say. Enter personalization.
Email personalization has been around since the dawn of email, but it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that better tracking and data storage allowed it to become scalable. Add automated email workflows and it becomes possible to provide a personalized experience at scale.
Fast forward to today, and you will be hard-pressed to find an effective marketing strategy that does not leverage a personalized, automated email strategy.
What does personalization mean?
Personalization in marketing involves using data about your audience to customize media and messaging based on a user’s attributes or interests. In paid media, this would include building custom audiences based on pages visited, products purchased, or lifetime value, just to name a few.
Similarly, email personalization uses customer data to create automation workflows that deliver, custom content based on a user’s expressed interest. For this reason, collecting as much granular data as possible with contact data is imperative.
A form of personalization that many are familiar with is dynamic insertion of user data like first name, location, or based on recent activity. While this helps catch the attention of the reader, it’s only the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to personalization.
Ways to personalize marketing efforts
- Segmentation: Create audiences in your email marketing service based on interests (product or content preferences), behaviors (frequency and depth of engagement), or demographics (age, gender, occupation).
- Dynamic Content: This is most commonly done with abandoned cart emails. Using past browsing history, it’s possible to serve up the same product a user has previously viewed. However, this can be extended to other user attributes like location-based content or membership or loyalty perks like sales or discounts.
- Behavioral Triggers: Actions taken on a site like visits or purchases offer great opportunities to build a further relationship with a user. Assuming an email has been submitted, an email flow can be crafted to appeal to a user no matter what stage of the purchase funnel or buying cycle they are in.
The goal with these personalized elements is to deliver timely media that speaks directly to that user, increasing the chance of engagement. This means that data must be collected on users at every interaction possible.
Common ways to collect segmented data:
- Lead Forms: Most lead forms consist of an email submission with first name, last name, and phone number. This would be the bare minimum and offers little chance to personalize email content. Consider adding fields like age, gender, company, industry, or interests related to your product or service for more robust segmentation.
- Preferences: Perhaps only an email is captured at lead submission, an example being a newsletter sign up. After the email is submitted, a way to gain more info on that user is to give them the chance to designate their preferences or interests. This could be what specific topics they’re interested in or desired frequency of communication. Depending on the line of business, this can be tailored to match the type of content that will be sent.
- Surveys: Similar to user-designated preferences, surveys can be used to collect personal information about a user. Tailor surveys to ask about a user’s interest in particular topics surrounding your product or service, or experience with their purchase to learn about their loyalty and likelihood to make a repeat purchase.
- Feedback Loops: Tracking metrics like email opens, click-to-opens, or link clicks can provide valuable insight into how likely a user is to complete a desired action, whether that be website visits, purchases, or advocacy. Tailoring how frequently a user receives email marketing based on their engagement with past emails is a great way to ensure they do not become fatigued. Sending an email to users that have not opened any communication in the last 3 months is a great way to keep email lists clean.
- CRM Integration: For more sophisticated email marketing, this is a must as it will allow for deeper segmentation into where a user is along their path to purchase or whether they are a repeat purchaser or longtime customer. Offers can be tailored to incentivize users at different stages of the purchase funnel.
- Third-party Data: Another more sophisticated tactic that requires the purchase of 3rd-party data from a vendor, meaning it typically requires an additional investment on top of the email service provider fee. Data usually includes interest or lifestyle segments that augment an email list by providing additional information about subscribers. Vendors will match email addresses to consumer profiles through either manual uploads or API connections. This will then offer additional attributes to segment an audience.
How to implement personalized content
Now that the audience has been segmented, it’s time to develop a plan for personalized content delivery within an email marketing campaign. Some of the most popular email automation tools include MailChimp, Hubspot, or Constant Contact.
Any of these platforms have the features needed to segment an audience based on custom variables and deliver automated emails using workflows. To get started, an email list with subscriber data like first name, last name, and email address is needed. Additional attributes like location, preferences, and purchase history are not required, but will help with more robust personalization.
These attributes will need to be built out as custom variables within the email marketing campaign. In Hubspot, custom properties can be created that collect and store information – data can be transferred into these custom properties from lead forms created in Hubspot, integrations with other systems (i.e., CRM or ecomm platform), or manually through a CSV file import. You can read more about Hubspot’s best practices in their email marketing guide.
Once this data is uploaded, a workflow needs to be established. A workflow outlines the specific triggers or conditions that need to be met to send specific content. Think of it as a roadmap – user A fills out a form, they get sent an email welcoming them to the subscriber list.
A good email automation strategy will incorporate steps in the workflow for automation and personalized outreach. User B fills out the form, then requests a demo – they are sent an email with details on the product and a product demo video. Tailoring content to the unique user’s situation increases engagement which in turn can impact authority, trust, and perception of the brand.
Here is a sample workflow for a business driving B2B leads.
To set this up, first a list of triggers must be created. Triggers will be used to determine when automated emails are sent. In the example above, the triggers used are form submission, and subsequent follow-up emails if no conversion is recorded. There are many simple and complex workflows, all based on specific triggers.
A list of useful email automation triggers
- Purchasers: Follow up with users after a purchase to boost product reviews or cross-sell a similar product. Just remember to allow for some time between purchase and follow-up to not come off too strong.
- Cart Abandonment: User adds a product to cart but does not make a purchase. An email is sent reminding them of the item in their cart.
- Email Engagement: An action within an email can be set up to trigger a follow-up email. For example, a user clicks through a link to a case study. They are sent a follow-up email with more industry-specific information.
- Event Registration: When someone signs up or registers for an event like a webinar, an email is sent with an itinerary and brief information on the speakers of the event.
- Quizzes or Surveys: User-response submissions can be extremely powerful when coupled with personalized email. Answers provided can be used to tailor content to their results and personalize recommendations for further engagement.
- Website Activity: Target subscribers that browse a specific page, number of pages, or spend a certain amount of time on site. Use the content browsed to deliver messaging that aligns with their current stage in the decision-making process.
- Inventory Updates: Keep customers up to date with product re-stock updates. Collect emails from users that are interested in a product and notify them when it has been restocked to incentivize action.
- Inactivity: Send personalized messages to users that have not interacted with an email communication in a set duration of time, typically 6 months – 1 year. If no response is received, set the contact to inactive so they do not receive future email communications. This can help keep lists clean and provide a better user experience for that customer. A win-back campaign can be run in the future to incentivize them to come back.
There are many more specific triggers like date-based, milestones, subscription renewals, and more. I recommend asking ChatGPT for a list of email triggers that can be used within your industry or business. This should give you the information needed to start planning out an email automation strategy.
Email drives the strongest ROI of any marketing channel due to its potential for strong engagement and relative cost-effectiveness compared to advertising. Done right, it can be an effective channel for nurturing existing and prospective customers and one that will continue to become increasingly focused on personalized content.