4 Simple Steps to Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns

4 Simple Steps to Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns

Aerio Staff

Today’s consumers are over uninspired, salesy content and havehigh expectations of the brands they engage with.

A consumer poll conducted by Marketo found that 78.6% of consumers say theyare only likely to engage with an offer if it has been personalized to align with their interests orprevious interactions with the brand.

An improved customer experience through personalized marketing can deliver:

  • A Sense of Understanding. Think about all of the clutter junking up your inbox. What do you do when you receive email marketing that isn’t relevant - Delete? Unsubscribe? Personalized messages communicate to your audience that you understand them and that they matter.
  • Loyalty. By consistently demonstrating to your audience that you know what is important to them and can deliver it, you begin to build a connection and earn their trust.
  • A Wider Audience. When your customers are loyal to you, they’ll act as brand advocates and tell their friends. Consumers are heavily influenced by recommendations and endorsements from people they trust.
  • Increased Sales/Conversions. There is a direct connection between relevant messaging and marketing results. For example, an Experian Marketing study found that personalized email marketing resulted in 6X higher transaction rates and revenue, than non-personalized email. Personalized content increases your chances of converting prospects and making sales.

As a savvy marketer, you know personalizing every interaction should be apriority, but implementing personalization into your marketing may beeasier said than done. If you’re ready to GET PERSONAL, here’s how to getstarted!

1. Collect and Use Data

Assess your data situation. What information are you currently capturing?While reviewing your data and analytics, keep your business objectives in mind. Consider aligning your goals withdifferent audiences and how data might help you meet your objectives.

The kind of business you are in plays a big part in where you want to gowith data collection and segmentation. If you’re just getting started, hereare some suggestions for the kind of data that can help you personalizemarketing and increase its relevancy:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Past Purchases
  • Search History
  • Email Open Rates
  • Links Clicked
  • Geographical Location
  • Current Customer vs Prospect

As you weave together the narrative of who your audience is and what your objectives are, it will become clearer to you whatinformation might help you glean deeper insights.

When just starting out, personalized marketing may seem complicated butdon’t get caught up in the complexity of it. It should be a work inprogress. Start basic and build upon it as you can.

2. Segmentation

As you define your segments, begin with broad categories and put yourpersonalization systems in place around those basic segments. You can getmore specific later on.

Some of your targeted lists may depend on how different groups fit your products or services. Let’s sayyou are a financial institution. A very basic segment would be categorizingby age and then marketing based on what products or services would berelevant to their life stage. For example:

  • If you send your 18-24-year-old segment an email marketing campaign on a special home equity rate, your results will be disappointing.
  • But if you promote customized debit cards – allowing users to upload their own photos and personalize their card - you’ll increase your success rate and create a positive customer experience.

Just be careful not to send that campaign to a customer that has beendenied a debit card. See how defining segments and leveraging your data canwork in your favor?

Once you’ve established your segments, you can develop user profiles tohelp refine your marketing. When you are ready to develop segmented emailsor content, your user profiles will help you deliver personalized marketingthat is in context. Remember to be thinking about your business objectivesand what you want to accomplish. Your objectives should ultimately be usedto measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.

3. Look into Tools That Can Help

As you get more comfortable with your data, it will be easier to determineif you are using the right tools or if you need help collecting, organizing, automating, personalizing,engaging and tracking your success. You’ll also develop a betterunderstanding of which criteria matters most in helping you build out youraudience segments. Yes, there are tools that can help you do all of that!

A few suggestions for platforms that can help you with segmentation andcreating a more personalized customer experience:

  • CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Software such as Salesforce or HubSpot.
  • Marketing Asset Management Software with tools like Brandfolder, Cando, WebDAM, etc.
  • Marketing Automation Software like Drip, ActiveCampaign, SharpSpring, etc.
  • Analytics Software such as ActiveDEMAND, emfluence or Act-On.
  • Project Management Software with tools like Hive, Wrike, Basecamp, etc.

4. Create and Deliver Awesome Content

Personalization is more than just dropping a name in an email or apersonalized subject line, though those things can make a message feel morehuman. Personalization is about understanding your audience and creating worthwhile content built around their needs.

Once you’ve developed your segments and user profiles, create a process foreach profile’s customer journey and build your personalized content toalign with that. Take every interaction with your brand into account. Allelements on a page (text, colors, images) should be in line with the user’sprofile.

Personalization goes beyond making sure the message is right. It’s alsoabout ensuring that messages come at the right time. This is whereautomation software can be useful. For example:

  • Certain behaviors or actions taken by a consumer might “trigger” a customized response that is in context with the action. This could be as simple as a “thanks for your recent purchase and we hope you love it” email.
  • Or if there has been no activity from a customer in 30 days, a “we miss you” email with a coupon code can be automatically generated. Messages like this create a personalized customer experience and increase loyalty.

The more your marketing resonates with your audience, the better yourchances for deepening your connection to them. Once you’ve mastered thefundamentals, you can build on them to continually track, learn from andimprove upon your personalized marketing campaigns.