How many emails have you received that begin with “Hi (mergetag)!”
Yes, such email personalization is simple and easy if you have the right ESP. It has become a popular tactic because we know email marketing personalization is good for business. 71% of consumers want companies to provide personalized experiences, According to McKinsey.
But if you want to send personalized email marketing that really resonates with your subscribers and helps create a real connection, it’s not enough to just add their name to the subject line or greeting.
True personalization is like sending the right email to the right person at the right time.
Everyone has their own unique path from realization to conversion. The key to a great customer experience is understanding the entire journey and taking advantage of every opportunity to deliver consistent and tailored email messages to everyone.
This requires a lot of time, effort, and data that many email marketers don’t have. This is a sentiment shared by many email marketers.
in our new State of Email Innovation Report, we asked email marketers about their biggest challenges with email personalization. What they tell us is that they either struggle to find the right data, don’t have the resources to experiment with personalization technology, or are intimidated by the technical methods behind the scenes.
If you’re struggling to find the right data or resources to personalize your work, you’re not alone. But there’s a surprising amount of personalization you can do without building your own big data appliance or storming an engineering department — here’s how you can enhance your email marketing personalization and meet your customers at every stage of their journey.
1. Use zero-party data to personalize emails
data Make the world of email personalization go round.
But the recent push for consumer privacy has made it impossible for marketers to use third-party cookies to plan and execute email marketing personalization. In fact, a Epsilon Research of U.S. marketers found that 69% said eliminating third-party cookies would result in greater General Data Protection Regulation and CCPA marketing efforts.
Between Google Plan to end third-party cookies in 2025 and apple Email privacy protectionwhich hides your subscribers’ IP addresses, making it more challenging to personalize your emails using traditional sources.
Guess what: you don’t actually need this data to send personalized emails that your subscribers will love.
You have more data to work with than you think.
Here’s the data you really need for effective email marketing personalization when planning your personalization Strategy:
first party data
First-party data is individual-level data collected directly from audiences on your own pipeline. Anything you can track through your existing technology stack—from social media interactions to websites and purchasing behavior—is first-party data. You can use this data to plan customer journeys based on behavior and engagement.
second party data
Second Party Materials are any materials about your subscribers or customers that you can purchase from other companies. (No, we still don’t advocate buying email lists!) Consider more macro research and demographic data, such as competitive analysis, broader consumer trends, or reviews from sites like Google or Tripadvisor. This is useful for providing scale and context to first-party profiles.
zero square data
Zero-party data is individual-level data provided explicitly to you directly from your audience. This is information you already have about your subscribers and customers: such as name, address, company name, or other demographic information. But it also includes any information they voluntarily provide to you – all you have to do is ask.
It’s the zero-party profile that gives your email campaigns the personalized magic that no one else can replicate. According to our 2021 State of Email Report, 71% of consumers are frustrated by impersonal experiences. This is your chance to get to know your subscribers one-on-one and deliver on the promise of a personalized email.
If you make an effort to talk directly to your subscribers about their preferences for messages they want to see, the topics they want to hear about, and how they want to interact with you, you won’t be like every other email in their inbox Same. You can do this through fun, interactive content, like this:
Or through Going’s powerful email preference center:
source: go
Applying these details can enhance your email marketing personalization strategy, allowing you to deliver your brand values and improve your customer experience.
2. Maintain good data hygiene to keep your personalization up to date
OK data hygiene Email marketing is one of the most important steps in designing an effective marketing campaign.
Having high-quality data that is accurate, up-to-date, trustworthy, and useful ensures your customers get the personalized experience they want and helps your business make informed, data-driven decisions for your email marketing strategy.
Without regular data cleansing, your data can become stale, resulting in lower email engagement, lower deliverability, and ultimately lower ROI.
Knowing which data points to access, how to store and use consumer information, and how to regularly “clean” your data can take your email marketing personalization to the next level.
To do this, understand your internal data supply chain, such as sources and destinations, date formats, text fields, numbers, and delays in when data is expected to arrive or be traded between these different sources to reduce issues.
When we talk to email marketers about their personalization efforts, most rely on their ESP/MAP to handle their personalization efforts.
But your ESP is only one piece of the data puzzle.
You need to mine data across your organization to make personalized emails work for you. You may need to work with sales, support, or engineering teams to fully understand where all the data comes from and how to make it “talk” to each other.
The more you know about the various data sources available to you, the easier it will be to extract the types of information that are important to your marketing campaigns, such as:
- Demographic information, such as geographic location or birthday
- Where they choose to receive your emails
- theme preference
- Emails opened and clicked by subject or product
- Purchase History
- Website browsing
- social media engagement
- Content download
- Sales or customer support interactions
- Responses to feedback surveys or Net Promoter Scores
If you collect this data, put it to use. You don’t need every piece of material to send great emails – start one campaign at a time using zero-party or first-party materials you already have.
Then, establish a governance model to control permissions in the data tools and designate a power user for each data push. If you can, create a data dictionary to catalog what each data means to your company and make it easily accessible.
Personalize email marketing campaigns at every stage of the customer journey
Once you have your stuff sorted, you can create truly effective email marketing personalization every time you send it, and make your customers feel valued throughout the entire process. travel.
In terms of implementation, the complexity of creating customized messages can vary. The majority of email marketers we surveyed (36%) use personalization in subject lines or preview text, which can encourage your subscribers to open your emails.
More advanced email marketing personalization (such as dynamic content) is also a popular choice at 36%. This includes Products Recommended Based on website behavior, Shopping cart abandonedor special offers that can take your customer experience to the next level.
But our favorite type of personalized content—the content that truly wows subscribers—is live or instant content, which only 7% of respondents said they use. If you want to stand out in your inbox, these strategies will do the trick.
Don’t be intimidated by instant or instant content. Live content can be as easy as using Personalized imagesor you can try one of the following suggestions:
1. Countdown timer
Countdown timers are the most popular choice for senders who use instant content. countdown timer Use email opening times to show the time remaining for sales, exclusive offers, or event registrations.
This is because they add a sense of urgency and excitement to emails, which is especially effective for large product launches or events.
You don’t want to overuse a countdown timer for every sale. Stick to your biggest event of the year, whether as a pre-sale promotion or to let subscribers know how long the offer will (or won’t) last. Make sure your countdown timer is transparent. If you frequently extend sales, or plan to extend a specific sale, don’t use a countdown timer as it won’t be as effective.
2. Geographical location
Geo-targeting based on CRM data is a simple way to add personalized details that your subscribers will love, such as including the address of the nearest brick-and-mortar store or concert venue.
No one wants to get excited about an upcoming event in the subject line only to find out it’s hundreds of miles away. If you’re promoting a real-life event, segment your listings based on geography.
3. Weather-based content
Triggering or changing something using the weather in the subscriber’s location when they open the email can have a big impact on engagement. Take a typical seasonal campaign to promote fall:
Instead of being somewhere in September and it’s still 8,000 degrees outside (certainly not sweater or PSL weather), you could tailor it to only send it to people who have experienced real falls, or edit it to talk about going on a trip instead Look at the autumn leaves.
4. Interactive voting
Interactive voting Allowing recipients to see what’s popular and vote on what they like encourages recipients to continue participating when they come back to see the results. This goes for any type of question you want to ask.
Source: Litmus
At Litmus, we use our own personalization tool at the bottom of each month’s newsletter to find out how our subscribers like it. We use this feedback to help build our next newsletter and inform our A/B testing strategy.
5. Social updates
Social signals demonstrate real-time interactions with a product or service on social channels (via real-time “like” counts). You can receive an email already focused on social proof, like this:
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And give it instant insight into what your subscribers are actually reading or watching. Adding a social element to your emails encourages more clicks, but it also does double duty: promotes your social media channels and gets more engagement.
Go beyond the basics to personalize your emails
subscriber expected Personalization in your inbox. It’s no longer just about the name and subject line. Email personalization means data-driven dynamic and interactive content that provides a customized experience for your subscribers. This is where the right data is so important.
Learn how to collect and cleanse accurate, timely customer data to customize your personalized strategies so you can engage with your audience intentionally and effectively every time.
