Why Personalization Matters for your Email Campaigns
Published: June 3rd, 2024
In 2024, consumers have come to demand relevant and personalized content and experiences. To meet those demands, marketers are striving to achieve personalization of email outreach that can set themselves apart from the sea of emails people receive. A report by Yes Lifecycle Marketing, the open rate of personalized messages is 50% higher than non-personalized messages. The click-through rate of such emails is also 41% higher than non-personalized ones.
It’s no surprise then, that when asked to prioritize one capability that will be most important to marketing moving forward, 33% of marketers answered that personalization was top of the list. 74% of marketers said that targeted personalization increases customer engagement and they see an average increase of 20% in sales crafting personalized experiences.
Personalization of Subject and Body of Emails with First Name
This one is an easy one, especially if you’re using a tool like Bread & Butter that guarantees a full visitor profile with first and last name, but absolutely essential. Including a recipient’s first name in the subject line can increase open rates by 26%. Subject line personalization is a very simple first step with a lot of upside, and luckily the next step is just as simple. Add that same name to the body of the email to address them directly. If you’re using a popular campaign mailer like Mailchimp, make sure you check out their guide to merge fields so that you have every email updated with a real name.
Segmentation of Audiences for Personalization
Ensuring that each of your prospective customers receives information that’s specific to them is known as Segmentation. It’s vital to segment your customers into buckets so they receive messaging that resonates with them. In this piece I’m going to go over 2 popular ways to segment audiences.
Segmentation by Location
One of the simplest ways to segment your audience is by where they are located. This can be advantageous for companies that are selling either internationally or locally.
- Country → Knowing what country your visitor is from allows you to ensure that you are adhering to legal requirements and using the correct language when approaching your prospects
- Region/City → Understanding where your prospects are coming from locally can help to focus your marketing on specific places as well as understanding demographic and lifestyle differences
Bread & Butter exposes Country, State, and City information for all visitors (whether they opt-in or not) to allow you to properly put each visitor into the correct geographical bucket.
Behavioural Segmentation
This is when you segment your customers based on their interests, behaviour, buying history, engagement with various marketing verticals, or other personalization vectors. It’s helpful to place visitors into audiences based on what they cared about, if they’re a new or returning customer, or their buying history. A real-world example of this would be for a travel agency like Flight Centre. Flight Centre collects data from their email, social media platforms, and back-end systems. Using this data, Flight Centre creates highly targeted customer segments based on interests, behavior, and engagement with their marketing channels. Leveraging these segments, Flight Centre initiates automated customer journeys with personalized vacation offers, aiming to boost bookings.
Some of the ways Flight Centre personalizes their outreach is:
- Personalized imagery and lead-in content
- Personalized first name and information on trips they had interest in previously
How to collect personalization data
Use email subscribe forms
One of the most reliable methods for getting information from your prospects is to simply ask for it. This typically includes asking for their first name, last name, email, company, and location. The drawback to this method is that people can fill out forms dishonestly or be hesitant to disclose personal information and bounce before completing it.
Integrate data from your CRM
CRMs like Salesforce or Pipedrive are great tools for aggregating information about prospects. This typically takes the information that is manually inputted and then using it in campaigns. The downside is that if your sales team isn’t diligent in filling in the information, CRM data can look incomplete to the next person that picks up the account.
Website behaviour tracking
By tracking browser activity on your website, you can gather behavioral data about your customers’ interests and preferences. This invaluable data allows you to create highly personalized emails featuring product recommendations, limited-time discounts, and dynamic content that resonates on an individual level. While several third-party apps track web behavior, tools like Bread & Butter can integrate with Google Analytics to provide detailed insights into your email audience’s website visits and clicks. Leveraging this data enables you to craft and send emails tailored to each recipient, moving you closer to a one-to-one email marketing strategy.
Where Bread & Butter comes in
Gathering and managing the data that powers personalization can be challenging, expensive, and time-consuming. Bread & Butter installs quickly (for WordPress it’s even code-free via our plugin) and captures everything you need to properly segment your audience for proper personalization:
- You get a verified first name, last name, and email address from every visitor that opts-in.
- Location data is automatically collected and made available to be used by your current marketing stack.
- Fights form fatigue. Don’t put friction in front of your visitors to get the information you need. Capture it automatically with a single click from your prospects.
- Analyze your inbound traffic. See what campaign brought your leads in originally, what brought them back again, and what they’re interested in from your offerings. Restore insight into how consumers interact with all your marketing efforts and optimize.
