Personalizing Your Email Campaigns Beyond “[firstname]” for Increased Engagement

Personalizing your email campaigns is an extremely effective way to add to your audience’s experience with your brand. Capturing extra details on your subscribers will allow you to personalize your campaigns.

Beyond including the recipient’s name in the subject line or body of the email, your subscribers can receive a message that is targeted directly at them, with an offer (products, promotions, etc.) that is relevant to their interests. Here are some proven ways to increase engagement.

Create segments.

Step one in accomplishing better personalization is to create segments in your list. A few basic ways to segment your audience include:

• Targeted sign-up forms and/or preference center. Beyond name and email, collecting location, birthday, occupation, etc. can enable a more robust personalization strategy. Preference centers let the subscriber tell you what they want to hear about — a great time-saver for you plus increased engagement from your audience.
• Integrations to collect additional data. Utilize any available integrations with your ecommerce platform, social media, Google analytics, video campaigns, retargeting platform, CRM, to segment subscribers and send the most relevant content to them.
• User behavior. Segment your audience based on how they interact with your content. For example, people who click on a certain product category, those who open only event announcement campaigns, or customers who have made a recent purchase could be put into segments for future emails with that type of content.

Offer dynamic content based on website and/or email behavior.

Convert window shoppers into customers. Contact people who visit a particular page on your site — say a product detail or your pricing page — who don’t convert with a triggered email based on what they viewed. Triggered emails have a proven higher open rate than traditional emails.  

Automation = relevancy.

Sending automated emails to welcome readers, re-engage them, upsell products or services, or bring them back to their shopping cart is an extremely relevant way to interact with your subscribers. Automation is the most personal tactic you can use because it’s all about sending the right information at the right time. This is an opportunity to show that your brand is paying attention to its customers.

Matching landing pages with dynamic email content.

Rather than simply dumping those who click through from your email onto your home page or section of your site, create landing pages that match the offer in your personalized email to each segment (graphics, same products, etc.). If your goal is to get your audience to make a purchase or other conversion, this tactic puts them right where they need to be to make that happen.

Conclusion

The bottom line is: personalizing your email campaigns beyond “[firstname]” will increase your engagement and conversions. You likely already have some of the data you need to begin creating and testing personalized emails to see what works best with your audience. If you have questions about personalization or how to implement it, we are here to help!