Personalisation in email marketing has long been the holy grail of engagement. But, like everything in the digital age, it’s tricky to get right.
For many, personalisation extends as far as inserting the recipient’s name within the subject line. However, there’s so much more to it than that.
The good news? Great personalisation doesn’t require oodles of effort – just a bit of knowhow, and that’s exactly what we’re going to give you today.
Let’s go beyond the name! Here’s three personalisation tips for email marketing that will set your engagement rates soaring:
1. Get the relationship off to the best possible start
When it comes to personalisation, asking the right questions from the off is vitally important.
In order to effectively segment your audience, you need to find out just the right level of detail when you first cross paths. And, for this, you need to tread that fine line between asking for too much or too little.
Before you put together your sign-up forms, think about the information you need to gather about each subscriber. Then, think about what they’d likely hand over without too much thought (because they would know intrinsically that it’d benefit them). The groundwork to excellent personalisation begins here.
If you’re running a recruitment firm, for example, potential candidates will almost definitely want to supply you with their preferred industry and position, along with their previous experience and qualifications.
The holy grail of sign-up forms lies in obtaining data that benefits both parties and which enables you to segment your lists perfectly and personalise based on that info.
2. Work on customer personas
This is one of those marketing tasks that is so easily avoided – but do so at your peril.
How well do you know your customers? Beyond the problem they have that you can solve, what makes them tick? How do they spend their spare time? What kind of relationships do they have?
By writing a customer persona, you can develop a far better understanding of the people on your subscriber list and therefore how best to segment them. Thus making personalisation easier.
A persona is simply a fictional character who possess all of the character traits, flaws and desires inherent within your real customers. A sheet of A4, an hour or so of your time and a bit of brainstorming with colleagues is all you need!
3. Personalisation for your landing pages
Firstly, a disclaimer for this one: we’re not suggesting you set up a landing page for every individual subscriber. Because that would be daft.
What we’re suggesting is setting up landing pages that continue to talk to specific segments within your subscriber database.
So, using the recruitment industry as an example once more, if you decide to segment and personalise based on industry type, make sure you have separate landing pages for email marketing campaigns for each industry.
This certainly takes more work, but it’s absolutely worth doing, because without the right landing pages, all of your hard work in creating and sending the campaign in the first place can be undone.
Wrapping up
Personalisation in email marketing is about so much more than the subscriber name. Use our three tips above, and you’ll start talking to a far more engaged, relevant audience every time you press ‘send’.
