On average, we receive over 120 emails every day. Unless you have a lot of free time, not all of those emails are going to be read. Customers and subscribers have to pick and choose the marketing emails that are most meaningful to them. So, how can we, as email marketers, ensure that we are creating emails that are meaningful to our customers? One thing you can use is personalisation.
Benefits of Personalisation
Personalisation could be the key to consistently achieving high open and click through rates. According to Deloitte, just including your customer’s name in your email marketing could boost open rates by 5.2%. Personalising further could achieve anything between an 11% and 55% increase in open rates.
Customers also appreciate receiving personalised emails. A study by Harris Interactive found that over 80% of people who received personalised emails from vendors would be likely to purchase from them again.
These figures show just how important personalisation can be for email marketing. Yet, only a handful are marketers are using it in their campaigns. If you’re struggling to introduce personalisation into your email marketing campaigns, here are a few ideas:
Examples of Personalisation
Customer Name
The simplest way to personalise your email is to include your customer’s name. When a customer sees their name in an email, they will immediately feel engaged. They know that they are dealing with a company that understands them and their needs. If you include their name in the subject line, your customers will be more likely to take notice of the email in their busy inboxes.
This email, from Graze, includes my name in both the subject line and body of the email. Graze makes it seem like the email includes something exclusive to me:
Location
You can also personalise your emails based upon your customer’s location. By including information about their closest store, your customers will be more likely to take advantage of in-store promotional offers or special events that you are running. They may not even have been previously aware that you had a store local to them.
This email from Hobbycraft included a message from a colleague from my local store:
When Musicroom ran a ‘Learn to Play Day’, their promotional emails included information about where the event was running most locally to their customers.
Buying Habits
Your customers’ previous shopping habits can also inspire your emails, and may encourage them to towards making a purchase. You can include product suggestions based on items they have previously bought. Things that have looked at on your website. Or, you can remind them about something they may have left in their shopping cart.
QVC send this email when a customer adds something to their cart without completing the purchase:
Argos send their customers product recommendations based on something they have previously purchased:
As you can see, email personalisation doesn’t need to be complicated or time consuming. But, by including a personalisation strategy within your email marketing, you could see greatly increased open and click through rates and boosted sales.
