How Personalized Email Increases Your Campaign’s Value

Customers have evolved into educated and demanding consumers who expect more, especially when it comes to technology. Most consumers are also email subscribers and the technological advances that are expected especially apply here. Email subscribers expect personalized emails based on their purchasing history and preferences. If you do not keep up with these expectations, you can expect to have unsubscribes as a result. Brands actually show that they care about customers when they take the time and effort to build databases and deliver customized emails; it lets customers know that you care and that you are paying attention to what they want or what they are looking for.

The 4 Ps of Email Marketing

Classic marketing always taught the four “Ps” which are Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. The new 4 Ps of marketing, especially email marketing are: Personalization, Preference, Permission, and Privacy.

• Personalization – Email is the best avenue for delivering personalized marketing messages. Emails can be personalized based on the origin of where they were signed up to ensure that preferences are addressed.  Customers should be receiving different email communications based on engagement and where they are in the consumer life cycle or other points of contact like loyalty program status. An email trend in personalization is progressive profiling, which is done by compiling all that you know about a customer and continually adding more details so that you can consistently provide personalized email delivery.

• Preference – Email preferences and personalization can go hand in hand. As a marketer, segmentation according to subscriber preferences is a key point of personalization. It means knowing where the customer is in their purchasing cycle. Analytics and numbers are an important part of marketing and it is the best way to get the segmentation and messaging right. The margin of error for marketers is paper thin and that unsubscribe button is only one click away. People are very visual, so delivering images in the email messages grabs their attention quickly and easily. Attracting customers visually is one of the best ways to cater to their preferences.

• Permission – Obtaining permission is most important and making sure to adhere to unsubscribe requests and Can SPAM compliance goes along with that. Sending email without permission will certainly get you into trouble and customers who do not want to receive your email are not buying anyway, so don’t do it. If you are worried about unsubscribes, listen to your customers and offer them other options for frequency or other options to connect.

• Privacy – Maintaining privacy is another fundamental need for maintaining a healthy permission-based email list. If you value your customers, you will not share or give out their emails or contact information. Posting your privacy policy is a requirement.

Takeaways for Your Business

Many factors go into effective email marketing campaigns that help improve your business. The 5 main factors for effective email marketing include:

• Engagement through relevant content: Monitor the list for engagement and continue with the types of email content that brings on engagement.

• Deliverability is key: Work with your email provider to make sure that the emails are structured to prevent being caught in SPAM folders or blocked entirely.

• Health of the file: This means keeping the emails permission-based, clean (remove undeliverable addresses), and unsubscribing those who request it.

• Integration with social channels: Allow for sharing on social channels and encourage it by auto filling in the fields for Twitter and enabling sharing for all social channels possible. Most consumers in the decision-making process will turn to social media.

• Constant improvement: There is always room for improvement. You should be testing different email content, styles, and options and continually filtering down to the best version of the email to each specific subscriber.

Conclusion

Personalizing the Email that you send to your professional connections goes a long way to building and nurturing your relationship with those people. Your professional connections will react favorably to your efforts and to your personalized, sensitive communications. It will give you a leg up on developing your relationship with each and every one of them.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a complimentary assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.