While some companies spend most of their marketing budgets on personalized email marketing campaigns, others still believe that “personalization” is just a business buzzword.
However, statistics show that personalized email marketing generates a median ROI of 122%. Also, it indicates that personalized calls to action (CTA) convert 202% better than default CTAs. Doesn’t that sound convincing enough?
If you want to know more reasons to invest in email personalization, keep reading.
Increase the Open Rate
According to statistics, email subject lines that are personalized generate an average of 50% higher open rates. So if you want to encourage your customers to open your emails, you should customize the subject line. You can do it by using the following information:
- Customer’s name or any other personal data (date of birth, occupation)
- Information related to the customer’s transaction or browsing history
- Current location of the customer
- Also, you can use the name of one of your employees instead of your company’s name
Personalization is a simple psychological trick. When a customer looks through incoming emails and sees his name (or other personal data) in the subject line, the customer can’t help but click to open the email.
Create an Irresistible Offer and Boost Sales
How do your marketing emails look? Do you send emails that offer your customers to buy random products from your website? Well, this approach to email marketing is doomed to failure.
Modern customers are not interested in buying “any good product” that you can offer. They are interested in buying a concrete product that satisfies their specific needs.
Let’s consider a simple example to make it clear. If a traveler is planning a family trip to Cancun, he isn’t interested in getting emails that offer cheap flights to Las Vegas, Milan, or Cairo. It’s highly unlikely that emails with irrelevant “special deals” will convince the traveler to change his plans and choose another travel destination.
At the same time, the traveler is interested in receiving discounts that are relevant to his recent browsing history. If a booking service sends a personalized email to this user, the chances are that he will proceed to checkout. The phrases “YOUR trip to Cancun” and “YOUR $15 promo code” will make the recipient feel like the air tickets already belong to him and that he just needs to click the “Complete booking” button.
Improve Customer Loyalty
Do you want your business to thrive in the long run? Then you should do your best to improve customer loyalty. The good news is that you can earn and build customer loyalty with the help of personalized email marketing.
When writing an email, you should focus on what specific benefits your customers can get rather than on how much you can earn. If you put your customers first, they will appreciate that a lot. And, as a result, you will be rewarded with increased sales and enhanced loyalty.
Here is an example of a perfectly personalized email. Volaris, an airline company, offers a customer to pay for checked bags in advance in order to “save money” and enjoy his “4-day stay in Cancun”. This email doesn’t sound like an ad. It sounds more like a piece of good, friendly advice – the customer is offered to get the product he actually needs for less money.
Collect More Feedback
Competition in the marketplace is getting fierce. And if you want to keep your eCommerce business afloat, you should continuously improve the products and services you provide. To do that, you should collect customer feedback to understand what changes you should incorporate.
Using personalized email, you can encourage your customers to take surveys and write reviews. If you use a personalized greeting in your emails, it’s more likely that the recipient will not ignore your message.
Here is how it works. When a customer gets a non-personalized email asking to take a survey, the customer thinks like this:
“You say that you value my opinion, but in fact, you don’t even know my name. I don’t think that I should waste my time on your survey”.
But when the email is personalized, the situation is different. If the company uses the customer’s name and states that it’s “grateful for the feedback,” then the customer reacts in this way:
“Well, I don’t like surveys… But if you truly want to know my opinion, I’ll find a minute to answer a few questions.”
Enhance Customer Experience
Some marketers wrongly believe that personalization is all about using the customer’s name in the subject line. However, it’s much more than that. Email personalization is about building a personalized customer experience.
Recent Epsilon research indicates that 80% of customers are more likely to buy products from a company that offers personalized experiences. And you should keep that in mind when developing your email marketing strategy.
Your major task is to show your customers how much your company values each of them. You should find the right words that will make your customers feel valued and special. To do that, you should research your target audience and find out what kind of language style it’s better to use (e.g., formal, informal) and what tone of voice to set (e.g., enthusiastic, friendly, educational).
Wrapping It Up: 5 Compelling Reasons to Invest in Email Personalization
If you want your company to stand out from the competition, you should personalize every email. You should show your customers that you genuinely appreciate their loyalty and support and that you treat each of them in a special way.
There are three steps you should take next: rewrite your email marketing strategy, reallocate your budget, and start using an advanced personalized marketing platform.
For more information about email marketing, take a look at our article The One Email Marketing Hack to Make You a Superstar.
