Personalise Your Emails and Increase Impact
Email marketing is a highly effective digital marketing strategy and involves sending emails to customers and prospects alike. It is perhaps one of the most effective forms of marketing in the world today.
You’re probably aware of it yourself. How often do you go to sleep at night with a clear inbox, only to wake up the next morning to a bunch of new emails that have been sent to you overnight? Some of them are advertising, some marketing, some address you by name, some offer you deals and promotions, and others are just spam. The trick can be sorting between the useless emails that you don’t really want, and the ones that actually add value to your life.
When looking at a couple of HubSpot marketing statistics, you’ll likely be blown away by what is fact and what is fiction. Did you know that 86% of professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes? 59% of B2B marketers say that email is their most effective channel in terms of revenue generation. You may also notice that your inbox is sometimes a little busier on Tuesdays, and that’s because Tuesday is the best day of the week to send an email.
While all of these statistics speak to the importance of email marketing, there is one that is perhaps the most vital of all. 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a retailer that caters to their preferences. This is why personalising emails to increase their impact is such an important part of ecommerce.
Making Emails Personal
You may have noticed that a lot of emails that you receive will address you by name, and while that seems to be more popular than not, it’s just not as effective anymore because people understand there is no personalisation in it.
Instead what you need, is software that can give you your customer’s name, age, gender, profession, location, hobbies and interests in order to give you an accurate way to make emails more individualised. A product that tests well amongst males, aged 25-34, located on the East Coast is not going to do as well as a customer who based out of the UK. In trying to encapsulate an entire market across the world, you may end up alienating your UK customers, even by spelling words with US spelling.
Creating Customer Lists
The smart way to go about doing things is to create subsets of customers in your userbase. Once you have gotten people to sign up and register with your site, harvesting the correct kind of information is paramount to success. Knowing that your client is based in a specific area, between a certain age group and has an interest in football, will likely have the same end result as a customer in a similar focus group.
This will allow you to target your emails far more accurately by developing content that is dynamic for the target audience.
Personalising the Emails
Once you’ve created these separate lists of clients and customers, that is when you start your blue sky thinking about how to best target these clients and make the emails personal. Should a client list rock climbing as one of their hobbies, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to start sending out emails about new swimwear. Obviously, people who rock climb will use swimwear, but they likely won’t look at, or buy anything recreationally. It might sound like something that’s pretty straight-forward but it’s very easy to get these things wrong.
If you have a system that can delve into the depths of the previous purchases of a customer, you’ll be able to get your hands on some important information that will help you along the sales process. Checking out a basket, hobbies, locations and previous purchases will give you answers and is considered very valuable data.
Put Effort into Email
We would always advise that you keep your email marketing in a similar design to that of your website. By doing this, you establish brand awareness, and should you already have a customer, establish a form of trust. Make sure that your email is easy to read on mobile, mobile is where most people check their emails, so having it easy to read, and displayed well on a smartphone is your first port of call.
You should also be looking to use trigger-based emails on your customer actions. If someone adds a product into their basket, then you should let them know that it’s still there, they forgot to check out, or if you’re really interested in making a sale, any kind of CTA stating that if the customer checked out now, they’d receive a discount, are all winning criteria for making conversions.
The key to great success in ecommerce and email marketing is to ensure that you are setting yourself up for success. MarketingSherpa says that a personalised subject line produces a 41.8% increase in open rate, with increased revenue of up to 73% in some industries. It makes sense, it works and it’s easy to do!
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