What’s the point of building your email list?
- Creating brand awareness?
- Reaching out to customers?
- Growing your business?
Yeah, we know these are very important for a business. But at the same time, a business needs to sell products.
For some reason, nobody talks about it. But the only way to know if your email campaigns are a success or not is if people will buy your product.
In today’s email marketing scenario, one size certainly does not fit at all. That’s where email personalization comes in.
In this article, we’ll tell you what email personalization is and why you need to personalize emails.
Let’s dive in…!
What is email personalization?
Email personalization is the process of gathering information from your audience and using the information to send timely and relevant messages to engage with them. In most cases, this ensures a human touch while being completely automated.
Think of your audiences as various kinds of fruits you’ve gathered in a large basket.
Now, it’s possible to sell mixed fruit. However, they will have different prices and appeal to the customers. As a result, it might not be possible to persuade people into buying your fruits for the right price.
An easier way is to categorize your fruits according to their price and appeal. This will help you determine the price and make it easier to attract customers with your offerings. Email personalization helps you do the same and more with your email list.
First, you can segment your subscribers based on common traits. And second, you can collect information from your customers.
In both ways, you’ll be delivering timely, relevant, and personalized messages that connect to your recipient’s emotion, trigger them into engaging with your message and drives them into taking your desired action.
Why personalize emails?
Let’s extend our previous question here. In a world where buying an email list is the easy way out, what’s the point of building one from scratch?
It’s easy to say that the point of collecting emails is to boost engagement and increase sales. But today’s customers don’t just like personalization; they demand it.
If you don’t personalize your emails, they are unlikely to produce a return. Knowing your customers and personalizing their experience is a prerequisite for a campaign’s success. With that being said, let’s look at some other reasons why it’s necessary to personalize emails:
1. Establishing an emotional connection
“A person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.”
– Dale Carnegie
While “Dear Sir/Madam” is a very formal, generic approach to greeting someone, this can also mean that you don’t take your customers seriously. You’ve only figured out their gender and did the bare minimum before reaching out.
On the other hand, “Hey Danny” sounds so much better and immediately generates curiosity. It connects to the recipient’s emotion and triggers them into reading your email.
Depending on how much information about your customers you have, you’ll not only be able to greet your recipients well, but also be able to modify your tone and personalize your message for establishing an emotional connection.
2. Addressing the audience’s pain points
People are too busy to respond to a message that makes no sense to them. In a world where bots can deliver millions of emails every day without regard to personalization, your email won’t stand a chance without identifying your audience’s pain points.
The only way to figure out your audience’s pain points is to identify your buyer persona(a fictitious character who might be your target customer). Once you’ve done that, you can address their problems with a little help from analytics, and offer them the right kind of solutions.
The top brands solve the customer’s problems instead of trying to get people into purchasing products. Personalization helps you to do just that!
3. Shaping customer’s journey and focusing on the audience’s needs
All your customers aren’t the same. They have different personalities, traits, and priorities. Therefore, they show different interests and behaviors. As a business owner, you’d want to establish a relationship with your customers and try to retain as many of them as possible.
Fortunately, not all customers come to simply buy and leave. They want to experience a journey, and it’s up to you to make it a good one.
Personalization works because it lets you focus on your audience’s needs rather than simply pushing them with cold emails. A well-segmented contact list helps you figure out what your audience is looking for and what attracts them most.
This enables you to focus on your customer’s needs and shape their journey with your business, making every customer’s journey a happy one.
4. Increasing trust
Today’s internet users receive about 121 emails on average every day, most of which remain unopened. Why?
Think from your perspective, how are you going to respond to an email informing a transaction error notice from your bank if it starts with “Dear beneficiary?”. That email immediately possesses a security concern for people that are looking to protect their banking credentials. Such emails get reported, never to be seen again.
Similarly, e-commerce and online businesses need to earn a certain level of trust to communicate with their audiences effectively. In an era where personalization is not only convenient but also a demand, you simply can’t afford anonymity.
5. Reducing fear and maximizing customer service effort
In a world where spammers send millions of anonymous messages with bots, a brand’s attempt to personalize messages and services is seen as an excellent effort to enhance customer service.
Personalization can significantly reduce the fear of spam and calm the average internet user’s ego. It enables you to deliver exactly what your users want and helps you win your customer’s buying decisions.
6. Delivering faster and reliable customer service
Customer service is one of the best ways for any organization to earn customers’ loyalty to their business. But today’s customer service has already gone beyond answering your customer’s questions. Now you need to speak in a tone that makes your customers comfortable, empathizes with them, and offers value to satisfy them.
Personalization plays a crucial role in keeping track of your customers. It helps store your audience’s data in a centralized system so that you can learn their preferences and interests. With such valuable information at your disposal, it would be easier for you to ensure fast and reliable customer service the next time they approach you.
7. Impressing customers and getting a competitive advantage
With thousands of businesses joining online business and e-commerce, today’s market is highly competitive. Therefore it’s vital to set yours apart from your competitors.
While it’s easy to say, setting your business apart isn’t going to be a cakewalk. It takes something special to win your customer’s hearts and differentiate your business from its competitors.
Today’s customers like brands that personalize content. So you can impress your customers by offering customized services and personalized messages. This takes your overall business and email marketing efforts beyond cold emailing and ensures maximum sustainability for your business.
Hence, personalization is crucial for ensuring an impressive customer experience and getting the competitive advantage you always craved.
8. Gaining loyalty and brand advocates
“In Brands We Trust” – that’s the slogan today’s customers sing.
Now most customers purchase products and services from brands that they trust. In fact, trust is so valuable to customers that they want brands to establish trust before making a purchase decision. Therefore, gaining customer loyalty is an imperative task for any business.
Personalized messages and customized services can improve customer relationships and boost their loyalty to your business. A happy and satisfied customer will be raving about your product or service to anyone they meet in person or on social media.
Do you know that word-of-mouth marketing can generate a staggering 90% conversion rate?
That’s why it’s vital to take a user-centric approach with all kinds of efforts you make as a business owner. It’s the only way your business can achieve customer loyalty and have brand advocates sing your name aloud.
9. Ability to automate tasks
Today’s marketing seems to have transformed into an inbound marketing methodology that requires marketers to increase awareness among the audiences and guide their consideration to get the purchase decision in favor of their brand.
Frankly speaking, executing such a marketing strategy wouldn’t be possible without being able to automate tasks. However, with the rise of customer relationship management systems and marketing automation software, it has become easy to automate a customer’s journey.
Modern-day email marketing automation software can help you onboard your leads with personalized welcome sequences. With a marketing automation tool, it is possible to guide user journies as they progress through various stages of the customer lifecycle and personalize every message they receive from a brand.
This makes personalization much more vital today than it was in the past. Customers simply expect it from your brand, and it’s up to you to deliver what they deserve.
10. Stats don’t lie
There’s a difference between logically explaining something and providing absolute proof. That’s where statistics comes in. And if you’re still seeking some evidence to justify the importance of email personalization, here are some statistics:
- Personalized subject lines improve the open rate by 26%. – Campaign Monitor
- Emails with personalized messages earn an 18.8% open rate. This comes down to 13.1% without any personalization. – Statista
- Email personalization increases by 600% higher revenue. – Experian
- Segmented campaigns generate 760% higher revenue. – Campaign Monitor
- Segmented and targeted email campaigns generate 58% of all email marketing revenue. – DMA
Such statistics only prove that email personalization is the key to campaign success and customer service. Hence, personalization has become a common practice in internet marketing and especially in email marketing.
Bottom line
The point of growing an email list is to generate genuine leads that will eventually become your customers and produce revenue for your business. Personalization helps guide your customer’s journey by addressing their pain points, building trust, and delivering excellent customer service.
By personalizing your communication, you’ll not only turn your leads into customers but create amazing brand advocates who’ll do the marketing for you. Besides, marketing automation software has made personalization so convenient that you can set it up once and for all.
If you want to get started right away, read our article on email personalization techniques. You can also learn some easy email segmentation strategies to achieve maximum campaign success.
Are you applying any personalization in your email marketing strategy?
Feel free to share them in the comment section!
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